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This article was published 28/9/2016 (1455 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Opinion

What Shomi’s demise comes down to, simply, is not being able to deliver on the implied promise in a cutely crafted corporate identifier.

The content-streaming service jointly owned by media giants Rogers and Shaw is being shut at the end of November. A brief statement released Monday by Shomi’s top executive thanked those Canadians who embraced the service during its brief run, but cited a "fast-changing business climate and online-video marketplace" for making the streaming-service effort "more challenging to operate than we expected."

In a follow-up release, David Asch, Shomi’s vice-president and general manager, said the service had attracted nearly 900,000 subscribers, adding the figure "would likely make Shomi a Top 10 service in North America." What it clearly didn’t make Shomi, however, is a business that is considered financially viable by its owners.

Which brings us back to the unfortunate irony of the service’s name: Shomi. As in "Show me the content," or "Show me the programs I want to watch, when I want to watch them," or "Show me that your option is an equal or better investment of my streaming-service dollars than Netflix, or than Canada’s other cable-giant-owned alternative, CraveTV."

Shomi, by almost any measure you might choose to apply, failed on all counts. It didn’t measure up to its competitors because it simply couldn’t assemble a catalogue of titles that justified its existence in the streaming-service game.

Netflix, of course, is the 900-pound gorilla in this relatively new realm of home-entertainment delivery. In addition to having the immeasurable advantage of being first in the market and creating a brand identity that associates its name directly with the very concept of content streaming (in the same way some people refer to all facial tissues as "Kleenex" and all snowmobiles as "Ski-doo"), Netflix also became a successful producer of original content — from House of Cards to Orange Is The New Black to Narcos to Grace and Frankie to Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt to Making a Murderer — and expanded its reach around the globe.

For any other media company looking to get into the streaming-service business, competing with Netflix was going to be a daunting (read: impossible) task.

Meanwhile, CraveTV, which is owned by Bell Media, enjoyed a huge advantage over Shomi right from their nearly simultaneous launches, on the strength of its parent company’s ownership stake in HBO Canada, which allows it to offer exclusive streaming-service access to the huge and popular programming catalogues of the dominant U.S. premium-cable services, HBO and Showtime.

HBO, the home of such coveted assets as Sex and the City, The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, True Blood, Veep and Game of Thrones, has remained protective of its content, declining to make it available on Netflix and instead choosing to offer it only on its various HBO-branded platforms. In Canada, that means CraveTV; you can north-of-the-border Netflix-and-chill all you like, but if you want to binge-watch The Wire, you also have to subscribe to CraveTV.

CraveTV can also claim to have made an effort in the original-programming field, having unleashed the cult-hit comedy Letterkenny on Canadian binge-watchers earlier this year.

Shomi, on the other hand, could only claim to be the exclusive Canadian home of a handful of binge-ready titles produced by alternative U.S. content services. Amazon’s Transparent, which recently earned Jeffrey Tambor a second consecutive Emmy Award in the best actor/comedy bracket, could fairly be described as Shomi’s sole legitimate calling-card title. And being the exclusive home of one high-profile, award-winning show isn’t nearly enough.

Also working against Shomi — and, for that matter, Bell-owned CraveTV — since its arrival was the fact it was launched and owned by two of Canada’s giant media/cable conglomerates (Rogers and Shaw). Simply put, most folks don’t like cable companies and the close association between Shomi and Rogers/Shaw likely made some potential customers balk.

Add to that the clumsy manner in which Canada’s streaming services were introduced — in their early "beta" stage, both Shomi and CraveTV could only be sampled if you subscribed to their respective parent companies’ cable-TV services — and the result was an environment in which it was going to be difficult to win customers over to one or the other of this country’s fledgling streaming-content services.

CraveTV still holds the advantage of all that exclusive-access HBO and Showtime programming, but whether that will be enough to secure the Bell-owned service’s future remains to be seen.

However, Shomi didn’t show anybody enough. And now it’s being shown the door.

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @BradOswald