Rogers CEO Joe Natale revealed that roughly 5,000 employees have requested service for the company’s upcoming Ignite IPTV platform.
Natale delivered these comments during the company’s April 19th, 2018 investors’ call for Q1 2018.
Rogers has also launched the service with its Ontario base of employees, with approximately 1,400 employee homes running the service.
“We’re pleased [that] the employee training went well,” said Natale, during the call.
Natale said that the goal is for Rogers to establish a “smart home of the future, where video entertainment is a piece of it.”
While Rogers has completed testing the service with its employees, Natale said that the company isn’t necessarily gauging a rollout timeline based on “a level in terms of numbers.”
Instead, Natale said that it’s more “a sense of satisfaction that we have exhausted all the possible use cases, customer order delivery process…type and diversity of homes in respect to Wi-Fi installation capabilities.”
“It’s important that what we have to offer isn’t just [television],” said Natale. “[It needs to be a] really strong first step towards smart home, video entertainment, Wi-Fi…all the things that will come afterwards.”
Natale told listeners during the call that he has previously said that “we’ll know when we’re there, because we’re sitting with employees on a regular basis in town halls and scrums.”
The next step for Ignite TV is a contained commercial launch. However, Natale didn’t specify when the company plans on launching the service to its customers.
Natale previously said during the company’s January 25th, 2018 Q4 2017 investors’ call that the company plans on rolling out Ignite TV to Rogers customers later this year.
Rogers has previously stated that the service would launch in Q1 2018. Since then, the company has walked back this claim, saying it would “soft launch” in Q1 2018 — a deadline that has now officially passed.
Update 19/04/2018 8:25pm ET: Story previously said that employee trials are still ongoing. However, employee trials are now completed.
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