Simultaneous substitution
[4] The most prominent public criticism of simsubs has been centred around the Super Bowl—the championship game of the National Football League—which is well known for featuring high-profile commercials on its U.S. broadcast.
In 1960, the Board of Broadcast Governors, the predecessor of the CRTC, began granting licences for commercial stations in order to provide an alternative to the CBC.
Examples include most of the stations in the Buffalo, New York television market, which targeted Toronto and the Golden Horseshoe region, and in the most extreme case, Pembina, North Dakota, station KCND-TV (channel 12), which was based in a town with fewer than 1,000 residents but made its money by targeting the much larger city of Winnipeg across the border to its north.
This issue has also extended beyond scripted entertainment programming – all three major networks in Canada have faced criticism for at least one incident in which the network seemingly deemed a live Canadian news or cultural awards program to be less important than simsubbing an American reality television series: Since 2008, CTVglobemedia (now Bell Media) has held both the exclusive rights to the Canadian Football League and the rights to Sunday afternoon and playoff games of the American National Football League, broadcasting most NFL games on CTV, while relegating CFL games (including the Grey Cup) to cable channel TSN, making CFL games unavailable on broadcast television for the first time in Canadian history.
Since many broadcasters were only required to convert their main, typically major-market transmitters during the 2011 digital television transition in Canada, this means that HD simsubbing is not currently enforceable in many rural areas.
Enforcement, or lack thereof, of the regulations, as well as legal exceptions and simple circumstance, has led to instances where some Canadian cable and satellite subscribers are able to receive the original American channels in Canada without simultaneous substitution.
Similarly, cable television viewers in Greater Vancouver may receive unmatched HD stations from Detroit, Michigan, and Rochester, New York.
However, high-definition feeds are also subject to simsub, and such substitutions began to increase as local broadcasters performed wider deployments of digital terrestrial television.
[11] On January 29, 2015, the CRTC announced changes to the simsub rules as a result of Let's Talk TV, a series of hearings which mulled reforms for the Canadian television industry.
[7] Michael Geist of the University of Ottawa believed that this decision was a test case for eventually phasing out the simsub rules entirely, arguing that the practice was becoming increasingly irrelevant due to changing viewing habits (such as the consumption of TV content via video-on-demand services rather than linear networks), and that dropping the rules could force domestic broadcasters to make greater investments into original, Canadian content, rather than scheduling it as an afterthought around fluctuating U.S.
[7] On May 18, 2017, the NFL testified to the United States Department of Commerce that the CRTC's August 2016 ruling was a violation of copyright protections under NAFTA.
In an unprecedented step, the top court announced that it intended to use this appeal as an opportunity to revisit the law governing standard of review of administrative tribunals.
[29] On December 19, 2019, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in favour of Bell Media, arguing that the CRTC overstepped its power under the Broadcasting Act by attempting to "impose terms and conditions on the distribution of programming services generally".
Another example, Bell Aliant Fibe TV subscribers in Newfoundland and Labrador regularly have Global Television Network stations in Halifax and Toronto (and, very rarely, Vancouver) simsubbed with NTV; Maritime Fibe subscribers, however, often have NTV simsubbed with Global Halifax or New Brunswick, depending on where they live.
