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TV on the Rodo

By Alixandra Gould

2009_11_30RODO1.jpg
Rogers On-Demand Online premieres today.


Starting today, the Canadian media giant that is Rogers is offering Rogers On-Demand Online—Rodo—to all of its cable, Internet, home phone, and Fido customers. The one-stop beta site will stream current and archived TV shows, movies, sports, and music videos, available anytime and anywhere in Canada.
We were able to peruse the site before the grand release, and it’s pretty nifty. The content is nicely organized under the tabs “Channels,” “TV Shows,” “Movies,” “Clips,” “Genres,” and “What’s Hot,” making locating your choice video a breeze. The video quality is excellent, and should improve as HD content is added. Except for one commercial at the beginning, and a few inserted throughout, the streaming is uninterrupted. Finally, we can all watch Glee in peace.
Well, not quite.


The hit Fox show, and many other online television favourites, aren’t available. So far, Rodo has only fifteen content providers. Some are well-known channels, such as CityTV and the Food Network, and others are more unfamiliar, like Vuguru and Setanta Sports (which we hadn’t heard of until now). This leaves the selection with something to be desired, as the majority of the shows and movies available are rather obscure. Mantracker, Sorority Forever, Captain Flamingo—anyone? But on the bright side, it offers all the Ultimate Fighting Championship matches you could ever want.

2009_11_30RODO2.jpg
Many of the TV shows offered on Rodo are lesser known, such as OLN’s Mantracker.

If you compare Rodo to Hulu—the similar and very popular online video source only available in the United States—Rogers’s version seems paltry. Hulu has 190 content providers, and is still expanding. However, Rogers does hope to develop one new partnership each week for the next year.
Another drawback is that Rodo cannot be accessed by non-Rogers customers (sorry, Bell loyalists), whereas Hulu works for those with any Internet Service Provider.
“Well yeah, but us forlorn Canucks can’t access Hulu,” you might say. Think again. As long as you have a proxy—a fancy Internet tool that can trick Hulu into thinking you have an IP address that originates from the States—you can watch Grey’s Anatomy until you’re blue in the face. Proxies are available for both PCs and Macs, but their effectiveness varies from user to user. Of course, we at Torontoist would never endorse such circumvention of Hulu’s rules.
And here’s the big catch. If you’re a Rogers Internet customer, Rogers counts the videos you watch on Rodo towards your monthly bandwidth allowance. Considering most of us online junkies get the vast majority of our movie, sports, and reality show fixes from the web, this could leave us paying extra at the end of every month. So beware of your megabyte consumption.
So okay, maybe Rogers isn’t the Canadian online television hero just yet. But you can still feel good about using a legal, Canadian provider. If you’re one of the lucky Rogers customers, go here to sign up. Who knows? Captain Flamingo may not be half bad.

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Comments

  • http://undefined torontothegreat

    This reads like a sponsored ad. Really.
    Do we need to ignore that Rogers has made this impossible for anyone else to do with their shady throttling practices? Or that my service will diminish the longer I watch online videos as I’ll be tagged as a “downloader”?
    This is so wrong on so many levels. I hope that they get sued or other regulatory action is taken for this.

  • David Toronto

    I wonder how many people using this service will
    exceed their monthly limit of 60GB and have to pay
    a significant sum for excess capacity.

  • http://kyleschruder.com triplexpac

    Not to sound like an ad, but I’m with TekSavvy for my internet. The 200 gig transfer limit is awesome.
    Of course Bell is fighting over this with the CRTC, so chances are the higher limit won’t last too much longer.

  • http://undefined katiech

    I’m with teksavvy too. I could log into this on account of me having fido for my cell.
    I don’t know much about internet transfers, but I streamed MANY seasons of shows last spring when I had access to Hulu, and now stream a lot over the networks’ websites or various other sites without a problem with my bandwith. However, I as I said before, I’m with teksavvy and get 200GB/month.

  • http://undefined Ted

    Throttling only affects torrent downloads, any other site that worked in the same way as this (i.e. an online Flash video streaming site in your web browser, such as YouTube) would not be throttled. There is nothing anti-competitive about this offering.
    Not sure what you are talking about your service diminishing or being tagged as a “downloader”…

  • http://undefined Ted

    I think people are overreacting a bit about the bandwidth.
    In the end, yes, this is a win for Rogers if it starts sucking up people’s bandwidth to the point where they go over, but I’ve had access as of Friday and the stream quality really isn’t high enough to put a major dent in your bandwidth. YouTube’s HQ and HD settings, or Vimeo HD would use up more bandwidth than this. And regardless of whether you were already downloading videos online already with iTunes or illegally, both use up more bandwidth than RODO and you are already used to dealing with this bandwidth issue.
    What’s worth noting is you can be a Rogers OR Fido customer for any service. I’m just a Fido cell phone customer and I don’t pay for cable, now I have access to all this TV content for free. I think it’s a great offering, works well and the content is just gonna keep growing.
    You’ve been whining for Hulu Canada, so here it is. Stop whining.

  • http://paul.kishimoto.name Paul Kishimoto

    Agreed entirely. Torontoist has been forthright about oligopolistic practices in the wireless sector. The same companies’ broadband Internet offerings and ‘service’ are worse, if anything. Consequently everyone has to cope with poor service for inflated prices.
    http://www.billshrink.com/blog/internet-penetration-costs/ has an illustrative map (ignore the nonsensical pie chart). We pay twice as much per megabit of downstream capacity as Americans. Japan gets, on average, eight times faster service for one twenty-fourth of the per-megabit price. Rogers’ top-tier, 50 Mb/s up, 2 Mb/s down “Ultimate” offering is $100/month, compared to 100 MB/s (both ways) fibre at ¥4778, or about $58.

  • http://undefined torontothegreat

    I use VOIP and I can tell you it’s not just torrents that are throttled.
    And seeing as it’s totally secret as to what they throttle, either you are part of their engineering team or just re-iterating what their public relations group has said about it.
    Try having services dependent on internet in your home that are NOT run by Rogers, then come talk to me. I’m on the phone with them every month.

  • http://theintrepid.blogspot.com/ Stephen Michalowicz

    Two notes.
    - Since Rogers Cable isn’t available in Quebec, you can’t use the service there.
    - Under the Biography channel, the featured documentary is one of Ted Rogers (lame).

  • rek

    I’m also with TekSavvy, and despite downloading over 90% of what I watch each week, I’ve never once gone over their limits. It really sucks that Bell is so anti-competitive and the CRTC so useless.

  • http://undefined Vincent Clement

    This is not Hulu Canada. I don’t have to be a cable, cellphone or landline subscriber to access Hulu in the US.

  • http://undefined simonyyz

    I just ran into a limitation of access that others may not have noticed yet – I’m a rogers Internet user (not cable TV subscriber), and some of the specialty channels are blocked to me. e.g. The G4 Tech TV channel is only available to Cable TV customers.