Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Archive for December 15th, 2008

I enjoy the “Dragon’s Den” series on CBC, for it’s entertainment value and also seeing raw capitalism at work (5 “rich folk” sitting in judgement of lowly entrepreneurs begging for money).

I am not sure whether I like or dislike Kevin O’Leary, one of the more opinionated dragons, however, last week he made a statement about a technology idea that keeps ringing in my head. Pointing out that all “Calendar Software” cannot make money any more because Yahoo, Google and other sites, “… are giving it away for free…”, and this brings us to today’s Case Study.

Rogers On Demand

The Rogers on Demand Video service has been available for a while, if you have a Roger’s Digital set top box (I believe the HD and PVR boxes also have it, but I am not sure).  With this service you can watch movies when you want and previously a few fairly non-descript TV shows.

This changed in the past week, when Rogers announced an improved version of this On Demand service. They have now integrated shows from E!, Global and City TV that you can watch “after” they have been shown on the TV schedule. You can do this already on the City, Global and E! web sites, so this is a simple extension of that service (but the bonus part is you get to watch it on your TV instead of on your PC).  You can also watch pay per view movies with the system, but that has been available for a while as well.

The user interface for the service is not very easy to use, and on my Rogers STB (set top box) the service “crashes” a lot, and you end up having to retry playing whatever you were attempting to watch. My guess is this is a shortcoming of the STB and the network, and hopefully will improve soon (if not, these shortcomings will kill the service).

Why did I mention Kevin O’Leary’s comment? If this service catches on and improves (and it has a lot to improve) this service suddenly puts the PVR (Personal Video Recorder or Digital Video Recorder) business in peril, because now Rogers is “… giving it away for free…”. Yes, it’s not really free, because I am paying for the set top box and the service, but now I don’t need a PVR to record shows, I simply need a box to go back to the Rogers Archive to play the shows I missed.

Can this service survive? Not sure, there are legal issues in the U.S. where Comcast attempted to create this “Network PVR” concept but the large Hollywood concerns decided to stop it via Court Injunction. The case is still percolating through the system, but it will be interesting to see what the U.S. Supreme Court decides.

Does Bell ExpressVu offer this kind of service? Anyone care to comment?

Advent Financial Calendar Box Day 16

We open today’s box and find a small coffin. That’s a morbid symbol for Advent, but if we look at it on the Financial Side, we can ask, do you have enough Life Insurance? December (and Advent) is a good time to review how much life insurance you have and whether you have enough. You can consult with an insurance agent, but remember that 99% of them are going to try to sell you some kind of Whole Life insurance or some bizarre investment creatures, so keep that in mind. 

I am not espousing whole life insurance or any variant therein, I am simply suggesting you review your Life Insurance coverage and decide whether there is enough insurance on you (and your spouse). Term insurance should be fine.

Don’t buy Mortgage Insurance either! If you want insurance to cover that debt, simply buy more Term Insurance (it is usually cheaper).