The Curious Case of Canadian Broadcasting

Internet radio is great. I can listen to thousands of stations anywhere in the world right from my computer. Even Canadian radio stations have grown a small international audience judging by the ones who phone in to talk programs. Try watching international TV on your computer and you'll get a completely different and wholly negative experience. I use IGN a lot for my MMNTech site but I find a lot of the videos they've been using to show clips and trailers of TV shows are through Hulu. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp owns both Hulu and IGN so naturally they're going to use the service. Unfortunately, Hulu is not available in Canada or anywhere else for that matter besides the United States. Pretty stupid for a website with an international audience. Copyright problems are usually blamed but I don't buy this since audio falls under the same umbrella as video. So why am I free to access international audio broadcasts online but not international television?

To answer this question, you have to go a few years back with a struggle over Apple Corp.'s iTunes and the Canadian networks. When Apple launched the iTunes video store back around 2006, they wanted to put TV shows up for all customers. However, this was blocked in Canada because Canadian networks refused to hand over broadcasting rights. As usual, CTV was the leader, meaning popular American shows like South Park took a long time to reach Canadian internet shores. It doesn't matter that CTV doesn't own the copyrights to these shows. They had been handed exclusive broadcasting privilege from the CRTC. Much of it has to do with laws concerning Canadian ownership of broadcast outlets and Canadian content laws. Apple is an American company after all. What confuses me is why such a double standard exists between TV and radio in Canada. To tell Apple they can't sell TV episodes in Canada would be equivalent to them saying they can't sell music on iTunes because it would hurt Canadian record stores and radio stations. Obviously that never happened. The problem still exists today with a great deal of television content moving online. Direct feeds from American networks are off limits to Canadians let alone huge archive sites like Hulu. Canadians are met with the message that they are not permitted to use the service. So let me get this strait. We live in a multicultural society that praises our international heritage but the government won't let me watch international broadcasts online. Does that make sense? I didn't think so.

The CRTC recently decided that it would not try to regulate new media at this time, although they are already doing it by proxy. They also left the door open for future regulation. As I've said many times before, the whole Canadian content rules are anti-multicultural and are vastly outdated for our current international society. The laws only exist at this point to keep the likes of CTV, Bell, and CBC in exclusive communications monopolies. It is worth noting that radio doesn't have the lobby power that the TV networks do. The CRTC needs to get with the program and open the doors to international television broadcasting, no matter what the medium, to put it on equal ground with radio.