ROGERS IS SHUTTING DOWN ITS STREAMING SERVICE JUST TWO YEARS AFTER LAUNCH
On Monday Rogers announced that it’s throwing in the towel and shutting down its streaming service Shomi (which it co owned with Shaw) after just two years of operations.
Shomi was never able to compete with Netflix or Bell’s Crave service. While Roger’s been cagey on numbers, industry insiders believe this will result in a write down between 100 and 140 million dollars for Rogers this year. Shomi’s Senior Vice President and General Manager David Asch revealed that the service had up to 900,000 subscribers but failed to specify how many of those were paying subscribers (Rogers would often include Shomi as a perk or an extra with various cable bundles). Rumours that Shaw-who sold their TV channels to Corus entertainment in a huge 2.65 billion dollar deal earlier this year- was trying to get out of their partnership with Rogers may have hastened the decision to shut Shomi down before incurring any more losses.
The big question now is what happens to all of that content. Some of what you could see on Shomi was available because services like Netflix and Crave passed on it. And while you might think that Rogers could recoup a few bucks by selling some of the rights to other services, many of their licensing agreements include legal roadblocks preventing resale. It may not prove to be a lengthy problem since Shomi usually only licensed content for an average of two years and some of that content could soon appear on other Rogers platforms until the license expires.
Shomi launched in November of 2014 to try and compete with other services like Netflix and to capitalize on the growing number of Canadians “cutting the cord.” The monthly service was initially exclusive to Rogers and Shaw cable subscribers until 2015 when it was opened up to everyone. A recent study concluded that at the time of this announcement, Shomi was used in less than four percent of Canadian households.
Shomi will officially cease operations on November 30th of this year.
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