To prevent this waste of money, I’d travel back in time to the beginning of the streaming era and write a persuasive column arguing that the technology was now possible for CBC/Radio-Canada to create a single online TV service – one with a bilingual interface that offers the choice of viewing its French content with subtitles in English and vice-versa (or with dubbing should that be more politically palatable).
I’d write: “Believe it or not, in a few short years, some of the most popular international TV shows in Canada will be Scandinavian noirs and Korean gorefests – and a significant chunk of the audience will even watch shows in their own language with the subtitles on. For a small cost, CBC/Radio-Canada could vastly expand the reach and value of its content to Canadians.”
In the actual past, however, the two sides of the Crown corporation launched Gem and TOU.TV separately, years apart, and did so with each operating on different technology supported by separate engineering teams.
That costly error took a costly multiyear harmonization project to fix. But even now that the back ends are in sync, CBC/Radio-Canada still does not automatically secure the rights to subtitle or dub their own shows in the other official language.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/article-cbc-plan-b-french-english-subtitles-netflix/
I personally cancelled all of my streaming services in February or March, 100’s of dollars a year that I stopped paying because I wanted to follow the buyCanadian movement. I thought that would be hard, because I had not sailed the high C’s in well over a decade but found that it had gotten so much easier over the.
I have a pihole so I do not see the ads in CBC’s streaming but I do like to turn on the national every once in a while so I pay for CBC Gem. I wish there was a way to pay just to watch the CFL and not pay for all the other US sports I do not want to watch, or to even have the ability to watch other sports leagues that are not US centric.
I would also love streaming replacements for YouTube/movies that is 100 percent Canadian controlled, but we wouldn’t limit it to only Canadian users. Though i love Steam/Valve in pcgaming, if the Americans go nuts on retaliation to our retaliations and freeze Canadian access to these storefronts, would be nice to have an alternative that a foreign country couldn’t weaponize against us. Just thinking about all the games i’d lose on Steam fills me full of dread. I have a bunch of Games at least on GoG, of course it pales in size in comparison to Steam. I’d love some actual Canadian alternatives to online services. Serves us right i guess, we put ourselves in this position, getting too tied up with American culture and not tending our own.
