Blackout (broadcasting)

[2] However, in the federal election in 2000, Paul Charles Bryan published results from Atlantic Canada online despite being told not to by the authorities.

Stephen Harper, who later became Prime Minister, labelled Elections Canada "jackasses" and tried to raise money for Bryan.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation also supported Bryan, hoping to "make election night a bigger event than it already is".

On August 17, 2011, Elections Canada Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand suggested improvements of the voting system to Parliament; among them were a proposal to remove the blackout rule.

"[4][5] On January 13, 2012, it was announced that the federal government would introduce legislation that would repeal the blackout rule, citing the increased use of social media.

[7] Under the league's 2008–2013 contract with TSN, teams were given a cap on the number of blackouts they could impose per-season (with the number varying by media and CFL reports, ranging from 2 for Hamilton and Toronto, and 5 for teams in Western Canada), and final decisions were assigned to the league if at least 90% of tickets were sold out within 48 hours of the game.

Sportsnet's four regional feeds correspond with each of its NHL teams' designated markets; the Ontario and Pacific feeds are designated to the Toronto Maple Leafs, and Vancouver Canucks respectively, while Sportsnet West and its corresponding market (which includes all of Alberta and Saskatchewan) is shared by the Edmonton Oilers and Calgary Flames.

As of August 2014, TSN is similarly structured, with the Ottawa Senators on TSN5 (East), Maple Leafs on TSN4 (Ontario), and Jets on TSN3 (Manitoba and Saskatchewan).

As RDS was, until 2011, the only French-language cable sports channel in Canada,[12] the team forwent a separate regional rights deal and allowed all of its games to be broadcast as part of the national package.

As of the 2014–15 season, Quebecor Media and TVA Sports is the national French rightsholder as part of a sub-licensing agreement with Rogers Communications.

[13][14][15] RDS negotiated a 12-year deal with the team for regional rights to the Canadiens: games are now blacked out for viewers outside Quebec, Atlantic Canada, and parts of Eastern Ontario.

The National Football League, for example, sold worldwide Internet broadcast rights to a package of its Thursday Night Football games during the 2016 season to Twitter; however, Rogers Media forced Twitter to block the streams in Canada by virtue of its holding of terrestrial television rights in the country.

This intricacy created a "grey market" for obtaining the broadcasts from alternative sources, such as foreign satellite providers or unofficial online streaming services.

In 2014, for taking inadequate steps to prevent unauthorized retransmissions from its streaming broadcasts online, the Premier League briefly restricted MENA region rightsholder beIN Sports to one 3 p.m. match per week on television only.

[29][30][31] Critics, including Advocate General at the Court of Justice of the European Union Juliane Kokott, have argued that 3 p.m. blackouts are outdated, as its purpose is hindered — especially within the Premier League — by the high demand for the few tickets available to the public, and that there was little evidence that television broadcasts actually affected attendance.

[32][33][31][34][35] To preserve the value of its domestic broadcast rights and allow more games to be televised, the Premier League has added more matches in windows outside of Saturday afternoons, such as weekdays and Sundays — including the final matchday of the season.

[39][40] Upon the resumption of the 2019–20 Premier League, all matches were shown on domestic television due to them being played behind closed doors, while a number of free-to-air broadcasts (via Sky Sports' sister channels Pick and Sky One, Amazon Prime Video and its sister service Twitch, and the BBC — which usually holds rights to free-to-air highlights programmes) were also aired.

[44][45] After an attempted pay-per-view scheme folded in November 2020, the Premier League returned to allocating the matches to the four broadcasters through at least the end of 2020.

[46][47][48][49] In 2023, the Premier League sought a rare private prosecution against members of a fraud "gang" who sold £10-a-month subscriptions to retransmitted games.

The second exception was for the Bills Toronto Series; by a technicality, Rogers Communications (the team's lessee) owned all tickets to those games and resold them to potential fans.

[66] The suspension continued into the 2016 season (a season that included the return of the Rams to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum as an interim home until the completion of SoFi Stadium; the Coliseum has had long-standing issues with NFL sell-outs); commissioner Roger Goodell stated that the league needed to further investigate the impact of removing the blackout rules before such a change is made permanent.

[67] The suspension quietly continued into the 2017 NFL season as well, which saw the San Diego Chargers also relocate to Los Angeles, temporarily using the 27,000-seat, soccer-specific Dignity Health Sports Park (known as StubHub Center before 2019) as an interim venue until the completion of SoFi Stadium for the 2020 season, which is shared with the Rams.

[70][71][72] Per NFL policies, all games that are exclusively televised on pay television or streaming, including ESPN's Monday Night Football and Amazon Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football are syndicated to over-the-air broadcasters in the markets of the teams involved, and blacked out on the cable channel in defense of the local simulcast.

At the time, NFL Network was available only on a sports tier of cable provider Comcast in the immediate viewing areas of the Patriots and Giants.

[73] Senator John Kerry and Rep. Ed Markey, both of the state of Massachusetts and fans of the Patriots team, wrote to the NFL as well as Comcast and Time Warner Cable, to request that the Patriots-Giants game be aired at least on basic cable in order to reach the highest possible number of television-viewing fans, citing the "potentially historic" nature of the game.

There are no radio blackouts, but only each team's flagship station can carry local broadcasts during the conference championships or Super Bowl.

In order to protect high school and college football, the federal Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 cancels antitrust protection for television broadcasts of any professional football game on Friday evenings or Saturdays by television stations within 75 miles (121 km) of the venue of a college or high school game, that had been announced in a general circulation newspaper prior to August 1 of the calendar year.

[87][88] Until 2001, the same blackout policy applied to the Brickyard 400, a NASCAR Cup Series event also held at Indianapolis Motor Speedway; at the time, television rights to NASCAR events were sold by the owners of their respective tracks,[89] and IMS had packaged the 400 with ABC's rights to the Indianapolis 500.

[90] This policy ended in 2001 due to NASCAR centralizing the television rights to all events, and selling them in packages to Fox Sports and NBC/TNT respectively.

[89] A 1963 episode of the CBS television drama series East Side/West Side, focusing on an African-American couple in Harlem, was blacked out by network affiliates in Shreveport, Louisiana and Atlanta, Georgia.