What's does Showtime Have Against Canada?? (1 Viewer)

[PatB]

I don't get this one at all.
I was trying to get some info on the Tyson fight this weekend so I tried to get access to the Showtime website.
When I did, there was a message saying that the website was only intended for people to access from the United States!!
Has anyone ever been blocked like this from a "free" country before?
Any ideas why this would be?
I've never seen anything like this.

 

[Max Leung]

Simple: The Canadian market, being only 10% (at most) of the US market, is just not going to generate any worthwhile revenue.

Either that, or the CRTC has something to do with it, although I somehow doubt that.

 

[PaulT]

Depends on what your definition of 'free' is.

 

[Gui A]

It's stupid to block a site. There's always a way around it,
like this one:

http://anon.free.anonymizer.com/http://sho.com/jayz/

and this one:

http://216.239.57.100/search?q=cache...hl=en&ie=UTF-8

 

[Francois Caron]

The problem here is broadcast rights. Showcase is an American specialty channel available (legally) only within the United States. They only own the American broadcast rights for their programming. As such, access to their Web site is granted only to those citizens who are most likely to be current and potential customers of their service.

Showcase is not blocking out just Canadians. They're blocking out all non-US residents.

 

[Dennis Nicholls]

I'm sure it's the intellectual property licensing issues. After all, doesn't DirecTV also not do business for Canadians, so Canadians set up post office boxes in the US for billing? I read a lot about this in the DBS forums.

 

[Peter Kline]

I'd bet that a local Canadian broadcast company has rights for future rebroadcast if not a live one. Showtime only has rights for the U.S. as stated above.

 

[PatB]

It's not just the fight info, we can get it here on the local ppv. It just seemed really odd to me. I can view all the HBO info that I want.
Maybe this kind of thinking explains why showtime is an also-ran compared to hbo.
Thanks for those links Gui.

 

[Peter Kline]

Well, you didn't miss much. 49 seconds. To quote a movie great, "There's a sucker born every minute".......