How Canadians Get Their TV

Michael sent me this comment about a month ago and I thought the topic was interesting enough to coax an article out of. It concerns the mechanics of how TV is delivered in Canada.

I am curious about how the Canadians get their TV. Cable, satellite, downloading (such as NetFlix, iTunes, and Amazon) or DVDs.

How many channels are available to view? How much of the country's area is reached by TV in any form? What percentage of Canadians watch TV? Is it based on the free commercial model, the pay-tv model (cable for example), or license fees of the British?

To answer part of the last question first, Television in Canada is largely based on the free commercial model, although certain premium stations – HBO Canada, Sportsnet World, The Movie Network (in Ontario and east), Movie Central (Manitoba and west), and Superchannel – are commercial free but operate on a pay-TV model by charging significantly higher subscription prices than other channels. Apparently there was, in the early 1950s, a short-lived attempt to intrdoduce a licensing system such as the British use to help fund the CBC but that effort apparently died because Canada and the United States use the same technical standards and equipment and it was nearly impossible to stop people from buying (unlicensed) sets in the US and bringing them into Canada.

According to the CRTC, virtually all Canadians have access to over the air broadcast (OTA) signals but about 92% Canadians get their TV with cable and satellite. There are two major cable companies (Rogers and Shaw), three smaller regional companies (EastLink, Cogeco and Videotron) and a number of small independent companies, some of them community or cooperatively owned. There are two satellite companies Bell ExpressVu and Shaw Direct. Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) offered by several of the telephone companies including Telus in BC and Alberta, Sasktel Max in Saskatchewan, MTS in Manitoba, BellTV in Ontario and Quebec, and Aliant in Atlantic Canada has a far smaller penetration in Canada than in the United States. Shaw, which is the primary cable TV provider in Western Canada and Northern Ontario is both the largest service provider in Canada and the largest Digital Cable provider. Part of this is because of their ownership of the Shaw Direct Satellite service which is significantly smaller than the Bell ExpressVu service.

Downloading is an available option although penetration is relatively low. According to a 2010 CRTC report in a typical week less than 25% of Anglophones and 20% of Francophones watched TV programming – defined as including “a TV program, newscast or clip from a TV program available on the Internet” – as opposed to over 40% of Anglophones and 35% of Francophones who watched amateur videos online. Sources appear to be somewhat restricted. Hulu is not legally available in Canada although there are people who try to avoid these restrictions. Apple has a Canadian service that appears (to a non-user like me) to be fairly extensive. In most cases you order from Canadian service providers such as CBC, CTV, Global, and CityTV and the cable service providers. NetFlix introduced a Canadian service in 2010. Again I’m not a subscriber so I can’t speak to the selection. Amazon Instant Video isn’t available in Canada. A potentially major problem for downloading may be the ownership issue. Shaw, Bell, and Rogers are among the largest Internet service providers in the country and the principal suppliers of broadband Internet services as well as the major cable/satellite Television providers. They also own the four largest broadcast stations – CTV (Bell), Global (Shaw), CityTV and Omni (Rogers) – as well as a high percentage of the Canadian cable channels. There is a benefit to them in restricting the penetration of downloading commercially made videos online.

The number of stations available to Canadians gets very complicated. Let’s start with broadcast. There are three English language networks – CBC, CTV, and Global – and two major English language systems – CTV Two, and CityTV. Systems are defined by the Canadian Radio Television and Telecommunications Commission as groups of stations that don’t have outlets throughout the country. There are two French Language networks – Radio Canada (which has stations in all provinces) and TVA (stations in Quebec, cable deals in the rest of the country) – and one French language system – V (formerly TQS or Quatre Saisson). There is one multilingual network – APTN or Aboriginal Peoples Television Network with broadcast stations in all three territories and cable coverage in the rest of Canada which broadcasts in English French and several Aboriginal languages – and one multilingual system – Omni, which has five stations and broadcasts in no less than twenty different languages including Mandarin, Cantonese, Punjabi, Portuguese and Italian. People in border regions can also receive broadcast stations from nearby American cities.

Turning to cable/satellite, most Canadians have access to at least five American network stations as part of the most basic cable package, with others available depending on what sort of cable package they subscribe to. Four US “superstations” (WSBK, WGN, Peachtree and KTLA) are available depending on service provider – some require a subscription to premium movie services to get these stations. Canadians also have access to 110 Canadian owned English language, 33 French language, and 54 multilingual analogue and digital services. There are 67 English language, 26 French language and five multilingual High Definition services but most of these duplicate existing analogue, and to a lesser extent digital TV services. This is in addition to a number of American and Foreign broadcast and cable stations carried in Canada. Most Canadian cable subscribers also have access to more American and international specialty channels than I choose to count. Needless to say, no cable or satellite system carries everything, either because of limited bandwidth or because of rivalries between the various cable companies which are also cable channel owners.

I hope this gives you some answers about Canadian TV. It’s not the whole story – I haven’t even touched on simsubs and why Canadian stations schedule shows the way they do – but it’s a start.

Weddings Are Weddings

After watching the second episode of Global's new series My Fabulous Gay Wedding one thing became absolutely apparent and that is that a wedding is a wedding is a wedding, and a show about a wedding is a show about a wedding. It doesn't matter if the couple involved are a man and a woman, a man and a man or a woman and a woman.

The second episode of My Fabulous Gay Wedding featured two women, Nikki and Debbie. Both are divorced - from men - and each has two children of whom they have joint custody with their exes. When show host Scott Thompson, formerly of Kids In The Hall goes to them with the application for the wedding license, Debbie immediately states that she's the Bride. As nearly as I can tell the license applications in Ontario haven't been changed to reflect the reality of Same Sex Marriage. After this is taken care of and we learn a little about Nikki and Debbie's relationship (the met when Debbie answered Nikki's newspaper ad, and got her to pull it from the paper after just one day) Scott has to pull together their wedding in just fourteen days. Well really his team of wedding gurus have to do it. They are wedding planner Fern Cohen and her event planner assistant Gregory White, design expert Eric Aragon, fashion stylist Jim Smith, and caterer Barbara Stuart-Peterson.

Of course the essential part of any wedding is what the couple wants and doesn't want as a theme, food, music clothes and of course location location location. This is part of Scott's job; between his talks with them and blatant snooping around their home, he has to give the event team some sort of idea of what they want in a wedding - and hope that he and they get it right. In the case of Debbie and Nikki, what he doesn't find out much until he finds a CD of music by lesbian singer and comedian Lea Delaria. Fern (who is straight) doesn't know Delaria, but her male assistants are very excited about the prospect of having her for the wedding. It just so happens that she and Scott are close friends so he's able to arrange her appearance at the wedding, if they can get her from Boston to Toronto on time. There are other problems. Nikki and Debbie say they don't want a church wedding, but the facility that the team finds for their 1920's speakeasy themed wedding looks suspiciously like a church. That shouldn't be surprising; it used to be a church. Once they have the local they have to get a piano for Lea's accompanist only to discover that the doors of the place aren't big enough for the grand piano that Fern wants. Eventually the piano is reduced to a pianette which will fit into the ex-church. Meanwhile Debbie and Nikki, who describe themselves as retro women, are balking at the vintage clothes that Jim's suggesting to them. Still, with the exception of almost missing the deadline to get the wedding license before the appropriate offices closed for the weekend, things on the wedding planning front run relatively smoothly.

I mentioned that for the most part the concerns of same sex couples getting married are almost identical to the concerns of heterosexual couples. Well that's not entirely true. In some cases there's resistance from family. While Nikki's son and daughter are happy for them, and her mother and godmother both show up. Things are rockier for Debbie. After she and her husband broke up, he begged her not to come out of the closet and initially refused to let her two sons attend even though it was her weekend to have custody of them. Debbie was willing to stand up to him, saying that she wanted to be "gay with a voice." But the real problem was with her parents. They refused to attend because they felt the need to "protect the children" by which they meant her sons. Debbie reached the point where she called off the wedding and told her parents that, but they didn't believe her and were actively lobbying he ex husband to keep the boys away from the wedding. In fact on the night before the wedding Debbie's parents were calling around town trying to find Debbie and her sons. Eventually Debbie's ex-husband relented and lets the boys attend although he refused to allow them to be shown on camera, so in virtually all of the shots where they'd be seen in the wedding, their faces are "fuzzed" out.

Scott Thompson describes the show as a "heartwarming comedy" but from my perspective most of the comedy comes from the self-described (I swear) "Wedding Fairy" himself. Thompson is funny although not in the same way as he was during his Kids In The Hall days but he has his moments. On the whole he seems superfluous to the proceedings as Fern and her team seem to do most of the "heavy lifting". In the end - for me at least - the series falls flat. When it comes right down to it this is a wedding show of the sort that wouldn't be out of place on a network like TLC, Lifetime or W (the Canadian equivalent of the Oxygen network) if the couples were a man and a woman. For me, watching a wedding where I don't have any emotional connection with either of the participants isn't interesting regardless of their sexuality. It seems to me to be a little bit cynical for Global to air this show on the network since it is my impression that they wouldn't put a wedding show about heterosexual couples on their broadcast network. I'd like to suggest that the decision to air the show in the summer in "peak viewing hours" (as defined by the CRTC) is at least in part an effort to keep the network's Canadian content numbers acceptable. Certainly I'm willing to bet that having something unique to sell to the American MTV's new, gay-themed, cable network called Logo may have made the decision to produce the show a lot easier for the programmers at Global. Then again, maybe I'm the cynical one.