MONTREAL – On Thursday, the Vidéotron announced the launch of Illico Club Unlimited, an online video subscription service that will have the largest collection of French-language movies, television series and other programming available in Canada.
The service, which launches on Saturday, will cost $9.99 a month, a bit higher than the $8 a month that Netflix Canada charges. It will be available to everyone in Quebec and Ontario, regardless of whether they live in an area served by Vidéotron or subscribe to a Vidéotron service. This may expand to other provinces as well. Quebecor executives say they have secured rights for all of Canada, but for "technical reasons" (they used the example of different sales taxes) are just starting with the two largest provinces where they have customers.
At launch, the service will have about 20 television series and about 800 to 900 movies, all of which will be available in French and about 10% of which will also be available in English. Vidéotron CEO Robert Dépatie (pictured) said they want to focus on becoming the largest provider of French-language content.
Like Netflix, Illico Club Unlimited will be available through online streaming. Vidéotron is also launching an application for Android-based tablets, and is working on making it available on the iPad and on mobile devices in the coming months. But the company is also integrating the service into its digital television service, making it accessible to customers with the latest-generation MPEG4-compatible set-top boxes, which after less than a year are in 500,000 of their 1.46 million households with digital cable. Not only will this allow people to use the service without additional equipment, but because the signal is delivered through digital TV video-on-demand, it won't use up any data.
Having gathered journalists at their headquarters for the announcement, Vidéotron also dropped some more good news about its services, announcing that it will soon increase its upload speeds and data caps on its ultra-high-speed Internet packages, introducing a $30 option for unlimited data ($10 for triple-service subscribers), and revealing that it is about to add U.S. pay TV channel AMC to its television service, a mere three and a half years after competitors Bell and Shaw.
