Free movies. music, and TV Shows. Online. If you’re Canadian those words bring about a great deal of frustration as legitimate services like Hulu and Pandora offer a wealth of content that you can access with a web browser, but only if you’re doing so from within the United States. Well, now there’s a Canadian service. Rogers has launched RogersOnDemand.com, offering free, streaming movies, tv shows, and music videos. Is there a catch? Yes, you have to be a Rogers customer. It doesn’t have to be through their television service, if you merely have a cellphone through them for example, that’s enough to gain entry.

 

The site is currently in beta, meaning that Rogers is still experimenting, trying out changes, and looking for feedback from users. This means is the video quality is moderate (no widescreen or High Definition) and content selection is poor. Right now if you’re looking to get caught up with Chef Abroad or old West Wing episodes, this is your great chance to do so. Movies include back catalog titles like Saw, The Big Kahuna, and Madea Goes To Jail. Nothing you’re looking for, but maybe something you’ll watch just for free. Everything has commercials, even the movies, and no, you can’t skip them. Essentially Rogers is taking their television service and offering it online. Eventually it should have the same selection of new releases and hit shows as their cable offering.

There are of course advantages to watching TV with a mouse over a remote control. You can add in social networking sites like Twitter or Facebook, online chats, and many of the interactive features that movie studios are currently exploring with titles on Blu-ray. Rogers hasn’t added any of that kind of interactivity yet, but if you look at their playback window you’ll see a great deal of empty screen real estate reserved for just such possibilities.

The baby steps they have taken so far are in the right direction. The service authenticated me as a Rogers internet subscriber directly through my modem, I didn’t have to look up or type in any of my account information. A few clicks and I had an account and was watching a video.

The playback screen offers a timeline at the bottom that makes it easy to skip ahead to chapter stops or any moment in the movie. While the basic view is windowed, there is a fullscreen mode and if your computer has problems handling this, you can opt to “dim the lights” which darkens the menu system around the screen to reduce distraction.

Right now there’s no real reason to get excited, not until they add better content and more partners, the real reason to click and join is simply that you can, and that’s north of the US border, that’s quite a change.