TORONTO – Finally putting an end to months of speculation over plans to launch a Canadian subscription video-on-demand service, Rogers Media and joint-venture partner Shaw Media announced the highly anticipated SVoD service, dubbed shomi, in Toronto on Tuesday.
Cartt.ca broke the story in January that Rogers was working on an over-the-top video portal, but despite being continually pressed on the subject, until today, Rogers execs wouldn’t comment publically on the service other than Rogers CEO Guy Laurence’s recent cryptic allusion to the “Loch Ness Monster”.
And Cartt.ca doesn’t want to take it personally that Rogers and Shaw decided to officially unveil shomi while our editor and publisher, Greg O’Brien, happened to be vacationing overseas. But, when told that O’Brien sent his regrets at not being able to attend the media event in person, Rogers PR staff joked that they had checked his travel schedule to pick an announcement date.
All joking aside, Rogers Media president Keith Pelley, shown in the photo with Shaw Media SVP content Barbara Williams, admitted that there were some good reasons why shomi’s official announcement was made on Tuesday.
“There are a number of things with the timing. We all have a lot on our plate…We have hockey coming up, we’ve got the Let’s Talk TV hearing coming up, then you’re into the holiday season…And you don’t want to launch over the summer,” Pelley said during a media interview roundtable after the official event. As soon as Rogers was able to consummate the deal with Shaw, it was ready to introduce shomi to the market, Pelley added.
Shaw's Williams added: “We launch a lot of stuff in September in our world. September and October are huge…in our business, so it was valuable actually to get this piece of the announcement out ahead of all that ‘fall noise’, if you will.”
Pelley declined to confirm the price tag on shomi’s programming inventory to date when asked by Cartt.ca which content licensees were part of the rumoured $100 million in content deals that Rogers has inked with U.S. studios and distributors.
“First of all, that would be your number, not our number”, Pelley responded. “In terms of content, we’ve announced a little bit of the content. But we have a number of deals that are in place that we haven’t announced yet. We will announce them over the coming weeks.”
Williams added that all of the major content distributors will be included in those content deals. Pelley confirmed this, saying “We’re involved with all of them.”
Based on the shomi service demo, television series and movies from Fox, Disney/ABC, Universal and Warner Bros. are included in the choices that will be available when the service launches in early November. Shomi is expected to be priced at $8.99 per month.
Shomi will be available first to the approximately 4.5 million combined subscribers of Rogers’ and Shaw’s cable TV and Internet services. After six to 12 months of beta testing, and gathering feedback from customers and getting as many BDUs involved as possible, Rogers and Shaw will then determine what the distribution model will be going forward, Pelley said. That includes rollout plans for Rogers and Shaw mobile customers.
As far as the official details announced during the event, shomi will work initially on set-top boxes, the Xbox 360, online (PCs and Macs), tablets (select iPads and Android) and other IP-connected mobile devices (select iPhones and Android). In its first year, the service will offer 14,000 titles of movies and TV episodes, and, Williams said, with “a large portion of that being ‘look back’ seasons of top 20 shows, both from the premium conventional networks and our cable channels.”
In discussions with their current subscribers, Williams said that Shaw and Rogers were told that viewers wanted to be able to watch previous seasons of “all the binge-worthy hits”. Examples of some of the TV series titles that will be available at launch include Modern Family, Vikings, Shameless, Sleepy Hollow, Sons of Anarchy, New Girl, and American Horror Story.
During a Q&A session after the announcement, Pelley said that once shomi launches in November, Rogers customers will be able to watch season four of Scandal on City or via Rogers on Demand, and will be able to catch up on the first three seasons exclusively on shomi. Similarly, Williams said that Shaw customers will be able to watch the current season of Sleepy Hollow via the Global Go app, but only watch past seasons of the series on shomi.
“We see this as complementary,” said Williams. “Global Go will still be there for you. When the new season of Sleepy Hollow rolls out this fall, we’ll have that season stacking on Global Go as people have become accustomed to. But the past seasons of Sleepy Hollow will be available on shomi.”
Williams added that she sees “layers of opportunity” with the launch of shomi. “And ultimately what we realize is, we have to go where viewers are, and we have to appreciate where and how they want to find content today,” she said.
When asked if shomi will feature any original content, a la Netflix, Pelley said that “it’s definitely on our road map. Creating Canadian content and creating content (in general) is what we do and it’s part of our DNA. So I’m sure you’re going to see original content down the road.”
In terms of how the shomi business may capitalize on the hockey-related content that Rogers acquired as part of its $5.2 billion NHL deal, Pelley said that “sports movies and documentaries are where we’ve focused. Archived games and such could be contemplated, for sure. The only thing that we have steered away from right now is live sports.”
From a marketing perspective, the new shomi service will be promoted during Hockey Night in Canada broadcasts and through promotional ads running across Global, HGTV and FX.
Pelley emphasized that one of the things that will differentiate shomi from its most obvious SVoD competitor, Netflix, is the curated content that it will highlight for subscribers. Similar to the ‘staff’s picks’ section that used to exist in video rental stores, shomi will offer favourite picks from some of Rogers’s on-air talent such as Citytv’s Dina Pugliese, ET Canada’s Rick Campanelli and Sportsnet’s Bob McCown.
Pelley appears confident that shomi will be able to take on Netflix. “Our user interface is superior”, he said. “The content that we have is very recent. And then the third thing that I think is really cool is we’re the new video-age clerk.”
