Don’t deprive Canadians of the full Super Bowl package
The telecast of this year’s NFL’s Super Bowl may be the last one Canadian football fans can really enjoy all the hoopla of the event.
According to reports, Bell Media, which owns the Canadian providers of the game which include CTV and TSN, is requesting the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), the regulatory body for Canadian broadcasts, to reconsider their edict that forces the Canadian network, to provide all the commercials of the American telecast to be shown here in Canada.
For the 2017 and 2018 Super Bowl games, Canadian football fans have been able to receive the full impact of arguably the biggest sporting event on TV, at least for North American viewers, without having it interrupted by repetitive Canadian-based commercials and program promotions.
American companies spend multi-millions of dollars to produce and show commercials for the broadcast (reported $5 million for a 30-second spot) that will keep the viewers watching through the many annoying breaks in their broadcasts. Now conglomerate Bell Media wants to again deprive Canadians of this once-a-year pleasure of watching a complete Super Bowl package.
The press release from Bell said that 3.4 million Canadians watched the 2017 Super Bowl on U.S. stations to avoid the Canadian commercials, costing them, in my estimation, about what one of their Bell CEO’s will receive as an annual bonus.
NFL fans in Peterborough have already taken a hit this season if they had the Sunday Ticket on Cogeco.
This past season the NFL decided not to allow the Canadian cable providers to carry the Sunday Ticket package which to those subscribing gave them access to all NFL football games along with most games of the NHL, NBA, MLB, NCAA football and basketball and OHL games.
The NFL got in bed with a British provider, DAZN, whose apparent expertise was soccer and darts telecasts, to carry all the NFL games streamed to Canada separately. This British group completely botched the package. Some football games were unwatchable. The NFL was flooded with complaints. Partway through this past season, DAZN allowed some Canadian cable providers to reinstitute the NFL package. For some reason Peterborough’s Cogeco did not.
Canadian NFL football fans have had to put up with CTV’s coverage of the regular season games and their repetitive, lacklustre commercials and program previews ad nauseam. Occasionally there was an opportunity to watch NFL games on American networks but the bulk of the games came through Bell with no Sunday Ticket package available.
Thankfully for the remote control and the “last” button, a fan could switch between two games and miss some of the product drivel. But watching the recent NFL playoffs was especially annoying with the repeating up-coming program promos.
The popular, original, entertaining Super Bowl commercials have become an important part of North America’s most viewed one-day sports’ broadcast. Apparently this year’s game had the 10th highest average viewership in American TV history with 103.4 million viewers. After putting up with a regular season and playoffs of Bell telecasts, for football fans and Super Bowl half-time viewers, it is a treat to see an original broadcast. Now because Bell Media are losing a few dollars, relative to their profits, they are whining to the CRTC about how the loss of viewers is hurting their bottom line. Poor Bell!
In the grand scheme of things this tempest in a teapot over what commercials we see is nothing more than annoying. But when a large media organization like Bell wants to deny a few million Canadian football fans the complete Super Bowl package once a year because they lose $11 million you cannot have much sympathy. And the CRTC shouldn’t either. Don Barrie’s a retired teacher, former Buffalo Sabres scout and a member of the Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame and Peterborough and District Sports Hall of Fame. His column appears each Saturday in The Examiner.