Tech Blog

[#1]

As Teddy mentioned last week , Rogers officially took their premium online video streaming website out of beta and launched the full version, featuring new content and enhanced services, including free access to hundreds of TV shows and movies by anyone in Canada.  To celebrate the roll-out of Rogers On Demand Online (RODO), their digital media group held a lively party called Casting Call on May 27, 2010 at Toronto's hip, upscale music-bar Cheval.

The bar, located on King Street just east of Bathurst, features an urbane, high-energy main floor and an upper sprawling patio perfect for outdoor socializing.  Upon arriving at the event I was greeted by Rogers PR team who checked me in and gave me a complimentary DVD copy of Sunshine Cleaning, a movie that I haven't seen, but received mostly positive reviews according to the top critics on Rotten Tomatoes.

Guests of the Rogers party inside Cheval nightclub.

The party crowd interacts.

Since I typically travel the video game circuit, I'm used to recognizing a good number of the attendees, but this was my first non-gaming Rogers event (long time readers of the Tech Blog will remember I visited the Rogers Ultimate Gaming Experience back in September) and I entered solo.  Fortunately I knew a member of the Rogers' Social Media team, Stacey Fowler, who was an excellent host and showed me around the facilities while we mixed and mingled with the crowd.  I learned quite a bit about the Rogers On Demand Online service from a wide range of RODO project members.  Below is a recount of what I learned.

In a nutshell, RODO is a video entertainment portal that serves up a vast library of prime time, daytime and special TV shows, movies, sports and music videos.  Think Hulu for Canadians, but expect less content than the American counterpart (RODO features 1,500 hours worth of content vs. Hulu's 14,000 hours as of December 2009 ), however given how new the RODO service is, the content library is sizable (and growing weekly).  In addition to its current 20 partners, which includes Corus Entertainment and Canwest, Rogers announced a number of new content partners including: Cineplex (featuring movie trailers), Saturday Night Live (Global), Shorts in the City, urMusic, WildTV, Equator HD, Rush HD, andPOP, The Filipino Channel (TFC), Oasis HD, WFN: World Fishing Network, and Treasure HD.

Guests chatting the night away on the patio.

More patio mingling.

To add more value to the service, RODO now offers new programming content such as web-exclusive live streaming of concerts and world sporting events for Rogers customers (cable, wireless, home phone and hi speed internet.)  Furthermore, Rogers digital cable customers can also register to watch many of their purchased subscription-based specialty channels online.  A strong emphasis has been placed on community and social media tools with the service now including the ability to comment, rate and share (via email, Twitter, Facebook) and create playlists.  Finally, the overall site navigation has been made easier and videos can now be streamed at higher resolution than what was available during the beta phase.

I spent some time browsing the website service and feel there is definite potential, but as it stands now it seems to be a hodgepodge of videos, many of which I'm not familiar with (although granted I'm not a huge TV guy).  I found a number of hit shows have limited episode availability, such as only one episode of Glee and one of House.  If Rogers can beef up the number of episodes per show it would add a significant value to the overall offering.

To check out the service for yourself, head on over to www.rogersondemand.com .

Oh, and before I go I simply must tell you about my favourite part of the evening -- seeing (and eating) the RODO chocolate cupcakes.  Eying the serving tray filled with those mini cupcakes made my mouth water, and believe me, I wasn't disappointed!  Take a look at the savoury treats:

Server brings out a tray of RODO chocolate cupcakes.

My RODO cupcake -- YUM!