Gray Satellites Still Beam
North
I think it started with the gym bags.
Several years ago I remember sitting with a colleague in a downtown Toronto restaurant and
being amazed as a young man came in and began selling cartons of cigarettes out of a
canvas equipment bag.
I wasn't really surprised that this was happening -- it was
at a time when the various levels of Canadian government had pushed the price of a large
pack of smokes to $7 in some places, and the trade in smuggled tobacco was well
documented. Tobacco prices have again risen to those levels, but the legal quirks that let
manufacturers ship tax-free smokes south, to be smuggled back, have been more or less
corrected.
But what took me aback in those days was the openness of it
all. The seller was at no pains whatever to conceal what he was doing, and nobody in the
place seemed disturbed at all that this illegal activity was taking place in their midst.
There seemed to be a general agreement that the legislators and bureaucrats had gone too
far this time, and that consumers therefore were entitled to look after their own
interests. If that meant buying black-market cigarettes, so be it.
The same thing seems to be happening with digital satellite
dishes in Canada, and for very much the same reasons. The country has two licensed
satellite providers, yet there continue to be hundreds of thousands of dishes aimed at
U.S. satellites in use in Canadian homes.
After some years of ambivalence, the existence of these
dishes has been declared illegal, and nobody really knows how many such cross-border
installations remain. But there is no doubt that a very large number of Canadians have
decided to defy government regulators, and have continued to use equipment that gives them
access to U.S. services. The only requirement the American providers of the programming
impose is that any fees be billed to a U.S. address. Lots of users circumvent even that by
buying unauthorized cards that let them watch the full range of services free.
In the early days, mid-'90s, Canadian consumers who wanted
the dishes would have to head for Buffalo or Seattle to get them. Soon enough, they could
turn to the gray market to set-up their systems without having to cross the border. But
it’s about the brightest gray you can imagine: TV shops across the country still sell
the equipment openly. Many sell both Canadian and American services.
The broadcasters and cable companies in Canada obviously
don't want anyone to engage in cross-border viewing, and the regulators in Ottawa backed
them up on this, ultimately. Their motivations are very different, however: The government
wants to restrict the foreign material that Canadians can access in order to persuade them
to watch domestic programming, and thus ensure the health of the country's culture and the
people who create it.
But with the notable exception of the government-run
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and some of the provincial public networks, the
television companies find Canadian content a nuisance; the big commercial outfits have all
become rich delivering American programs to Canadians. Their argument is that they have
the right to those programs in Canada, and the U.S. satellite companies shouldn't be able
to deliver them by the back door. By that argument, Canadians should not be able to watch
programs on U.S. border stations using a rooftop antenna, either.
For its part, the Canadian cable industry (the most
technically innovative in the world in the early days) was developed exclusively to
deliver U.S. channels to Canadians. They are bound by government fiat to deliver a
mix of Canadian and foreign channels, but you can bet that if they were legally and
technically capable of carrying the hundreds of American channels available on the U.S.
satellites, they would. Ditto the Canadian satellite services, which are allowed only to
carry the same channels the cable companies have access to, which include relatively few
American signals.
The popularity of the gray-market equipment in Canada is
partly driven by a love of American TV, and partly by the desire for more choice than the
Canadian cable and satellite companies now offer or the government allows. As with the
gym-bag cigarettes, enough Canadians have acted to show that the regulations and
restrictions have little general support, and driving anywhere in the country will
demonstrate the large number of dishes on Canadian roofs aimed at DirecTV and EchoStar, in
spite of the law.
Some of the dishes are blank, but most don't even bother to
conceal the services they are aimed at.
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
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