Online Streaming Services In Canada Must Hand Over 5% of Domestic Revenues (www.cbc.ca) 94
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC News: Online streaming services operating in Canada will be required to contribute five percent of their Canadian revenues to support the domestic broadcasting system, the country's telecoms regulator said on Tuesday. The money will be used to boost funding for local and Indigenous broadcasting, officials from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) said in a briefing. "Today's decision will help ensure that online streaming services make meaningful contributions to Canadian and Indigenous content," wrote CRTC chief executive and chair Vicky Eatrides in a statement.
The measure was introduced under the auspices of a law passed last year designed to make sure that companies like Netflix make a more significant contribution to Canadian culture. The government says the legislation will ensure that online streaming services promote Canadian music and stories, and support Canadian jobs. Funding will also be directed to French-language content and content created by official language minority communities, as well as content created by equity-deserving groups and Canadians of diverse backgrounds. The release also said that online streaming services will "have some flexibility" to send their revenues to support Canadian television directly. [...]
The measure, which will start in the 2024-2025 broadcasting year, would raise roughly $200 million annually, CRTC officials said. It will only apply to services that are not already affiliated with Canadian broadcasters. The CMPA was among 20 screen organizations from around the world that signed a statement in January asking governments to impose stronger regulations on streaming companies operating in local markets. One of the demands was a measure that would force companies profiting from their presence in those markets to contribute financially to the creation of new local content."We are disappointed by today's decision and concerned by the negative impact it will have on Canadian consumers. We are assessing the decision in full, but this onerous and inflexible financial levy will be harmful to consumer choice," a spokesperson for Prime Video wrote to CBC News in a statement.
The measure was introduced under the auspices of a law passed last year designed to make sure that companies like Netflix make a more significant contribution to Canadian culture. The government says the legislation will ensure that online streaming services promote Canadian music and stories, and support Canadian jobs. Funding will also be directed to French-language content and content created by official language minority communities, as well as content created by equity-deserving groups and Canadians of diverse backgrounds. The release also said that online streaming services will "have some flexibility" to send their revenues to support Canadian television directly. [...]
The measure, which will start in the 2024-2025 broadcasting year, would raise roughly $200 million annually, CRTC officials said. It will only apply to services that are not already affiliated with Canadian broadcasters. The CMPA was among 20 screen organizations from around the world that signed a statement in January asking governments to impose stronger regulations on streaming companies operating in local markets. One of the demands was a measure that would force companies profiting from their presence in those markets to contribute financially to the creation of new local content."We are disappointed by today's decision and concerned by the negative impact it will have on Canadian consumers. We are assessing the decision in full, but this onerous and inflexible financial levy will be harmful to consumer choice," a spokesperson for Prime Video wrote to CBC News in a statement.
Well it would be cheaper... (Score:1)
... for the streaming services to band together and give every subscriber a VPN for free and then leave Canada.
Re:Well it would be cheaper... (Score:5, Informative)
Come-on, we already know they'll just raise prices another 10% to address this. It's just another straight-to-consumer tax under the auspices or taming corporations.
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If you think hairhare* is going to be more legitimate, I have a brand new Champlain bridge (with a nifty electric train on it) to sell you!
Trudeau is the shit sandwich with the most bread and the least shit.
* That's Poilièvre in English.
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Come-on, we already know they'll just raise prices another 10% to address this.
Capitalism doesn't work that way.
If they could make more money at a higher price, they'd already be doing it.
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They raise prices slowly so that the frogs don't hop out of the pot. And I hope you've noticed that streaming services have all been raising prices recently.
Re:Well it would be cheaper... (Score:4, Insightful)
What keeps them from doing that now is that their competition does not need to. Raising prices in isolation to your competitors requires you having a better enough product to not lose customers to the competition. The problem with industry wide fees/taxes like this, is that their competition will also need to raise prices. It will be a similar price hike for all the services at the exact same time. No one will lose a pricing competitive advantage. This will not be absorbed by the big bad capitalist streaming companies. It will be paid for by the consumers.
This is just a way to fund pet projects from the government without directly raising taxes. They'll blame big, bad business and Capitalism for the higher prices while sending money to favored projects that customers have little interest in actually paying to watch. All while being able to campaign against Capitalism to push their Progressive ideas based on demonizing the price change they caused (but refuse to take credit for).
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The problem with industry wide fees/taxes like this, is that their competition will also need to raise prices.. No one will lose a pricing competitive advantage. This will not be absorbed by the big bad capitalist streaming companies. It will be paid for by the consumers.
That analysis doesn't make sense. You can simplify the problem by considering one company instead of an industry (because as you pointed out, competitive advantages aren't relevant). This industry/company sets its prices to maximize profit. They choose a point on the demand curve to maximize revenue. The simplest analysis is that when taxed, they must keep their prices the same because they still need to maximize revenue, and the demand curve has not changed.
In reality, the streaming companies probably have
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Mesmerized by how your reply went directly to the private service providers being taxed and completely skipped the government that is forcibly imposing this tax.
You even went as far as to extrapolate that is a plot of the private service providers to get an extra 5%.
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This is good. It only “taxes” consumers of digital shows instead of everyone, whether they watch the stuff or not.
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... for the streaming services to band together and give every subscriber a VPN for free and then leave Canada.
So you really think moving to the tax-riddled USA to build your operations from scratch is worth a 5% tax? I’m willing to bet the Board is gonna make you prove that bullshit. Good luck.
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Amazing how when businesses want to move here our businesses are suddenly "tax-riddled", but all our locals prefer to say that our corps are skating, not paying nearly enough...
I think I'll go back to ignoring everyone else's subjective realities...
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So you really think moving to the tax-riddled USA to build your operations from scratch
Most of these streaming services already have most of their operations in America.
Some have no infrastructure in Canada other than a help desk phone number that can't reach a human.
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USA has relatively low tax, despite all the complaints. It's very business friendly. All the major streaming services have their major corporate centers in USA already, anything in Canada is just an expensive field office.
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USA has relatively low tax, despite all the complaints.
Yah, we have to read "Tax Riddled" and "low tax" as "I want no tax at all". But I do want all my government services for free.
Re: Well it would be cheaper... (Score:2)
The company doesn't even have to be in Canada to stream to Canadians. It's the internet! If the company is in Kenya, is Canada going to block the site? Or block the CDN's IP address?
Re:Well it would be cheaper... (Score:4, Insightful)
They'll require Canadians to buy their overpriced VPN service, plus add several fees to help with profits.
This is nothing new with Canada; they have a copying tax on all blank media, like CD-R and cassette tapes.
Re: Well it would be cheaper... (Score:2, Insightful)
How long before the enforce content consumption requirements, along the lines of their requirements for Canadian content on their broadcast services?
I can see it now, "Before you can watch Mission Impossible 8 you must watch this Canadian show on curling..."
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Oh, I see: you're a Libertarian, and don't care about anyone but you.
Yes, they will pay. And when we run your kind, and the Trump Crime Family out of Congress, we'll tax them, too.
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But then how can they ninja-edit or vanish their shows?
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It's going to be loads of made-for-Canadian-content-requirements like Bob and Doug McKenzie [wikipedia.org], pigs slurping at the trough
Bob and Doug McKenzie were treasures. I'd kill to have something as entertaining as some of those early SCTV seasons available today.
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Bob and Doug McKenzie were geniuses. Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis both went on to have very long and successful careers.
Koo-loo-koo-koo-koo-koo-koo-KOO! Welcome to the Great White North, eh?
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It's an example of what MAGA's would call it, not me.
Re: MAGAs would flip-out here (Score:2)
You're not indigenous to this planet so this doesn't involve you.
Re: MAGAs would flip-out here (Score:2)
Got to love that first past the post voting system!
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Does Canada have enough radical conservatives to throw a notable fit over "commie-subsidized woke DEI shit"?
You’re joking, right? Woke DEI shit is how the current neutered PM is still in office.
Canadians can only hope Poilievre can change that.
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Remind me again why an election hasn't been called?
Everyone is Flipping Out Here (Score:2)
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Conspiracies are for losers and mental patients. And you forgot to mention Soros, it's obligatory for these kinds of rants.
Exactly what their psychological warfare techniques have as a goal with regards to what you will think and say. Those techniques work amazingly well with weak people like yourself. This is to be expected otherwise they would modify the techniques, only a minority will see clearly in their schemes and that minority will be ridiculed by the majority just as you did.
Another part of the technique is to make yourself believe that you are really smart, much smarter that anybody who sees clearly. It's based on dec
Re:Everyone is Flipping Out Here (Score:4, Insightful)
The two pillars of spreading Progressive policy:
1) All the smart people believe this. You're not stupid are you?
2) All the good people believe this. You're not one of these many 'ists are you?
They prey on people wanting to belong and wanting to be in the good club. They try to end every debate with things like 'racist!', 'bigot!', 'sexist!', 'follow the science!' rather than actually debate facts and the pros and cons of different approaches. The vast majority of people on both the conservative and liberal side agree on most of the issues we face. What we disagree on are the solutions. Yet, it's constantly framed from Progressives that if you disagree with the solution, you don't care about the problem (or you're for the problem). And they use that narrative to get votes from people that want things better, but pay no attention to the details. Like claiming everyone that opposes Affirmative Action (or 'antiracism', or DEI) is racist. It can't just be we don't believe that solving bias/racial issues with bias/racism is a workable solution.
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Joe's a left-leaning centrist. If you complain too much, you'll get a real lefty.
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No one, especially Joe knows what he is. His history was to swing to whatever got him votes. Often contradicting himself from speech to speech depending on who he was plagiarizing (or what grandiose story he was making up). His current state is that he has no clue where he is or what his Administration is doing and it's the puppeteers that are pushing a very far left agenda. There has been a slight move on some issues lately where polling has him so far behind Trump, that they're wanting voters to belie
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> His history was to swing to whatever got him votes.
Name 2 positions that are not centrist.
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He is currently holds the record as Canada's least popular prime minister ever
I think you'll find that Brian Mulroney, circa November 1992, has him beat. Trudeau may someday get down to a 12% approval rating, but he's not there yet.
The Great White North (Score:3, Informative)
It's not the worst thing to foster Canadian content. If we didn't do this, we might as well close down our entire entertainment industry as it would get washed away by American content overnight.
On the other hand... We've had some crappy stuff funded this way.
Re:The Great White North (Score:5, Insightful)
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I though that it was a nice anecdote relevant to the fork of the discussion it is in, and it was written with proper spelling and grammar.
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What I've noticed is the weather reports. You used to have local weather with meteorologists who knew the local weather patterns better than any central model.
And lots of bad community access stuff. Rogers cable 10 for the 'win'?
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Bribing the Media with Other People's Money (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not the worst thing to foster Canadian content.
Yes it literally is because now that we have streaming we cannot be forced to watch anything. So, siphoning off lots of money to make programs that nobody wants to watch - and therefore will not watch because with streaming you get to choose - is an utter waste of money that provides no cultural value because nobody is watching the utter crap they produce.
This is not a way to bolster Canadian culture it is simply a way for Trudeau to use other people's money to bribe the Canadian media and keep them happy with him. He tried it with Google's and Facebook's money and when that failed he has now turned to using our money. If you really want to bolster Canadian content force the entertainment industry to do as their name suggests and produce shows that are entertaining and thought provoking and not just thinly veiled political messaging where entertainment is very optional.
I'm OK with this (Score:3, Informative)
what (Score:4, Insightful)
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Every other show is filmed in Vancouver already.
That's national network shows. Local stations are now a subsidiary of some huge media conglomerate. We used to have four separate local stations. They recently consolidated, so that we have one news program across the four networks, and nationally airing programs get whatever the base network is supposed to be programming wise. I do miss the local content sometimes. Honestly? Once they went to a single news program, I kinda stopped watching. It ceased to have much to do with local events outside of election
Re: what (Score:2)
Cable systems carry public access channels...
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Cable systems carry public access channels...
But who wants to pay for cable just to access local channels? Last I checked I could get cable for $150 a month, and there's no cheap option that just gives you the basics, it's all in with seventy-bazillion channels of nonsense, or nothing. It should be over the air, but those over the air channels have all been bought out by the big media conglomerate and "merged" into one. We do have access to over the air creative channels, supposedly PBS related, but it's a far cry from public access. Just nationally s
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The owners of the local broadcasters has nothing to do with local content. People have choices and don't watch local content. If the large media companies that own the local broadcasters believed they could make money off of shoestring budget local interest productions, they would be making them. Cable, and now streaming (along with decades of existing content) have given people choices they prefer. Even a locally owned broadcaster would choose syndicated content.
We could always change economic systems
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It may well be true that IF a broadcaster thought they could make money from content then they would make it. However... surely some content that might have to be produced at a loss is important? Here in the UK we have programs in Welsh which are funded mostly by the license fee and other broadcast-based taxes. Don't large groups of people from an individual area or culture deserve SOME media relevant to themselves? Canada has a large population of pre-European-colonisation, right? First Nations people I th
Re: I'm OK with this (Score:2)
No local content left? That's actually really sad, because local content is out there. Local problems and issues. Local elections. Local school happenings. Local sports teams. Etc. Etc.
Some proportion of local people care about these things. The trick is finding a way to collect and publish the info, in the age of massive, faceless corporations.
It’s a tax (Score:5, Insightful)
Whether this particular tax is a good or bad idea, that’s a stickier question. So far, Canada’s attempts to wring money out of US internet giants has backfired.
Re:It's a tax (Score:5, Insightful)
A tax that will result in a commensurate rate increase for Canadian customers. If Canadians are OK with this, then I don't see a problem with it.
If Canada wants a cut of revenue from Canadian citizens expenditures, so be it. As long as they are not trying to tax revenue of non-Canadian businesses doing business with non-Canadian citizens, it is an internal matter.
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Yeah, as a Canadian, I'm fine with it. OTOH, I don't subscribe to any streaming services, so... :)
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As a Canadian, I'm also fine with it.
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Using your logic corporations should pay no taxes. I'm sure all those cost savings will trickle down.
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Surely corporations are sacrificing some profits on account of having enough, in order to give their customers a discount. Right, guys who think corporations will just raise prices in response?
By the way, 90% of companies don't pass their costs on to their customers [duckduckgo.com]
Re: It's a tax (Score:2)
Citizenship is mostly irrelevant if itâ(TM)s within Canadaâ(TM)s jurisdiction.
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Plain and simple. Not unlike the taxes that countries use to fund roads.
Whether this particular tax is a good or bad idea, thatâ(TM)s a stickier question. So far, Canadaâ(TM)s attempts to wring money out of US internet giants has backfired.
Yea it's hard to get upset here.
They are taxing all streaming companies, not just US ones.
They are being taxed only on their earnings within Canada, not their earnings elsewhere.
This looks, sounds, and feels like nothing more than a tax. Nothing about it appears to be targeting US companies specifically.
This is nothing like the EU creating laws that are specifically tailored to target five American companies and nothing else, then lie about that targeting.
+1 point for Canada here
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A revenue transfer bill (Score:2)
This takes revenues from non-Canadian content to fund Canadian broadcasters. It's even more insidious than the 'domestic content' requirements on Canadian media companies. Of course, the Canadian talking head community is happy to blame "Yankee Cultural Imperialism" any time Canadians don't buy what the elites think they should.
(And for the record, my CD collection includes, among other Canadian artists, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Tafelmusik, La Nef, Glenn Gould and every recording by Stan Rogers.)
News Flash (Score:5, Insightful)
>"Online Streaming Services In Canada Must Hand Over 5% of Domestic Revenues"
News flash- Canadian streaming services suddenly raise prices 5%.
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This assumes that they set prices to generate a specific % profit for some reason. No business works like that, prices are set based on what the market will bare and their strategic goals e.g. growing their customer base.
If they do simply raise their prices by 5%, it will create opportunities for competitors.
This is a lie they tell you to avoid being taxed. It's rare that all costs are passed directly to the consumer.
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>"Online Streaming Services In Canada Must Hand Over 5% of Domestic Revenues"
News flash- Canadian streaming services suddenly raise prices 5%.
Wonder how this will work with Sirius XM, which already dedicates a whole slew of channels to Canadian content? Will Sirius tell them "What, this wasn't enough?".
Not if Wall Street has anything to say about this. (Score:1)
At this point Netflix, Max and YouTube are the thralls of Wall Street. Wall Street wants more and more profits out of the streaming services. If Canada proves to be a threat to profits, then the services will do what Facebook/Instragram did with news: Phase themselves out. That way, Canada gets nothing, and the profits keep coming.
The only mystery is why the Canadian state does not seem to realize that ... unless that is the intent: Remove non-Canadian programming from their internet.
Canada ... (Score:2)
I seem to recall seeing a news story about them once. But now, I can't seem to find it [nytimes.com].
I think it's just a place they made up as the setting for the Dudley Do-Right cartoon show.
Commie Tax (Score:1, Insightful)
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Plutogelical propaganda is better?
Nothing new (Score:3)
Harmful to streamers, not consumers (Score:5, Informative)
Prime will raise their prices to cover the 5% levy.
So will Google, Netflix, Disney, and all the rest.
And soon as they do, people will cancel and move on.
We're already witnessing a significant resurgence in pirating and torrents - this CRTC nonsense will just add fuel to that fire.
People are already leaving Disney in droves over their last increase, which was close to 30%. And they'll have to add another.
And now, many of the streamers are dropping ads.
What a shit show.
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Additionally Disney removed their native Disney Plus app from Microsoft Store and replaced it with an Edge web browser app which is limited to 720p (same limitation applies to all web browsers on Windows).
The previous Disney Plus app on Windows provided native 1080P video at the very least.
So not only did they make a huge jump in subscription pricing they also gave us PC customers the middle finger.
Too low (Score:2)
This tax should be much higher, at least 50%. That way people would cancel their subscriptions, get outside, and actually contribute to "Canadian culture."