A group representing major foreign streaming companies told a hearing held by Canada’s broadcasting regulator on Friday that those companies shouldn’t be expected to fulfil the same responsibilities as traditional broadcasters when it comes to Canadian content.

The Motion Picture Association-Canada, which represents large streamers like Netflix, Paramount, Disney and Amazon, said the regulator should be flexible in modernizing its definition of Canadian content.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is holding a two-week public hearing on a new definition of Canadian content that began Wednesday. The proceeding is part of its work to implement the Online Streaming Act — and it is bringing tensions between traditional players and large foreign streamers out in the open.

  • Kelsenellenelvial@lemmy.ca
    1·
    24 hours ago

    I’m torn. With broadcasting there’s an argument that the bandwidth is publicly owned so there should be some oversight in the content that’s transmitted. Mandating Canadian content here seems okay, kind of like how we control .ca domains and have some say in who gets to use them. For streaming though it seems to be private infrastructure, it’s been built using public funds, but the people running the infrastructure aren’t really making decisions about the content it caries. They just lease it out to anybody with minimal oversight. It’d be kind of like mandating that some% of phone calls need to be Canadian content.

    Then again, we do control the .ca domains so we might argue that foreign companies using them should make some effort to carry or promote Canadian content. Get too restrictive though and companies just shut down the .ca domain and make us use the .com version which we can’t really control.