Cartt.ca is reporting that Rogers is spending more than $100M to design and launch a Canadian Netflix competitor. The report states that Rogers has already signed licensing agreements with Disney/ABC, Warner Bros, 20th Century Fox, plus a handful of Canadian content owners such as Bell Media and Shaw.
The always trustworthy (said sarcastically) anonymous source said " They are buying up all the rights, all the windows, to everything in order to keep them out of the hands of Netflix in Canada. What they also say they want to do is target all the twentysomethings who don’t have cable with this – and then hopefully pull them into the system."
I can easily believe this because Netflix's Canadian catalog sucks. It has old movies that no one really wants to watch.
The service may be called Showmi and could launch as early as this April. The source claims the pricing model will be like Hulu where a single monthly fee allows streaming to unlimited TVs, computers, tablets, consoles and smart-devices.