If you recall back at the start of 2010 Domino’s Pizza ran an ad campaign in the US about the process they went through in putting together their new pizza recipe.  They cited focus groups and customer comments that cite their crust is like cardboard, their cheese is processed garbage and their sauce is awful, the 3 things that are pretty much essential building blocks to making a decent pizza.   Basically they throw their old product under the delivery car, so to speak, in launching their new product.  Below is a video from that particular campaign.

It’s great that they have come up with a new recipe for their product and are committed to  creating a great product.  The big problem I see is the fact that their inferior old pizza recipe is still being sold in Canada.  I live like 3 minutes from a Domino’s.  I see their fleet of delivery vehicles every night delivering what was called “mass produced, boring, bland pizza” by their own consumers.  I can’t say I’ve ever been a fan of Domino’s Pizza.  I’ve long thought it was pretty awful for many of the same reasons that were cited in that video.  Yet here we are in Canada are still being delivered what amounts to an inferior product.

This is a beef I’ve had for awhile, but the fact it has now been over a year since the new recipe became available in the US just seems like a slap in the face to Canadian consumers.  I would have understood if the new recipe had a staged release, it would make sense.  But given a few Google searches I find no mention of the new recipe coming to Canada at all.  I’m not sure if Domino’s is aware, but us Canadians watch US television all the time.  We get the major US stations and I’m sure many of us would have seen the campaign where they essentially trashed the pizza they are still serving in Canada.  To me this seems like a company doing a recall because their product contains lead based paint, but only does the recall in US.  It just seems absolutely crazy that they would sell a product they no longer stand behind as a company to the general public.

I signed up for the new beta of the new Rogers on demand service yesterday morning to see what all the hub-bub was about. I had heard some buzz starting last week that Rogers was launching a Hulu type service available to Rogers customers. I got excited as I’m a Rogers phone and Internet customer, so I figured this would be pretty awesome. Canada has long been tailing behind the US in our ability to watch TV content streaming online for free. If you’re like me and expected Hulu for Canadians, then you’re in for some disappointment.

Rogers On Demand beta service

Content
Rogers has built a website on the same platform on which Hulu was created, but that seems to be about where the similarities ends. Since this is a beta the content is limited pretty much to Rogers properties(CityTV, Sportsnet, G4), mixed with a smattering of Canwest Global(Slice, Food Network) and Corus Entertainment(YTV, Treehouse) channels mixed in as well. Aside from the stuff from CityTV, there really isn’t any big network shows available on the site. There are a smattering of full length movies as well.  I don’t want to bag on the content since the service just launched yesterday, but knowing how the Canadian content providers are at odds with each other, I’m not holding my breath on whether the channel selection will get better.

Tiered system online
Where things really go off the rails is when you try to access content from channels you don’t subscribe to. As a non-cable subscriber, I have access to very little of the content on the site. If I want to watch an episode of Slice’s Til Debt Do Us Part or any Sportnet content, I’m out of luck with RoD. I can go to the Slice.ca and watch every episode from season 1 – 8 for free, but I can’t watch the 3 old episodes available on RoD because I don’t subscribe to that channel. To me this is essentially Rogers attempting to create a tiered “cable television 2″ online.

As a person who has abandoned cable and satellite in lieu of paying for loads of crap I’ll never watch, you would figure Rogers would be trying to court people like myself to use their service.  Maybe their intent is to simply create a value added service for their cable customers, but if that’s the case, don’t compare the service to Hulu. Hulu is probably the one thing that the MPAA and television networks have done right when it comes to bringing their content to the world. Content providers actually working together to provide a valuable service to end users in an easy to use format.

What Rogers has built is essentially a platform meant to exclude satellite subscribers and those who don’t subscribe to either service. 6 months down the line we’ll probably have a similar website for Bell Expressvu, which will only compound the problem as Bell will keep all the CTV content and this will become the next frontier of the Rogers versus Bell battle in Canada.

To Canadians this has to be frustrating. Rogers seems to have a reasonable start with this website, built using a proven technology. The site is usable, aside from the horrible navigation. The video that is available is pretty good quality.  I have often heard the refrain of Canadian users about being envious of US only Hulu site and we’ve now waited over 2 years to get something similar.  Ideally Canadians deserve better.  Guess we’re back to waiting for hulu.ca.

As more and more people become connected using smartphones like the iPhone and Blackberry it has become even more important for websites to feature mobile portals that make it easy to access websites. Here’s a list of the major Canadian news outlets and how they’ve fared with each of their offerings. I’ve tested each of these on my iPhone, but they should viably work on Blackberry, Android and other smartphones with a decent browser.

CBC.ca (http://cbc.qwapi.ca/)
CBC’s mobile website probably has the most visual style of all the sites I’ve looked at. They pack the most content onto the page, though that comes at a price. A lot of the links are just on the cusp of being too small to comfortably read from a distance, especially on the content pages where the text isn’t bolded like the links of the same size. Adjusting from portrait to landscape on my iPhone does help the size, but I find reading the complete width left to right on the screen to strain my eyes a bit at that size.

Toronto Star (http://www.thestar.com/iphone/)
The Toronto Star’s mobile site strikes a good balance between being functional while having a little bit of visual flair. The design works well both portrait and landscape modes. Their start page offers 2 lead stories from each main topic, then a link to more stories.

National Post (http://www.nationalpost.com/m/)
I find the National Post’s offering seems to come off as the most pedestrian of all the sites. It’s not bad, but doesn’t seem to do anything with any flair. The only thing featured on the start page are the top stories, with all the links to the rest of the sections buried at the bottom.

Canada.com (http://www.canada.com/mobile)
Canada.com is the news portal associated with Canwest Global. This site is presented well and features some nice usability tweaks. There is menu dropdown at the top that allows you to quickly access the major sections. As well the footer has links to all the major sections, plus collapsible menus allowing you to quickly down into further subsections of content. The footer also has home and back to top buttons which are handy. I think these tweaks come as a trade-off too as the site seems a little slower then some of the other sites.

Canoe.ca (http://m.en.canoe.ca/)
Canoe is the news portal for Quebecor Media, which owns The Sun chain of newspapers. I would say their mobile site is easily the crappiest of all these media sites. There seems little to no effort put into styling the content for the page. The other beef I have is that they paginate the content. My iPhone can easily render more text on the page, making me load a new page every 6 paragraphs is annoying. They definitely have a long way to go to catch up.

Globe and Mail (http://m.theglobeandmail.com/)
The Globe and Mail’s mobile presentation isn’t the flashiest, but it features probably the nicest typography of all these sites.  The part I like about it is that it does load quickly and gives you plenty of links from the various sections.  It also allows you to sort by top stories and most recently posted.

The last couple of nights I’ve been checking out the Canadian beta for 1 vs 100 on Xbox Live. The premise behind the game is similar to the popular game show of the same name. You have “The One” facing off against “The Mob” of 100 other players. The twist to it is that it’s all playable online over Xbox Live, so pretty much anyone with a Gold XBL account can play and be picked to play. Those who aren’t picked to be the one or the mob gets to play as part of the crowd. The live version of the game has a real host and the whole thing is presented like an authentic game show.

1 vs 100 the one

So far I’ve played the extended play version of the game, which is simply a half hour, 37 question quiz, open to everyone. By playing it you can improve your chances of being picked to the mob or as the one. The Canadian beta features exclusively questions pertaining to Canada, which is quite cool. I have to say of all the stuff on Xbox Live this is what I’ve enjoyed the most. I’m not a hardcore gamer myself, so I find that playing a game that requires smarts instead of dual analog dexterity appeals to me.

After playing it a couple nights my only beef with the game is how it won’t actually tell you where you rank in the scoring hierarchy. I know from what I can glean from the limited stats they offer that I’m in the top 10-15% of players, but since I don’t rank outside the top 10 there is no info on how well I’m doing in the game. There have been over 7000 other people playing when I’ve been on, so it would be nice to know how I’m stacking up.

I’m totally giving props to Microsoft for this whole thing. It really is an innovative idea and great use of the Xbox Live service. It just feels like this could be the next wave of entertainment. Game shows onto themselves are very universal, so giving people the opportunity to get in on the action at home just feels natural. If you have a Gold account on XBL this game is definitely worth checking out. The beta is running until May 24th, so you still have a couple days to get in on the fun.