CRTC Broadcast Rant

Access Denied

I'm trying to watch some WSOP on ESPN3. Impossible. I live in a modern, western, high-tech, democratic country that somehow manages to impose Chinese style censorship for fear of having our little Canadian minds flooded with non-Canadian content. There's a reason some people call us the friendly dictatorship.



This is the mandate of the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission:

"The CRTC’s mandate is to ensure that both the broadcasting and telecommunications systems serve the Canadian public. The CRTC uses the objectives in the Broadcasting Act and the Telecommunications Act to guide its policy decisions.

Broadcasting

In broadcasting, the CRTC ensures that all Canadians have access to a wide variety of high-quality Canadian programming as well as access to employment opportunities in the broadcasting system. Programming in the Canadian broadcasting system should reflect Canadian creativity and talent, our bilingual nature, our multicultural diversity and the special place of aboriginal peoples in our society."

High Tech

The Broadcasting Act hasn't been overhauled since 1991. To put 1991 into technological perspective, it's the year Nintendo released the SNES in North America.

So here I am trying to access some great content online from around the world and I'm met with a stream of "Access Denied. This service/product not available in your region," over and over again. Here's a sample of some of my issues:

• ESPN3 - Access Denied
• Various live sports feeds  - Access Denied
• Netflix Online Streaming - Reduced Library
• Hulu - Access Denied
• Cable TV - Somewhat decent Canadian networks unwatchable on Sundays while they try to cram every last half-assed Canadian production (ie. hunting/fishing/travel shows with about 75% dead time to boot) out there into the everyone's at church time slot to get  their required content percentage in for the week before they switch back to the ABC/NBC feed of football or golf.

I'm not really about to go the VPN workaround route since I can just fill my time up doing other stuff anyways but it's just so damn annoying that you can't do something online when you want to do it.

Government sponsored cultural engineering, based on technological rules written 20 years ago, being run by a 65 year old, ftw. In 2011. Canada needs to get with the program.