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Month: May 2009

CRTC Crashes While Looking Through the Rearview Window

“Hulu.ca”… Has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?

This particular post started out as a rant.  It evolved.  In the process I realized that, as a media consumer, I’m a temperamental 2-year old with ADD.  I have no patience.  I want my content the way I want it, and I want it now.

No hulu.com for Canadians

At Christmas I received some iTunes gift cards.  I figured I’d be an honest consumer and go buy some content. After surfing the Canadian Apple Store site, I felt discouraged… Where were the commercial-free “Prison Break” episodes that I’d gone looking for?  And why were they readily available on the American Apple Store site, where I couldn’t get them, alongside countless hours of other commercial-free entertainment.

A quick Google search brought up numerous ways to get those same episodes, but I was feeling lazy and wasn’t in the mood to forge my mailing address or buy a fresh US-based gift card on eBay. I simply wanted to redeem my existing Canadian-bought gift cards and be entertained.

Around the same time, I found that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) was surprisingly relevant in how it brings new content to market. On the Canadian Apple Store site, I could buy and download “Hockey Night in Canada” games and episodes of “MVP: The Secret Lives of Hockey Wives”.

I could also watch streaming episodes of the Canadian “Dragon’s Den” on CBC.ca for the price of watching one or two quick Rogers commercials.  Seemed fair. 

However, I didn’t want to pay to download any commercial-free CBC content since the publicly funded broadcaster already gets my tax dollars to send me its signal and its programs for ‘free’. 

Besides, where were my “Prison Break” episodes?  I had money (the gift cards); I wanted to buy.  Another quick Google search reveals how to shield your I.P. to watch those same episodes but I wanted to stay away from the grey-market of 21st century media consumption.  Why was it so hard? 

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