I can't quite wrap my head around Rogers' opposition to this. Usually they're in lockstep with Telus and Bell, and they have a significant foothold in traditional media in Canada.
Everything I've ever known about Rogers tells me to be wary of their opposition, but I still can't quite say what their play is here.
I was talking over this with a friend when the news dropped. My (layman) conclusion is that Rogers already has their happy little non-neutral network for their exclusive use.
All that coax they have lying around? A certain percentage of its spectrum is reserved for Rogers' digital TV service and the rest of the spectrum is dedicated to internet (that they are forced to sell to companies like TekSavvy).
So Rogers has a bunch of things going for them: a huge installed base of cable boxes across Canada with ability to provide demand video; they've had this for years. Bell and Telus don't have the luxury of dedicating a chunk of their copper spectrum to their (IP-based) TV services and thus want the same advantage Rogers gets by default over coaxial. This is why the other guys don't like net neutrality. Of course, they want priority for their content and want to pay less for it. But the CRTC says no.
Rogers, naturally, wants to keep their advantage over their competitors, and by supporting net neutrality they limit the possibility of Bell, Telus, and co from eeking out a little extra advantage. Cable and DOCSIS are starting to show their age and can't quite keep up with growing internet demand. So Rogers lays net neutral fibre to meet that demand while leaving their happy little slice of digital TV spectrum just as it is: wide open free of traffic and interference.
The idea of an uninterruptible stream for video content is a good one in principle but is perpendicular to a neutral network. One provider creates the stream and that's it. No buffering or packet re-transmission. It's exactly like radio.
I've missed quite a bit of nuance and history and glossed over important technical details, but that's my general idea of why Rogers doesn't really care, mostly because they may see their main market as, for the most part, competing with Bell and Telus on standard old-school TV.
To counter all that, Shomi (may it rest in peace) showed us that they cared about the Netflix threat but it didn't work out business-wise. If they're going to push IP video over their neutral tubes, why should they waste all that money managing and running a web streaming service when they can charge their sucker clients the same money for the same Netflix-sourced bits per second? Maybe their business plan includes charging exorbitant fees for co-locating Netflix cache servers in their city hubs.
I wouldn't count Rogers out yet. They're always up to no good.
Aside: my little day-dream is to start a municipal fibre-to-the-home ISP. Maybe Elon will bestow micro-tunneling upon us and we can say goodbye to Rogers for good.
I was quite surprised that Shomi died. Looking into it, I found the CRTC's commentary interesting:
> The discontinuation [of Shomi] was criticized by CRTC Chairman Jean-Pierre Blais, who remarked in an address that he "can't help but be surprised when major players throw in the towel on a platform that is the future of content – just two years after it launched. I have to wonder if they are too used to receiving rents from subscribers every month in a protected ecosystem, rather than rolling up their sleeves in order to build a business without regulatory intervention and protection."
Everything I've ever known about Rogers tells me to be wary of their opposition, but I still can't quite say what their play is here.