Video on demand is serious business but that doesn’t mean it has to act serious, and no streaming video service is having as much fun as Canada’s shomi.

Unavailable as a standalone product, shomi is currently for cable, satellite and Internet subscribers to Canadian media companies Rogers and Shaw, who own it jointly. Before those subscribers even sign up for its more than 12,000 hours of on-demand TV and movie content, they are treated to an elaborate and colorful narrative infographic outlining the guiding principles of its brand.

“In the beginning… there were buildings where movies and TV shows would sit in racks as far as the eye could see,” reads the “Our Story” section of shomi.com. “The buildings were called video stores and they were like shrines.”

Whether you found visiting the wan, flickering-florescent-filled confines of your local Blockbuster a worshipful experience or not, you may have at the very least, the story continues, enjoyed interacting with your friendly video store clerks, whose collective film-nerd know-how and quirky personalities are sorely lacking from the robo-recommendations provided by Netflix.

It’s a touchy subject, those VOD recommendation engines. On Netflix, the pop-up video content meant to be paired with what you’re currently watching is often almost insultingly disconnected, and clearly Netflix competitors are taking note. shomi’s Canadian rival VOD service CraveTV has eschewed recommendations entirely, and while shomi does have auto-generated suggestions, they are obviously not the focal point. Instead, the service’s identity is built on its human element. The video store clerk of yore is gone, but at Shomi, said Ann Tebo, the service’s director of product management, “we reserve places in the apps for that human voice.”

From the moment you log into shomi, the human-ness is palpable. Where competitor Crave has an HBO GO-esque black, velvety, premium-style backdrop, shomi is all white and bright and welcoming. The lightness makes its extra-large images pop across all devices, and matches the timbre of its descriptions, which are funny, informative and all composed by its own, in-house, content team. The vibe also extends into one of shomi’s “Collections” feature, which offers groupings of movies and TV shows with cleverly concocted themes.

Tebo, for instance, enjoys the “Surviving the Apocalypse 101” collection with films like Children of Men and 12 Monkeys. Other representative collections have titles like “Dating Bad: Romance, Regret & Restraining Orders” and “Teased Hair, Don’t Care!” a gathering of ‘80s teen flicks. shomi is even rolling out collections put together by celebrity guest curators, with recent participants including LL Cool J and Sleepy Hollow’s Orlando Jones. Such efforts aren’t trying to assume you’ll enjoy one thing because you enjoyed another, but re-contextualizing similar things in a fun, frisky way that’s “hopefully a better and easier way for you to find something you want to watch,” said Tebo.

If this all sounds almost childishly playful, it kind of is. Though shomi has plenty of perfectly adult fare – including the recently required Amazon binge-vehicle Transparent—the apps, said Tebo, “purposely focused on kids and families because we know they’re a huge demo for these types of services.”

To that end, you or your little ones can select avatars for your profile such as Whyatt Beanstalk from PBS Kids’ Super Why! or Mario from Nintendo’s Super Mario franchise. Parents also have the ability to control access to programming rated PG and below, while separate profiles enable parents to see what their kids are watching. Just to make sure families are on board, shomi has ensured that more than 6,500 episodes of kids- and family-friendly programming are available, including Yo Gabba Gabba!, Are You Afraid of the Dark, iCarly and many more.

shomi’s development team worked hard, said Tebo, to incorporate “hidden gems” in the user interface “that make interacting with the application really fun” for kids and adults. A press and hold feature in the mobile apps, for instance, lets you touch the content poster art and linger there to bring up a menu of options and, for film, a trailer. And to save a show or film for later, you just press a plus sign in the corner of its box art to seamlessly save it to your own personal shomi later box.

More features are on the way. Now that it has a few months under its belt, Tebo said shomi will “survey and talk to our members and really understand what they feel is most valuable and what they want… We have a lot of ideas for where we want to take shomi.”

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