Funny Picture

A dear friend posted this Toronto Star column about American broadcasters streaming content into Canada, commercials intact.

The key determinant will obviously be money. Once U.S. rights holders conclude that it is more profitable to retain the Internet rights so that they can stream their programs online to a global audience and capture the advertising or subscription revenues that come with it, Canadian broadcasters may find that they can only license broadcast rights with the U.S. rights holders competing directly with them via the Internet.

As content moves onto the Internet, this could present a huge problem for broadcasters that rely on a protected market. The response that we (content creators) hope they'd have is to produce more homegrown content that they could then stream into other markets. But the immediate temptation, once it really begins to hurt, will be to ask for some kind of government-enforced geoblocking. We'll see.