Rogers Retail has announced that its Rogers Video stores are being re-branded as Rogers Plus and will add expanded product and services offerings from the Rogers Cable and Rogers Wireless business lines to the existing movies and games software inventory available for rent and sale at the locations.
The transition from Rogers Video to Rogers Plus stores will take place between August and December 2008 on a city-by-city basis across the country. Information on the stores can now be found at http://www.rogersplus.ca/.
Rogers spokespersons are claiming that the decision to add new products at these stores is not a reflection of a software rental downturn, claiming that home video and game rentals continues to be a thriving, vibrant, industry in Canada to which Rogers is committed.
Frankly, despite the rhetoric, I am suspicious of the REAL motives behind this switch. There is no doubt that video piracy and illegal movie and software downloading and duplication have been eroding the video and game rental revenues of bricks and mortar retailers in the same way that it earlier altered the music retailing landscape. Also, renting homevideo titles may cannibalize Rogers revenues from its “Rogers on Demand” VOD PPV cable services in regions where Rogers holds CATV licenses. The window between homevideo release on DVD discs and availability of the same titles on PPV seems to be down to less than a month now. (Frankly its a lot easier downloading a movie using a Rogers high speed internet cable connection or ordering it up on an ROD screen than going out to a bricks and mortar store (twice) to pick up and return a DVD or Blu-Ray disc (particularly in the rainy weather we’ve been having this Summer or in Canadian winters)). Similarly, in Roger’s wireless business, its hottest new product is the Apple iphone which is generating download revenues for Apple (from sale of apps, music and video at the itunes store) rather than for Apple’s wireless service partners (like Rogers) that distribute the iphone.
Stateside, Cablevision, the cable TV provider in Long Island New York, recently won a court decision allowing them to remotely store digital video recorded content selected by their cable subscribers (for time-shifting) on central high volume servers housed in cable company premises outside of consumers' homes. Until this ruling such timeshift digital recording was limited to that done using a TIVO or other DVR set top cable box within a subscriber's home. This decision greatly enhances storage capabilities and cost efficiencies for cable companies and their subscribers. However producers, broadcasters, cable network operators and their advertisers opposed the court ruling. This is because studies reveal that viewers skip thru commercial breaks when they play back programming from DVRs instead of watching original broadcasts in network programmed timeslots.
Rogers have so far not announced any plans to introduce a Cablevision style DVR storage model in Canada, but marginalizing the role of homevideo sales and rentals in their retail locations would certainly insulate them further from the influence of the movie studios that produce a lot of the content that both gets DVRed and released on homevideo. Moreover, there is no love lost between Rogers and conventional (over the air) TV broadcasters who have petitioned the CRTC regulators, seeking license fees from cable operators for distributing their programming comparable to those charged by specialty TV license holders.
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