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Canadian Regulator Threatens To Impose New Netflix Regulation
An anonymous reader writes: Netflix appeared before the Canadian broadcast regulator today, resulting in a remarkably heated exchange, with threats of new regulation. The discussion was very hostile — the CRTC repeatedly ordered Netflix to provide subscriber information and other confidential data. As tempers frayed, the Canadian regulator expressed disappointment over the responses from a company that it said "takes hundreds of millions of dollars out of Canada." The CRTC implicitly threatened to regulate the company by taking away its ability to rely on the new media exception if it did not cooperate with its orders.
Tax subscribers. Obviously. The funds will be pissed away giving Canadian cable executives better bonuses
Is Canada still taxing blank media to subsidize the "victims" of "piracy?"
Whatever. Enjoy your cable monopoly Canuckistan. You deserve it. As do we.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Then why do they have so many reality TV shows? Ugh.
No, but really, the set of inputs to what Netflix has is quite complicated. They love things with cheap per showing licenses, like off-the-air TV shows, unpopular movies, documentaries where the producers are more interested in pushing a message than making a profit, and a smattering of more popular "draw" shows/movies to bring in the popular audience.
And then there's the loss-leader shows trying to get people to start watching the series as it comes out, either on pay services or with commercials.
And then there's the various "taste profiles" of the people who are netflix subscribers, and what's both cheap and good within that frame.
There's some pitiable accountants in the company who's responsible for balancing all those factors, while making a profit.
Reducing all that to "giving the people what they want" is a little unpragmatic.
It's 55% from 6pm to midnight, however, part of the way they get around it is that commercials are included which means they only need to air 66 minutes of non-commercial Canadian content during that period. Usually that takes the form of news.
That's not the point... i don't know the details, maybe it's more complicated than this, but as i understand it there are rules about playing X% of canadian content. for a radio station, this means that if there are 24 hours in a day, they may need to play e.g. 10 hours of canadian music and 14 hours of everything else (announcers, commercials, foreign music, etc). And you either listen to it, or don't, but you can guarantee a certain percentage of supply. If you watch or listen to any particular station for any length of time, you'll see or listen to some canadian content.
Netflix doesn't work like that... i say i want to watch X, Y, and Z. if those aren't canadian, what do they realistically want netflix to do? throttle me? pay a tax on every non-canadian item? force the catalog of choices to be X% canadian? ensure that some canadian content is shown (but that's usually based on my watching history... guess it would have to take some additional input)? none of those are really very similar to the content quotas on radio/TV, and are far less effective at promoting Canadian cultural content....
in general, culture is transitioning from a push model to a pull model. There's just not as much room for central control of any kind to meaningfully control it.
The blank media levy isn't for victims of piracy; it makes it legal to copy music for private use in Canada.
Basically, Canadian recording companies constantly lobbied the government saying "People are copying our music. There's no other use for a blank cassette but to copy music. We want to be paid a little for all those blank cassettes, and then we'll make copying music legal." The Canadian government resisted for a while, but eventually caved in, and there was much rejoicing from the record execs.
And then a short while later Napster appeared on the scene, and suddenly all the record execs said "noooooooooo!" They suddenly started lobbying to remove their new bill. :P