PedroSteckecilo said:
In many cases The CRTC is why we can't have nice things, it's why it took us forever to get HBO up here and why the BBC needs a special BBC Canada Station to broadcast here.
They're also pretty much ensuring that Canada will never get good digital content because they feel they can't "regulate the amount of Canadian Content" provided by digital sources.
A lot of Europe has similar issues and licensing in general throughout the continent is an insane mishmash of bad ideas. That's before you factor in every country having their own way of doing things and the costs of localising. Add to that the sheer network burden of a large amount of people moving to online TV. In the UK the rollout of BBC iplayer was very close to having the kibosh put on it when the internet providers threatened to refuse their users access to it claiming that there simply wasn't the bandwidth to go around.
The digital age of TV may have started but it's going to take a change in a lot of regulations to be mainstream in much of the world. Torrents are going to rule the roost for a while yet.
Even in America there's still issues with advertising revenues,rating systems and royalty and licensing payments attached to online content.
The weekly model isn't just the old way of doing things it's TV's attraction to investors. Some returns week in week out, the ability to see how the audience is taking your series and the opportunity to take it back and re-write the second half are big deals. Hitting your audience with one big dose and hoping it sells is a much bigger risk; the only serious advantage COULD be a few freedoms from network control but giants of streaming are already in place so the situation may just change hands rather than change.
As it stands working for a network eking out a weekly release and payment system and later putting it up for download\stream (maybe even for a fee) gives the best of both worlds and your online viewers will have been bolstered by those who missed teh airing and got word of mouth encouragement from those who did watch.
Yes, we may be at the start of something interesting that changes the way TV is made improving it in every way but there's a lot of obstacles in the way and it has some big risks if it goes all the way.
And lost? As much as people bang on about it I had absolutely no urge to pick up series two after watching the first. When an article that is talking about something altogether different wastes half the space on said show I have to wonder where the point went.
