Canada Gets Shafted...Again

Apple announced today that they will finally be offering Canadians the ability to buy TV shows through the iTunes store. Now many of you might be excited to hear this. With video support available on all new iPods, except the Shuffle, the ability to download TV shows from iTunes should be a great thing. Well as per usual, we got shafted. Here's a partial list of available shows from the press release:

CBC's comedy programs Little Mosque on the Prairie and The Rick Mercer Report, reality programming No Opportunity Wasted and Dragon's Den CTV smash hit comedy Corner Gas, dramas Instant Star, Degrassi: The Next Generation and Robson Arms Comedy Central's Drawn Together, The Sarah Silverman Program and Emmy and Peabody Award-winning South Park MTV Networks programs Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Hills NHL Games of the Year, including top NHL games in their entirety for the 2007-2008 season, as well as Stanley Cup Classics, a five-game bundle of great Stanley Cup Final games.

Compared to the American offering, that list is pathetic. It's well known that the most watched shows in Canada are all American shows. Don't get me wrong though, I don't blame Apple at all for this. The CRTC is the one to blame. If they had it their way, we wouldn't be able to watch any American content at all.

Here's an idea, instead of trying to keep American content out of Canada, why don't the Canadian networks try and produce content that can compete with the American shows. If CTV produced an action show with as much suspense and production quality as 24, I would be happy to watch it. If the CBC created a show with as much intrigue and intricate plot lines as Lost, you wouldn't be able to keep my away. Hell, if Canadian Idol could find singers who came even slightly close to the singers on American Idol in terms of actual singing ability, rather than relying on their current combination of mediocre talent and quirky personality, it would be a quite a victory.

Unfortunately, that's just not the way it is at the moment. So in the mean time, all of us Canadians will just have to rely on things like YouTube and BitTorrent to get the shows we want to watch until the CRTC smartens up.

/rant