BOSTON – "Clearly, I was wrong," David Purdy told CTAM Summit delegates today.
The Rogers Cable vice-president and general manager of television was talking about his (formerly) held opinion that making sports available on demand wouldn’t work – that viewers wouldn’t want to see games and events hours or days after they happened.
And then the number of users of the MSO’s Winter Olympics on CBC on demand blew away even the most optimistic usage projections. The Rogers on demand project won first place in the free division in CTAM’s On Demand Case Study competition and Purdy presented the results along with other winners in a session at the CTAM Summit Tuesday afternoon.
Convinced to add the CBC’s Winter Olympics package to its free on demand platform just before the 2006 Winter Olympics in February, there were significant hurdles. First of all, if it’s free to customers, how does Rogers get paid? Purdy said the company chose to look at it as a churn reduction exercise and a way to pull dormant, or former, VOD users back to the platform and to turn light users into heavier ones.
Then there’s the little matter that Bell Canada Enterprises sponsors almost everything to do with the Olympics in Canada, including a large stable of athletes. So, Rogers was not permitted to associate itself directly with the Olympics. "Dealing with the IOC makes dealing with a Hollywood studio reasonable and straightforward," added Purdy, describing the stringent sponsorship rules set out by the International Olympic Committee.
Rogers got around that by ensuring that any and all promotion and advertising made it clear Rogers On Demand was offering CBC Olympic coverage, which is fair ball since CBC is the national rights holder.
The cable company received tons of free media (in newspapers and on line) touting the service which featured event coverage that was available to all digital cable subscribers 24 hours after their original broadcast. Plus, having an Olympic property "made the office a lot more fun," he added – since the big MSO normally goes a little "mute" in the media since BCE has such an enormous Olympic presence.
At the outset, Rogers had hoped for 50,000 Olympic orders and to increase the take rate on VOD content to 10% from its 8% mark in December 2005.
With CBC heavily promoting the on demand availability to Rogers subscribers, Rogers’ own marketing and e-blasting its customers – and even hiring former Olympic downhiller Brian Stemmle to record voice mails to remind customers of the service, order numbers were 401% over targets.
There were 200,515 Olympic orders in total and the take rate of free content rose to 14.2% in February, well above the 10% target. Fully 10% of Rogers digital customers ordered some Olympic content on VOD and of the 92,468 users, 48.85% of them had never used VOD before.
The effects post-Olympics were lasting. 13% of formerly light VOD users became mid to heavy users and 35% of the lapsed viewers became light users. 19% of new non-users became light users. Company surveys on overall customer satisfaction even increased.
While Bell was totally immersed in the Olympics, Rogers had the FIFA World Cup covered through June and into July with TV, on demand, wireless and in other languages on OMNI and on demand. VOD numbers for its World Cup coverage will dwarf the success Rogers saw during the Olympics. Purdy said final numbers aren’t in because customers are still ordering World Cup content on demand more than a week after the final game but the number of orders will be well over a million. "What we’ve seen is just spectacular," said Purdy.
As for Rogers’ on demand future, Purdy urged delegates to watch the media habits of the young people in their corporate offices for some clues on where media consumption is headed – and also pleaded with the broadcasters in the audience to offer up prime time episodic programming for the on demand platform. "We’ll play it with your commercials embedded and give you the transactional data to take back to your advertisers," he said.
Shorter on demand content is also in the offing, so that Rogers’ on demand platform will be where people turn to find out "did you hear what Chris Rock said last night?" added Purdy.
