I wanted an iPhone when it first came out. Really, really badly.
It’s not that I couldn’t afford it; money wasn’t an issue. I also had a phone that was in sore need of replacing, so a smartphone was the next logical purchase. I already immersed my household in Apple gear, so an iPhone was the best choice. But I had no way to get one…because Canada didn’t have it. And we never did get the first iPhone.
While that could be seen as a blessing in disguise, considering that us Canucks were spared a first generation model, it makes me wonder why in the world we don’t get technology that is available right below us. Especially when much of the technology we want comes from right below us.
“I think Canadians have been sold a bill of goods about why it takes so long,” says Jesse Brown, MacLean’s columnist and host of TVO’s Search Engine. “We’ve sort have been told that ‘it’s a smaller market’ and ‘it’s less important’ — and they’ll get around to us. They’re sort of appealing to our Canadian sense of inferiority, patience and politeness.”
Brown says the reality is that there are powerful, entrenched interests that have various projectionist relationships with the government, making it difficult for American companies to do business in Canada. Basically, the reason the iPhone finally came to Canada was because it got the point where it was going to impossible to deny Canadians the hardware; the telecom companies were forced to bring it in. But at least they could attempt to profit from that.
In terms of getting technology later being a blessing in disguise, Brown disagrees.
“(That’s) a bit of a paternal attitude,” says Brown. “Its not just about a sense of entitlement…the iPhone launched an industry of app development. It was a real innovation engine for all kinds of developers who make stuff for it. I don’t know how you can make stuff for it if you don’t have one.”
Interestingly, Canada has the highest iOS market share in the world, and this wasn’t lost on a group of developers south of the border. The developers of Matchbook, a recently released app that allows users to bookmark and organize places they’ve visited, decided to use Canada as the testing ground for the app. It’s that kind of attention (not to mention foresight) that should encourage hardware companies to think twice about ignoring Canada during a product’s initial rollout — or ignoring Canada altogether.
While hardware is one aspect of the equation, digital content and new media is another large part. A very large — and very broken — part.
Canadians can watch shows like The Colbert Report on CTV affiliates, a basic cable offering. But when they try to watch exclusive Comedy Central content associated with the show, they are halted at the point of entry with the following message:
I don’t subscribe to The Comedy Network, and I’m not really a fan of their website. I want to watch the content where I want to watch it. Website appearance aside, I would subscribe to the station — I’m a big fan of comedy. But it is only available from my cable subscriber as part of a premium cable package that includes 20+ other stations I have no intention of watching.
Diane Wild, the woman behind TV, eh?, a website and podcast that focuses on Canadian content explains why the above message appears on any computer screen based in Canada when they try to watch a video from Comedy Central.
“In general, what happens is the Canadian network has to buy the rights from whoever owns it,” Wild explains. “The broadcast rights are separated…the television rights versus the web rights. Sometimes broadcasters only buy the television rights and not the web rights.”
Wild goes on to say that if the Canadian broadcaster hasn’t bought the web rights, then they can’t show the content. That’s when geo-blocking comes in. The geo-blocking basically means websites recognize what country the computer is trying to access the content from, and doesn’t allow access to the content if the computer is transmitting from an unapproved region.
Sites such as Hulu don’t work here, either, meaning that if Canadians really want to watch shows online using that service, they have to attempt to circumvent the region blocking. Some software allows this (such as Hotspot Shield for the Mac), but content providers are betting that most Canadians won’t bother. And they seem to be right…for now.
“I can’t see it,” says Wild about Hulu coming to Canada. “If Hulu decides that they want to go into Canada that would be great. But then they would have to negotiate with not only the American partners but the Canadian networks that own the rights to broadcast those shows. So it becomes this really complicated labyrinth and the Canadian population and the money they can get from us probably doesn’t justify that amount of effort.”
When Netflix entered Canada back in September of last year, the content available paled in comparison to its American counterpart. While the library has grown considerably over the past few months…it has a long way to go before hitting the level of variety that Netflix offers in the States.
Some would suggest that if Canada begins to adopt more American values in terms of how they handle content, then Canadian consumers could see improved digital content access. Aligning copyright laws with the US is one of these items on the table. That idea is a fallacy, suggests Russell McOrmond, an Ottawa-based copyright activist.
