I’ve been watching the progress of CraveTV (which is Bell Canada’s streaming service) and Shomi (which is a joint venture of Rogers and Shaw) and one of the things that jumped out at me from the start is that unlike a streaming service like Netflix which is wide open to anyone, you have to have one of Bell’s services in the case of Crave TV, or Rogers or Shaw’s services in the case of Shomi to access these streaming services. That I always considered to be a #fail, but an advocacy group also says it might be against CRTC rules:
The Public Interest Advocacy Centre and Consumers’ Association of Canada say three of the country’s biggest telecommunications companies are operating online video services which “unduly prefer” their own customers.
The document, filed to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission on Friday, says both services require subscribers to purchase TV or Internet services from the telecom providers on top of the streaming video platform.
They argue that runs against rules put in place by the CRTC to promote competition and consumer choice.
There’s a simple reason why Shomi and CraveTV are set up this way. These restrictions are designed to stop you from cutting the cord as opposed to letting you stream content using any ISP. After all, Rogers, Bell and Shaw have very lucrative cable TV operations that they don’t want affected in any way by streaming services. Even the ones that they own. But it’s clearly left them wide open to something like this complaint. I’m guessing that there’s some discussion going on right now inside the executive offices of Rogers, Shaw and Bell about whether to fight this, or just avoid the issue altogether by opening up their services to any and all who want to use them and pray it does not affect their cable TV revenue too much.
I’d love to be a fly on the wall during those discussions.
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This entry was posted on February 9, 2015 at 9:39 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Bell, CRTC, Rogers, Shaw. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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CraveTV and Shomi Violate CRTC Rules Say Advocacy Group
I’ve been watching the progress of CraveTV (which is Bell Canada’s streaming service) and Shomi (which is a joint venture of Rogers and Shaw) and one of the things that jumped out at me from the start is that unlike a streaming service like Netflix which is wide open to anyone, you have to have one of Bell’s services in the case of Crave TV, or Rogers or Shaw’s services in the case of Shomi to access these streaming services. That I always considered to be a #fail, but an advocacy group also says it might be against CRTC rules:
The Public Interest Advocacy Centre and Consumers’ Association of Canada say three of the country’s biggest telecommunications companies are operating online video services which “unduly prefer” their own customers.
The document, filed to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission on Friday, says both services require subscribers to purchase TV or Internet services from the telecom providers on top of the streaming video platform.
They argue that runs against rules put in place by the CRTC to promote competition and consumer choice.
There’s a simple reason why Shomi and CraveTV are set up this way. These restrictions are designed to stop you from cutting the cord as opposed to letting you stream content using any ISP. After all, Rogers, Bell and Shaw have very lucrative cable TV operations that they don’t want affected in any way by streaming services. Even the ones that they own. But it’s clearly left them wide open to something like this complaint. I’m guessing that there’s some discussion going on right now inside the executive offices of Rogers, Shaw and Bell about whether to fight this, or just avoid the issue altogether by opening up their services to any and all who want to use them and pray it does not affect their cable TV revenue too much.
I’d love to be a fly on the wall during those discussions.
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This entry was posted on February 9, 2015 at 9:39 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Bell, CRTC, Rogers, Shaw. 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.