Five years ago this week… In a final act of desperation, Canadian operators Rogers Communications and Shaw recruited UK software house ThinkAnalytics to power the recommendation engine for their jointly-owned SVoD service, Shomi. Despite its owners’ mission, Shomi was failing to present a serious challenge to the dominance of Netflix in Canada, which became the giant’s first territory outside of home soil in 2010, where it had since amassed 5.2 million subs compared to Shomi’s 250,000, at the time of writing. Rogers and Shaw were banking on ThinkAnalytics to lift Shomi’s UX to new heights, but alas, it was not enough. Following an announcement in September 2016, Shomi folded just two months later. — One unconventional perk of…