shomi

» see shomi.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

two cable companies building a streaming service and then selling it only to their own subscribers is an instinct i recognize from here. turkish operators did the same thing with their own television products, bundled onto the line and priced as another item on the bill. it is a defensible move when you own the pipe. it stops being defensible when the competitor is a single app running on a device you also sold the customer.

shomi went into beta on 4 november 2014. rogers communications and shaw communications held half each, and eight dollars ninety-nine a month bought you 340 television series, about eleven thousand hours of them, alongside twelve hundred films. the name was lowercase and the whole surface was styled to look nothing like a cable product, which was the point.

for the first nine months you could not buy it on its own. you had to already be paying rogers or shaw for internet or television service, and if you were with a competitor there was no way in at any price. netflix had been operating in canada since 2010 and had never asked anybody who their provider was. the restriction came off on 20 august 2015, fifteen months before the end.

~ the chronicle ~

~ no algorithm ~

the one genuinely interesting thing about shomi was that it refused to recommend. instead of watching what you played and generating rows out of that, it divided the catalog into categories that human beings had assembled by hand and given names to.

that was a real product opinion in 2014 and it cost real money, because a curated shelf needs staff and an algorithm needs a server. people who used it liked it for exactly that reason. it also meant the service could not improve on its own as the catalog grew, and the catalog was never going to grow the way netflix's did, because netflix was outbidding everybody for the rights and had a global subscriber base to pay for it.

~ what the numbers said ~

a study in june 2016 put 5.2 million canadian households on netflix. shomi and crave, its domestic competitor, had fewer than seven hundred thousand subscribers between them. against a population of thirty-six million those two figures are not in the same argument.

the announcement came on 26 september 2016. david asch, who ran the service, said the business was more challenging to operate than expected. melani griffith at rogers put it in the register the whole thing had been styled in from the start, calling shomi a cult favorite with a fantastic core audience that was not big enough to be renewed for another season. rogers said it expected to take a loss on the investment of roughly a hundred to a hundred and forty million dollars in the quarter ending 30 september.

~ the last day ~

the service went dark on 30 november 2016 and there was no migration path, because there was nowhere to migrate to that either owner controlled.

amazon opened prime video in canada a few weeks later, in december, and picked up rights shomi had been holding, including transparent and mozart in the jungle. the timing reads worse than it was: amazon was coming either way, and the fact that it arrived one month after the funeral is mostly what makes the sequence memorable. shomi.com no longer answers at all.

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