It's interesting to see the divergence between companies that have a view to the future (e.g. Amazon, Netflix), and companies that seem stuck in the past (which, apparently include Rogers and Shaw).
I would imagine that "going global" would be a lot more interesting to companies that exist in a "small pond" like Canada rather than companies based in the USA. I guess if the mindset "my company is a little company, and I want it to stay that way", then I can see how Canada-only options like Shomi not being profitable because of the small scale of the implementation leads to the conclusion that they should just exit the market.
Maybe they've just been conditioned to only want to operate in protected markets.
My two thoughts:
1. Being able to serve a global audience via the Internet is a huge opportunity. When you're still thinking about limiting yourself to a small region, it's hard to compete against companies that can leverage economies of scale. For example, there is a fixed cost in developing all the necessary software to deliver streaming video on the various platforms whether your market is massive or your market is 1 person. While many costs of being in this streaming market are variable, many others aren't.
2. Amazon is very much built on the idea that you lose money to grow market share. I doubt their streaming service is profitable yet, but that won't stop them from growing.
May the best companies win. Evidently, those companies won't be Canadian. I also recall ~5 years ago on this forum how some people were predicting that the likes of Netflix were going to get crushed by the BDUs.
How wrong they were. The BDUs tried to go toe to toe with the streaming video services and are getting slapped down. Going forward, I expect that as fewer and fewer people buy traditional TV traditional "cable TV" companies will eventually find themselves in a situation where the only services that they provide that have much value is Internet access (wired and wireless).