Roberto Rocha
Sun
Zip.ca, the mail-order DVD rental service, will go digital by the holidays, letting Canadians watch movies and TV shows on their computers or on special Internet-connected televisions.
The Ottawa-based service will allow customers to buy movies in digital format or watch them once by “streaming” them to a device.
This will make Zip.ca the third provider of downloadable videos in Canada, after Apple’s iTunes video store and Microsoft’s Xbox Live Marketplace Video Store. Bell Canada had an online video store, but it is being shut down.
A spokesperson for Bell said it will focus instead on a website with extra features for its TV subscribers.
Zip.ca CEO Curt Millar said the service should be up for the holiday season.
“Our goal is to give as wide a selection as possible to our members at a nice price point,” he said. What the price will be was not disclosed, but the online service will start as pay-as-you go and evolve to a subscription model.
Zip.ca is the Canadian equivalent of Netflix. Members pick movies they want to watch on a website and the service lends out the DVDs over mail.
In the U.S., Netflix also allows members to watch online movies on a TV set, but it requires a set-top box. Zip.ca is negotiating with electronics companies to allow videos to stream directly to TVs and DVD players.
This will require special Internet-connected televisions equipped with software called CinemaNow. Such TVs do not yet exist in Canada.
“Over the next months, as new TVs are rolled out, we hope they will have this technology,” Millar said.
Given the number of Canadians who watch movies online — legally, that is — this is a risky venture, said Brahm Eiley, president of research firm Convergence Consulting.
“It’s a tiny market here,” he said. “The numbers hardly register.”
While in the U.S., video downloads claim two per cent of the rental market, in Canada it’s less than one per cent, he said. Mail order DVDs, self-service DVD kiosks and downloads represent two per cent of the rental market.
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