sounds all very similar to what Netflix found in France. Though since this is not broadcast over the air and user selectable I want to know how Netflix content differs from any other web content?
To do business legally in a country, you need to abide by that country's rules. One of Canada's is the "Canadian Content" requirement of broadcasters that says that a certain amount of content being broadcast in Canada to Canadians must also be Canadian.
Whether the rule is dumb or counter-productive is immaterial at this juncture. Rules is rules.
Netflix quacks like a broadcaster so it falls under the rule, no? Not quite. There's a "new media" exemption that says, in return for giving the CRTC, when asked, statistics on the Canadian consumers of your service, you can be exempt from that particular scrutiny.
Netflix was asked. Netflix didn't give the information.
Now we see what the CRTC will do. It has every right to ask for an injunction from the courts to shut down Netflix's Canadian operations. But it doesn't want to, because Canadians like Netflix and bringing this to the courts might just be the opening Netflix needs to strike down the information requirement (allowing it to operate in the clear with no conditions until a new regulatory framework is built and approved).
If Netflix were a broadcaster then at 8PM local time, everyone watching Netflix would be watching the same show. Assuming that Netflix was only a single channel, anyhow.
But hey, let's suppose that Netflix has not a single channel but say, 1000 channels. That's way, way way more than cable or satellite or anything like that. Okay, but Netflix has nearly 7000 movies and a bunch of TV shows, so it's not a 1000 channel broadcaster.
Let's say that Netflix has one channel for every movie and every show in their collection. That's something like 10000 or more channels (which is way way way more than any other broadcaster in the history of the world has ever offered) and it STILL wouldn't work!
Why not? Because you can start watching a Netflix title WHENEVER you want. But let's be reasonable, let's say that they'll run as many channels as they need so that you never have to wait more than a minute to start streaming. Since most of their titles are movies and a movie is on average around 90 minutes long, that's 10k*90 = 900k channels.
There you have it folks! In order for Netflix to be a "broadcaster" you've got to assume that they're roughly equivalent to a cable company with in excess of 900,000 channels.
If that could be considered "quacking" like something then I quack like a billionare!
So you’re saying a billionaire should be exempt from e.g. income tax simply due to being a billionaire and expecting them to provide a certain quota of their income to the state would be unreasonable, as they have so much income?
No, not at all. I don't have anywhere NEAR a billion dollars of net worth, but apparently being within oh say 5 or 6 orders of magnitude is close enough!
Most broadcasters in Canada broadcast on a few channels. The cable companies operate a few hundred, but they make no decisions about the programming of any one particular channel; they're aggregators.
In order to argue that Netflix is a broadcaster you have to fit them into the "channel model" because that's what makes "broadcast" broadcast. On a particular channel only one thing is playing at any one particular time, and it's the same everywhere. So trying to shoehorn Netflix into that model you have to make some crazy assumptions about how their service works (that aren't right) and then you get a channel count approaching or exceeding a million.
That's patently absurd which nicely makes the point that Netflix isn't a broadcaster. Do you know how much bandwidth it takes to broadcast a TV channel? It's 8MHz. 8Mhz * 1mm channels = 8 Terahertz of total bandwidth if they're broadcasting over the air, which according to all folks who are reasonable, is what a broadcast is.
If Netflix is a broadcaster than so is anyone who operates any website which doesn't block Canadian visitors. If they are going to go after Netflix I would appreciate them applying the law evenly and going after literally everyone else on the internet too.
It really seems to me like the CRTC is going after Netflix because a lot of people watch it on their televisions in place of content they may have otherwise watched on their television.
There is a substantial amount of pressure from Canadian telecom companies to get companies like Netflix and Youtube to conform to the same regulations that tv/radio deal with here.
