DigitalJournal.com has an article by Chris Hogg:
Recently, Rogers Cable Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. unveiled what they call a new integrated broadband experience. Combining high-speed Internet with a large suite of services like news, music and videos, yahoo.rogers.com is designed to provide a media-intensive trip for Net addicts and media junkies.
The Rogers-Yahoo site features an email system with anti-virus and spam protection; 2 gigabytes of email storage; unlimited storage space for uploading photos; a messenger service; an intricate system of parental controls; and music, videos and games.
This incursion comes one month after Bell Canada introduced a similar co-branded Web portal, Sympatico.MSN.ca, with Microsoft Canada Co.
However, both these new portals dont come free: To use the yahoo.rogers.com portal, you must be a subscriber of Rogers high-speed Internet services to use the perks, and Sympatico.MSN.ca demands that users pay for premium services.
Looking beyond the fine print, it becomes obvious that these two converged giants are looking to capitalize on this growing Web trend, and are working to shape an if you build it, they will come corporate strategy. The creation of these two new portals also suggests a new generation is being born from the information superhighway.
In the early days of the Internet, consumer demand called for speed and a stable connection. Now, with broadband connections being far more common (especially in Canada), the name of the game has become content. The current generation downloads everything, so it was only a matter of time before corporate think tanks would start churning out ideas to capture this growing market.
