Quote:
Originally Posted by jsbertram
Here's a dirty little secret of our Canadian TV systems:
The CRTC has mandated since 1972 that when a Canadian station and an American station are airing the same program at the same time (aka simulcasting) on cable or satellite, the American station's signal has to be replaced with the Canadian station's signal.
ie: Sunday's superbowl was broadcast by CBS (KIRO Seattle -- Shaw cable channel 15 in Vancouver) and by CTV (CIVT Vancouver -- Shaw cable channel 9) at the same time. Therefore under the CRTC mandate, Shaw cable must substitute the CTV/CIVT signal on channel 15 in Vancouver (replacing the CBS/KIRO signal with CTV/CIVT's signal). This is better known in the business as "Simultaneous substitution", "simsubbing" or "signal substitution".
That means that regardless of which channel on Shaw cable you are watching the superbowl, you are watching the Canadianized version - and the Canadian commercials sold by CTV. We may have seen Olympic ads here, but that means we were NOT seeing the American superbowl ads that everyone is talking about on Monday morning. The ads shown on CTV (and simsubbed on Shaw cable 15) were bought with Canadian dollars by a Canadian company to be viewed by Canadian eyeballs.
I think CTV would be ecstatic if they were able sell Superbowl ad space for $2.5 Million / 30 Seconds like CBS did.
This is such a common practice on all programs that are simulcast by US and Canadian TV stations, I'm used to seeing the bad simsub cut-over by Shaw / Rogers when a program starts.
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It's not really a dirty little secret when everybody knows that.
Unless, you happen to think that CBS or FOX plays your CTV (or Global) local news info-bites.
Or, don't notice the CTV logo positioned almost (but not really) over top of the CBS logo... but enough of the CBS logo still shows that you can tell it says CBS.
We did get some of the American commercials. Budweiser, for one, advertises in both USA and Canada. The rest you can watch online at
http://www.youtube.com/adblitz if you are that desperate to be advertised to.
Except the anti-abortion ad
Youtube seems a bit to PC to put that up.