Monday, 17 August 2009

On Mad Men in Canada and broadcasting via iTunes

This story (thanks @cameronreed) ) claims that iTunes has made a score in grabbing Mad Men from Canadian broadcasters. My view is that this merely demonstrates how there is no such thing as Canadian broadcasting, only a sort of legal piracy.

  1. Canadian broadcasters buy US programming at a sharp discount to its production cost. They then broadcast it at the same time as the US broadcaster. This is the key bit: by law, if a US broadcaster is showing the same programme as a Canadian channel, the cable company must swap out the US signal and replace it with the Canadian one for the duration. This gives the Canadian broadcaster 100% of the ad revenue on two channels.
  2. This rule, called simultaneous substitution, only applies when the original broadcaster is over-the-air. It doesn’t apply when the original broadcaster is cable only. AMC, the originating broadcaster for Mad Men, is a cable-only broadcaster.
  3. So, CTV ultimately dropped the show because they could not substitute it out. Instead, they will just rebroadcast some other US programming. On two channels. [1]
  4. Not mentioned in any story is that AMC, the originating broadcaster for Mad Men, is available to almost all Canadians on cable anyway. [2]
  5. Lastly, as a UK resident with a Canadian credit card, I’m loving this, and perfect for getting around Britain’s screwy schedule.

1 The idea that Canadian networks will commission original, quality programming is, of course, laughable.

2 According to a rough look at StatsCan by me, there are 11m households in Canada and 14m cable subscribers.