Earlier this week I was invited to attend an intimate gathering held by Rogers at Yorkville’s Hazelton Hotel. It was in the Silver Screening room where Rogers unveiled what they believe to be “the next big thing in TV”.
Rogers On Demand Online (RODO) service offers a convenient, one-stop portal with a comprehensive library of classic TV shows, specialty TV, movies, sports, music videos and web exclusive shows rolling out in public beta on November 30 to all Rogers cable, home phone, Internet and mobile and Fido customers.
In recent years, online video has taken off as Canadians surpassed the US as online video connoisseurs, consuming an average of 2.5 hours (our US neighbours consume 1.7 hrs) of content each week. This is an increase of 34% from just two short years ago.
As a service provider focused on content delivery and retaining subscribers, Rogers has been working with content owners to be the first in Canada to offer a comprehensive, ad-supported video content library online.
David Purdy, Rogers VP & General Manager, Television Services on stage at the Hazelton Hotel's Silver Screening room.
It’s impossible to talk about RODO, without a comparison to HULU, a massive online video portal owned by NBC Universal, News Corp., The Walt Disney Company and Providence Equity Partners. Although RODO service has nowhere close to the 190 content providers touted by HULU, Rogers is just getting warmed up. Besides, HULU is only available in the United States due to complicated licensing restrictions and some of the specialty content not available on HULU (for example, Mad Men) will be available to RODO customers that have already subscribed to that channel on their cable package.
David Purdy, Rogers Vice President of Video Product Management for Rogers (pictured right) announced that his team is working feverishly to add at least one new content provider to RODO every week.
My experience with RODO
After using RODO for the past week, I have been impressed with the reliability of the online streaming and the picture quality. Although RODO doesn’t yet offer HD, the video quality was higher than I expected and there was no jitter, lag or audio/video sync issues experienced during playback. There’s also fullscreen option and a ‘dim lights’ feature that dims the browser page if you want to watch in the window as well.
Finding content. Searching for content seemed easy enough and Rogers has invested a lot of time in the user interface and there are handy categories like “What’s Hot” and “most watched”. You can event search by genre and by channel.
Content availability. The downside: Since Rogers is still hammering out the details, there’s not a lot of video content online that interests me at the moment. I’m a Family Guy, American Dad sorta guy, so I’ll be happy once the FOX licensing deal is finalized.
Bandwidth. A 45 minute video will use approximately 400 megabytes of bandwidth and it will count toward a subscriber’s monthly bandwidth cap. This is going to be an issue for some, but in the interest of the net neutrality argument, I applaud Rogers decision to count the usage toward the cap. Not counting the usage toward the cap will have neutrality advocates up in arms about Rogers giving unfair preference to its video service.
User Accounts. There are no limits on the number of users in a household that can watch RODO, although Rogers will be keeping a close eye on account sharing. This is in contrast to the upcoming launch of the Comcast on demand service in the US which will limit the number of streams per account to three.
Parental controls. Parental controls are not available in the beta, but the team at Rogers has given this a lot of thought, so we can expect parental controls to be available, along with sub accounts for children.
Mobile player. Mobile player will be available in Q2 2010 (no word yet on which hardware will be supported).
Commercials / Advertisements. In the private beta, there were only a few commercials displayed from Blackberry and Ally Bank. The Ally Bank commercials are absolutely hilarious, especially the one with the little fat kid and the truck, so I didn’t mind the commercial breaks. One thing I did suggest to the folks at Rogers was moving the initial commercial breaks from the very the beginning of a video, to a couple minutes in. This would let a viewer get a bit of content watching in before an interruption. Imagine channel surfing, but each time you moved up or down a channel you had to watch a commercial first.
Breadth of content. The goal is to sign a new content partner each week, which will result in a deep library of available shows available online. Although each partner arrangement is unique, Rogers recognizes that in order to provide a service of value to subscribers, newly aired content must be made available quickly online, either as soon as it airs, or very shortly thereafter.
Summary
It’s important to let everyone know that RODO is not being billed as a cable replacement service: It’s a value-add to a Rogers customer’s existing service. Although it’s impossible to predict the future of RODO, don’t expect to connect to RODO using your PS3/XBOX in order to cancel your cable subscription. As a supplement to your existing Rogers service, RODO offers a reliable, easy to use portal for discovering new content and catching that missed episode of your favourite show while you happen to be in front of your PC (or Mac).
With a rapidly expanding library, I expect the Rogers On Demand Online service will provide a convenient (and legal) option for watching online video content from the major networks and studios. Kudos to Rogers for leading the pack and helping the content creators take that critical first step toward convergence. It’s a big one.
The service is currently in private beta, and will enter public beta on November 30, 2009. To sign up or learn more, visit the Rogers On Demand Online website.
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Thanks for the write up Ben. I am looking forward to giving this a whirl. I don’t watch much other than new, HD content though, so it will be interesting to see if I can get use of it of not.
I can say for sure an iPhone app that allows 3G streaming of this content would probably entice me a lot more than using it at my desktop where I already have an eyeTV 250.
Interesting. I don’t watch cable any longer as everything I currently watch is available online. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. Applications and service add-ons’ over internet are changing the way the world operates. Our data infrastructure here in Canada needs some major bandwidth to push all the 1’s and 0’s out to the homes… will be interesting to see where this is all going… I may try this out… undecided yet. MB Fibernetics Corp
CTV, Global, CBC and others are already making their content available online to Canadians. So far – programming of them altogether is way better than one from Rogers. And you don’t have to be a Roger’s customer to whatch it.
Here is the list: http://diyfreetv.blogspot.com/2009/01/no-hulu-in-canada-no-problem.html
@Mike, @Robb: Thanks for the feedback.
@aou: You’re absolutely right… but I’ve used the content providers directly and I think they leave something to be desired, from an audio and a video point of view. In addition, all of them had video stuttering issues that I did not experience when trying out the Rogers On Demand service. Thanks for chiming in!
Thanks for the article. I just found out and signed up. Video flows nicely however of course the fear lingers that this will end up on a rogers bill haha. But you’re article confirmed that it is not a fee service.
Thanks.