Quote:
Originally Posted by nfotiu
I honestly don't understand this logic. Why shouldn't a producer of content be able to sell the exclusive rights of their content to a Canadian station?
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I don't think ken has a beef with the content producers. His complaint, which I personally share, seems to be with the system created in Canada allegedly to protect Canadian stations and Canadian content.
American programming is popular in Canada. We all love our Glees and our Chucks and our HIMYM. The population, in general, seems to love it some Dancing With The Stars and American Idol. There are decent Canadian shows too but by and large American programming is most popular.
All things being equal, we could just watch American programming on American stations. The CRTC and others have seen fit, however, to step in and protect the Canadian marketplace from this happening. There are Canadian content rules that dictate a certain amount of Canadian content to be available and limit the ability of foreign stations to enter this market (among other things). Canadian stations see how popular the American programming is and purchase rights to broadcast it here in Canada alongside American stations showing the same programming. But how to ensure the eyeballs are on Global instead of Fox when Glee is playing...
I know!
We will come up with a law that requires cable/satellite providers to substitute Canadian station feeds for the American station when they are both playing the program that the Canadian station has paid for. Now when it doesn't matter if consumers are watching Global or Fox because they are both showing the Global feed right now. Booyah!
But, as we said, American programming is popular and the best way to make money from deals with advertisers is to show the most popular content. More American content is purchased. There is more competition for that content and the price goes up. Suddenly, Canadian stations aren't able to make ends meet in large part because of their desire to spend such large amounts of money on American programming. Crap. We're going under. What to do, what to do...
I know!
We'll lobby for even broader signal substitution rules. And we'll wage a campaign to force cable/satellite companies to pay us for carrying our station feeds. We'll make it seem as though those big bad cable and satellite companies are driving the local hometown stations out of business (and hope no one notices that many of these local stations are owned by the same parent organization that runs the cable and satellite companies we are vilifying). Brilliant!
Oh, and we have to make sure that consumers won't have a choice in any of this. We have to make it mandatory to bundle packages of stations and make it impossible for consumers to freely choose what channels and programming they actually really want to pay for and support. A la carte is for losers.
What also bugs me is that none of the local stations seem to realize that their advertising revenue is determined at least in part by the number of eyeballs watching the show and the advertisements that run alongside it. Cable and satellite providers are doing these stations a favor by bringing them into far more homes than terrestrial antenna broadcasts will in this day and age.