I would expect PBS, of all TV stations, to be less constrained by distribution contracts and to be able to stream their content worldwide. Instead, they choose Youtube TV which is US-only.
Worldwide distribution costs more than domestic, and streaming rights cost more than broadcast-only. And PBS doesn't have as much leverage as for-profit broadcasters, so the negotiations for those rights took longer.
Here's some prior context:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2018/04/15/w...
https://www.techhive.com/article/3338083/why-live-pbs-stream...
The answer is they'd have to pay stacks of people for streaming rights, on a tiny budget. I really pity the poor bastards at PBS who had to try and arrange the underlying copyright clearance for this YouTube deal, which must have been an unholy nightmare given their budget.
I'm an avid PBS Frontline viewer (some of the best documentaries out there). As a Canadian, I can watch most of them on the PBS website, but the odd time an episode will be rights restricted. I assume this is because of footage or music that they are unable to clear the licenses for outside of the US. And really, as a publicly funded broadcaster, why should they care about me in Canada?
Also possible, and something I hadn't thought of.
I'm with you. But I think you'd run into the 1-2 combination of the American public not wanting to fund free TV for Canadians (though obviously the marginal cost is ~$0) and the Canadian public not wanting to "pollute" our air waves with American media.
Or do you mean as an American in the US?
The BBC use the same provider as a number of Vegas gambling services, and they're very effective because Vegas is willing to spend lots of money on forensic work.
PBS, like all distributors, licenses content from producers of content--sometimes PBS is the producer, often it is not--for distribution inside a defined territory.
For example, Doctor Who, Red Dwarf, Downton Abbey, and Are You Being Served are all British TV shows licensed by PBS for distribution in the US. PBS can't stream them worldwide same as the BBC can't show some of the content it distributes outside of the United Kingdom.
This is why new Sesame Street episodes are now on HBO and not PBS
It's kind of backwards to be doing business this way. There are plenty of Youtube channels that have a wider reach than many TV shows with millions of subscribers and views per video. The trick is simply to ensure you have copyright for all content that you create plus a world wide distribution license for any third party content embedded in that (e.g. background music). This is basically how Netflix works these days and one of the reasons they are mopping up the media market that is still focused on creating and selling content for individual TV channels.
It absolutely isn't.