Does It Matter If The Future Isn't Available In Canada?
techvibes.com
techvibes.com
The funny thing is that American companies that engage in this kind of anti-cross-border behaviour may never realize just how much hostility they're brewing up against their products before they even finally arrive in Canada. By then there may be home-brewed alternatives. In the case of media, I think this will be particularly interesting because TV viewership amongst my demographic seems to collapsing in certain circles, yet people still want to jump online and view/share their clips. These are often blocked (or redirected to Canadian sites which have less content or use undesirable plugins/tech to show video).
So what's your alternative? Well, nothing! You go do something else. If the Big Media companies drag their asses on this issue I wouldn't be surprised if it had severe long term repercussions, causing people to switch to other forms of entertainment, brands, etc. One media market that never caved to idiotic lawyering (w.r.t US vs. Canada issues anyway) is video games. Perhaps we'll see that win out over time.
I find it hard to believe that a reasonably wealthy country with a population just under the size of California is ignored and blocked so systematically. It's actually the effort given to blocking our IPs that's the most surprising. I mean, don't Hulu's ad clients want me to buy their products up here too? .. Call it naive if you wish, I'll call it leaving money on the table.
Maybe because a reasonable chunk of the game industry is in Canada, and an even more reasonable chunk is outside North America all together (so that releasing in Canada as well as US isn't that big of a hassle as the hassle of going international from domestic).
Compare to entertainment (Hulu), where Canadians tend to import a vast (and to some disturbing) majority of the "culture" from the United States. Entertainment is much, much more centralized, and it's centralized in the US. Which is why Canada has Canadian content regulations (does Hulu have to abide by those? and if so, how do you define 'airtime' when it's on-demand? and a million other questions I have no idea about), and indirectly why nothing is ever available in Quebec (overall the asinine Quebecois laws are there because that's the price Quebec is willing to pay to maintain its own cultural and political identity).
For small countries, there is therefore a certain plus side to partially giving up sovereignity to join an effective economic superstate like the EU. Cross-border penetration of cool gadgets is just one part of this. Sadly, the only economic superstate bordering Canada is the United States which Canadians are, let's say.. ambivalent about joining.
And the US imports a lot of Canadians to produce said "culture", so saying that US culture is different is somewhat strange. (No, Jennings, Shatner, and Pamela Anderson aren't the only ones.)
I think it may be more about how hard it is to get set up in Canada and deal with local laws and regulations. If it comes down to two countries of equal size, the one with more restrictions will have to get in line behind the one with fewer. Too far down the queue and the product just never comes.
I have very little experience or knowledge when it comes to international business. I do know first hand that its quite a bit easier to send goods to Australia than Canada from where we are. I thought NAFTA was supposed to fix this.
As the roman poet said, "If you want to be loved, be loveable."
Your government, in its infinite wisdom, has seen fit to protect you from unscrupulous American companies which could possibly record your data without complying with the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act. (Never heard of it? Your bank has.) This strengthened existing legislation, such as the Bank Act (never heard of it? Your bank has.), one section of which "requires banks to maintain and process in Canada any information or data relating to the preparation and maintenance of bank records, including customer account records".
It gets even worse with media: each country has its own cartel representing entertainment copyright holders, meaning it's essentially impossible that we'll ever get something like hulu.com in Austria unless something changes in a big way. Presumably the legal hassles of working out contracts for each country individually are ridiculous, and simply not worth it in less populous countries. As with almost every aspect of the entertainment media industry, everyone loses: consumers, copyright holders and operator of the service.
Related:
http://availableincanada.com/