Blog Editors Note: "So..., with exclusive ad partners attached to the on-line content; how does this de-value the broadcasters traditional ad models further? How does this help content producers other then Rogers?"

Rogers Takes TV Beyond the Box with Rogers On Demand Online

Rogers customers access premium entertainment when they want, where they want, free and on demand

TORONTO, Nov. 30 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ - It's official: the next big thing in television is here. Rogers Communications today announced the widespread availability of Rogers On Demand Online, Canada's best authenticated online destination for aggregated primetime and specialty TV programming, movies, sports and web-only extras, all available when and where you want to watch, exclusively to Rogers customers.

Beginning today, any customer with a Rogers account can visit rogersondemand.com and register to experience Rogers On Demand Online content free from any streaming Internet connection within Canada. Offered to all Rogers Cable, Rogers Home Phone, Rogers Hi-Speed Internet, and Rogers Wireless customers, the initial BETA roll out will feature more than 1000 hours of aggregated content from 17 broadcast and production partners and 30 channels. Those Rogers Cable customers with matching cable TV subscriptions will be able to access online a selection of their own specialty TV programming they subscribe to at home. With new content and features being added on an ongoing basis, Rogers On Demand Online brings authenticated anywhere, anytime TV access in Canada to a vast library of top video programming.

"Rogers On Demand Online is an extension of the existing cable television model which customers have come to enjoy and rely on at home that truly revolutionizes the world of entertainment and provides the most convenient TV content access ever made available," said David Purdy, Vice President of Video Product Management. "By expanding the TV experience to the Internet, Rogers customers can now take TV beyond the box with their favorite shows, movies, TV classics and exclusive content - all in one place from virtually any place - wherever they have an Internet connection in Canada. And this is just the beginning."

Rogers On Demand Online BETA today provides some of the best video entertainment at no extra cost to all customers with a Rogers account, including new primetime and favourite classic TV shows, specialty TV, movies, music and sports, plus web-exclusive content. Specialty and premium content and programming is available to customers who subscribe to it as part of their Rogers Digital TV subscription at home. Rogers has partnered with leading broadcasters, studios and content providers that today include:

    -   Aux.tv - featuring programs including MasterTracks, Band Foto
    -   Big 10 Networks - featuring football and basketball highlights,
        coaches and player interviews, Friday Night Tailgate from around the
          Big Ten Conference campuses, season previews and more
    -   THE BIOGRAPHY CHANNEL(TM) - your backstage pass to today's hottest
        celebrities, movers and shakers and pop culture icons
    -   Bite.tv - featuring programs including The Conventioneers, West 49
          Ambition Skatecamp
    -   Citytv(TM) - catch up on hit series like Cougar Town, Extreme
        Makeover: Home Edition and Ugly Betty
    -   Food Network Canada - entertaining and mouth-watering shows including
          Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, Fresh with Anna Olsen and the
        Chef Abroad
    -   G4 - the latest in gaming, entertainment and technology with EP
        Daily, and quirky comedy and animated shows like Delocated and
          Superjail
    -   Galaxie MVOD - the music videos you want at the touch of a button
    -   Global Television - catch up on TV's biggest hits including House,
        Survivor, and the fall's #1 new comedy Glee, in partnership with
          GlobalTV.com.
    -   HGTV Canada - watch episodes of the channel's biggest hits including
        Disaster DIY, Relocation Relocation, and Handyman Superstar Challenge
    -   History Television - entertaining programming such as Ancestors in
          the Attic, The Re-inventors, and the new breakout living history hit
        Ice Pilots NWT
    -   Maple Pictures
    -   National Film Board of Canada - innovative and original Canadian
        programming including the stop-action animated short The Brainwashers
          (Patrick Bouchard), the Oscar(R) nominee Sunrise Over Tiananmen
        Square (Shui-Bo Wang) and the classic Waterwalker (Bill Mason)
    -   OLN - an intense, action-packed station that gets the adrenaline
          pumping with shows like Ghost Hunters, Survivorman and Mantracker
    -   Rogers Sportsnet - featuring Hockeycentral at Noon, Prime Time Sports
    -   Setanta
    -   Slice - guilty-pleasure viewing including Tori & Dean, Rich Bride
          Poor Bride, and 'Til Debt Do Us Part
    -   Showcase - bold hit series include Trailer Park Boys, Kenny vs.
        Spenny, and Secret Millionaire
    -   Super Channel - find the latest series episodes such as Burn Notice,
          The Closer, and of course movies such as Valkyrie and W., uncut and
        commercial free
    -   TELETOON - top animated shows including 6TEEN, Total Drama Action and
        Johnny Test
    -   Treehouse - featuring preschool favourites such as Dora the Explorer
          and Max & Ruby
    -   TVO - including flagship program The Agenda with Steve Paikin and
        TVOKids content from Gisele's Big Backyard and The Space
    -   TVtropolis - original series including Whatever Happened To, Reality
          Obsessed and Switch
    -   UFC
    -   Vuguru - Groundbreaking Web originals including Prom Queen and Back
        on Topps
    -   WarnerTV - Offering around-the-clock, on-demand access to series from
          Warner Bros. Entertainment, including the Emmy(R) Award-winning
        dramas "The West Wing" and "ER," and original digital series
        "Sorority Forever."
    -   YTV - featuring hit series such as SpongeBob SquarePants and iCarly
  

Rogers today also announced that the Starcom MediaVest Group, on behalf of their clients which include Research In Motion, Kellogg's, Kraft, Samsung and others, have signed an exclusive launch sponsorship with Rogers on Demand Online.

Rogers now offers Canada's only source of authenticated, aggregated, premium video content online, backed by Rogers' superior network and continuous innovation, outstanding speed, quality and technology.

To begin using Rogers On Demand Online BETA, register at www.rogersondemand.com to immediately transform your world of video entertainment.

About Rogers

Rogers Communications Inc. is a diversified Canadian communications and media company. We are engaged in wireless voice and data communications services through Rogers Wireless, Canada's largest wireless provider. Through Rogers Cable we are one of Canada's largest providers of cable television services as well as high-speed Internet access, telephony services and video retailing. Through Rogers Media, we are engaged in radio and television broadcasting, televised shopping, magazines and trade publications, and sports entertainment. We are publicly traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: RCI.a and RCI.b) and on the New York Stock Exchange ( RCI).

Is YouTube Ready for Prime Time? Google Wants to Stream TV, for a Fee

YouTube, which is already trying out the movie rental business, wants to get into TV, too.

Google's video site has been trying to convince the TV industry to let it stream individual shows for a fee, multiple sources tell me.

YouTube already lets users watch a smattering of TV shows for free, with advertising. Now it envisions something similar to what Apple and Amazon already offer: First-run shows, without commercials, for $1.99 an episode, available the day after they air on broadcast or cable.

Sources say the site's negotiations with the networks and studios that own the shows are preliminary. But both sides seem optimistic, since models for such deals already exist. No comment from YouTube.

The biggest stumbling block may be consumers. That's because Google (GOOG) is talking about streaming the shows, instead of letting consumers download them to their computers, as both Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN) do. But the networks and studios, who control pricing, will want to sell the streamed shows at the same price as downloads — they fear that offering them at a different price will force them to go back and rework their existing deals.

Executives at YouTube and TV insist that the disparity is simply a perception problem, and cite studies that show that most people who download TV episodes only watch them once, anyway. But that's a tough sell.

It's also possible that YouTube may skirt the issue by launching a TV rental business without the big hits that Apple and Amazon offer. One possibility: It could start by moving immediately to long and mid-"tail" shows and videos that aren't available other places, and don't have to match existing prices.

No matter how it does it, YouTube is likely to be just one of several outlets trying to get consumers to pay for TV on the Web in 2010.

Among others: In addition to its a la carte offering, Apple is trying to create a monthly subscription service. Hulu, the free TV site co-owned by News Corp.'s Fox (NWS), GE's NBC Universal (NBC) and Disney's ABC (DIS), is expected to launch a subscription service of its own. And cable operators like Comcast (CMCSA) will be launching different versions of "TV Everywhere" services, which give subscribers expanded access to online shows.

TV executives are generally enthusiastic about all of the above, since they are meant to create additional revenue streams without threatening the industry's existing business. That is: They're supposed to protect it from the digital disruption that has ravaged music, newspapers, etc.

But while Web users have insatiable appetite for video, they've yet demonstrate much interest in paying for it. If any of this is going to work, that will have to change.

Mixed Signals in Web Radio

More Listeners Haven't Translated Into Strong Ad Sales

By SARAH MCBRIDE

Radio's online audience is growing at an impressive pace at a time when the beleaguered radio industry needs all the ears it can get. But radio companies, suffering their third straight year of revenue declines, are having trouble turning that audience into the cash they crave.

More than 42 million people each week listen to radio streamed over the Internet, more than double the rate from five years ago, according to market-research firms Edison Research Inc. and Arbitron Inc. Many of those are either new listeners or people tuning in at times when they never listened to regular broadcast radio.

But radio has been slowest among the media industry to turn its Internet audience into cash. Gordon Borrell, who runs consultancy Borrell Associates Inc., calls radio the "C" student of the Internet. Radio gets only an estimated 2.4% of its revenue from online, while TV gets 3.4% and newspapers 7%.

One of the big problems is that the market for Internet radio is bifurcated between listeners who tune in to streamed versions of existing, terrestrial radio stations and people who listen to Internet-only radio startups. Of the 42 million people who listen to Internet radio, 24 million are tuning in to Web-only radio.

In addition, the number of Web radio listeners pales next to traditional radio listeners, who total an estimated 234 million. Stations generally draw only a fraction of their broadcast audience to Web sites—between 3% and 5%. That hasn't been enough to attract many online advertisers. Online spots end up getting thrown in as a sweetener for advertisers who were buying time on a station's regular broadcast.

"We'd like to meet or exceed the audience of our terrestrial (stations), and charge more to advertise on that," says Mark Preston, new media director at Bonneville International Corp., which owns stations in Chicago, Los Angeles and other markets.

For the clients that do pay for Web commercials, radio companies haven't been able to command much in the way of rates. Advertisers who buy on streamed radio typically pay about half the rate per thousand listeners that they do for regular broadcast ads, media buyers and radio executives say.

Partly, that is because of the newness of the technology. "It was really hard for us to get out and tell our story about streaming," says Michael Jackel, senior vice president for digital sales at Clear Channel Communications Inc., the nation's biggest radio company. The situation is improving rapidly, with Clear Channel's digital sales growing nearly 28% last year. Mr. Jackel says buyers accustomed to traditional radio often balked at the unfamiliar concepts involved online, such as relying on impressions rather than the traditional metric known as gross rating points.

Would-be customers concede as much. "I'm not an Internet buyer. We buy radio and audio," says Jamie Bartholomew, vice president for local broadcast at Interpublic Group's Initiative in Los Angeles, whose clients include big retailers such as Home Depot Inc.

Educating herself on digital-listening statistics and measurement techniques took a while, she says, but now about half of her national radio clients buy spots on station streams as well as in over-the-airwaves broadcasts. That is up from about a quarter a year ago.

Online radio's biggest potential advantage— the ability to target listeners based on slicing and dicing ZIP codes and other specific targets — has proven a tougher sell among her clients. Advertisers already know what they're getting — say, women 18-54 if they buy streams of soft rock stations, or young men if they buy alternative rock. Buyers say their clients don't yet attach much value to the additional information available from the streams, although that's changing.

Radio executives say they are attempting to interest more advertisers who buy on a local basis, in order to highlight the extra information available about their audiences who listen via the Internet. In radio, local has long represented the pricier buy, because homing in on particular groups always commands a higher price per listener. As streamed audiences continue to rise, that shift from national to local buying decisions should happen automatically, they say, with big advances in 2010 and 2011.

Many listeners to online audio are tuning in to Internet-only services such as Pandora Inc., which typically play far fewer ads. Pandora offers only a fraction of the ad time on digital streams of regular radio stations. "They're trying to keep it clean," says Kathy McLaughlin of planning and buying firm Media Spot Inc., which means Pandora can command high prices. In recent research she did for a client who wanted to target Los Angeles listeners, Ms. McLaughlin found that buying spots on Pandora cost 20% more than buying regular over-the-airwaves radio spots in the city, one of the most expensive ad markets in the U.S.

Tight control on inventory is one of the reasons Pandora is on track to eke out its first quarter of profit in these last three months of this year, says chief operating officer Tim Westergren. He expects full-year revenue of about $40 million.