Talk:Multichannel television in Canada

More commercials

Through the 1970s and 1980s, most Canadian TV stations were allowed to sell 12 minutes per hour of advertising, and an additional 30 seconds could be public service announcements. Newer licensees were limited to less, for example 8 or 10 minutes per hour. I do not know what the present day rules are.

This put imported television programs from the United States at risk of cuts to fit in those extra commercials. While viewers might then switch to the American station on cable, cable companies were required to do Simultaneous substitution, forcing people to watch the cut-up Canadian broadcast.

During the same years, American stations had varying quantities of commercials. I noticed the following during the 1970s:

Prime time: 5 1/2 minutes for a 30-minute program, or 10 minutes for a 60-minute program. Thus, a Canadian station cut 30 seconds from a half-hour program or 120 seconds from a 60-minute program.

Daytime game show (e.g. The Price Is Right): 16 minutes for a 60-minute program, so presumably 8 1/2 minutes for the other game shows which were all 30-minute programs. Thus, a Canadian station wouldn't need to cut anything, but could slip in public service announcements, program promotions and news updates.

By the late 1980s, US stations were putting as much as 14 minutes of commercials in an hour time slot such as for Star Trek: TNG.

GBC 21:11, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Can you provide a verifiable source for this - specifically that Canadian stations actually cut scenes (as opposed to simply airing less ads than the maximum)? This is the first I've heard of that possibility. — stickguy (:^›)— || talk || 21:20, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

I had to live with that blasted scene-cutting when I was growing up... all through the 1970s. If I watched, say, "The Bionic Woman" on CTV at 7 pm and then on ABC at 8 pm, there were extra scenes - they didn't show. And I also have correspondence with the CRTC which confirmed it and in which the CRTC rep explained that Canadian stations just would not forego the extra commercials because of the revenue it represented to help pay for purchase of the program plus support their operating costs. Especially when they had the captive audience when they began to schedule programs to run at the same time as on the American network. Global TV was a relief until they earned CRTC permission to up from 10 to 12 minutes per hour. GBC 21:32, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Fibre Optics

The following paragraph doesn't sound right. While fibre optic cable was invented by Corning in the 1970s, it wasn't widely deployed in cable plants until the 1990s:

In time, cable television was widely established to carry available Canadian stations as well as import American stations, which constituted the vast majority of signals on systems (usually only one or two Canadian stations, while some systems had duplicate or even triplicate coverage of American networks). During the 1970s, a growing number of Canadian stations pushed American channels off the systems, forcing several to expand beyond the original 12-channel system configurations. At the same time, the advent of fibre-optic technology enabled companies to extend their systems to nearby towns and villages that by themselves were not viable cable television markets.

...it needs a re-write. -- Jimj wpg 18:26, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

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