The IT Nerd

Netflix recently launched in Canada and I dropped a hint that I’d be talking about a way that a major cable company would be fighting back. Today is that day where I get to talk about the latter.

Introducing Rogers On Demand Online Rentals. New releases go for $4.99. Other movies go for $3.99.You have 30 days from the date of purchase to watch the movie that you’ve rented and a 48 hour viewing window to watch it in. Now I’ve had a sneak peek since September of this service and I’ll get the bad stuff out of the way first. Like Rogers On Demand Online, it uses Flash. That means unlike Netflix, you can’t watch movies on any of Steve Jobs shiny iDevices. Not to mention that you can’t watch movies on your PS3, Wii, or XBox 360. The other thing that I’ll point out is that Netflix is $7.99 a month for all that you can watch. That’s a value proposition that’s hard to beat. Now what’s the good stuff? The Rogers brand. While Rogers faces an uphill struggle to make this work, the value of the Rogers name may draw people to look at this service. The question is, will they keep coming back? Time will tell on that front. But if I have one tip for Rogers, it would be to switch to HTML5 ASAP. That would broaden your audience in a hurry and give you a much better shot at knocking off the perceived king of the hill.

This entry was posted on October 8, 2010 at 10:25 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Rogers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.