A commenter from outside of Canada says he’s unable to watch video on CBC.ca.
ian in hamburg says:
May 12, 2010 at 12:19 amAs an expat Canadian who likes to keep in touch with news back home I’m glad for what I get from the CBC. They geoblock the video on cbc.ca, but make up for it with their deep range of audio podcasts.
Can anyone confirm this is the case, that cbc.ca video is “geoblocked”? Geoblocking is when a website forbids IP addresses located outside of a desired region, from accessing content on a website that is thought to be publicly available by those in the unblocked region. The most famous geoblocking in the world goes on in China behind the Great Firewall of China. Also geoblocked are Comedy Central’s Daily Show and Colbert Report, and the American video service Hulu. YouTube also now engages in geoblocking of some content.
I’m against geoblocking because it’s censorship, it runs counter to the point of the World Wide Web, and it’s fricken annoying. People can use proxies and posted remixes and bit torrents of videos to work around the blocking, but we shouldn’t have to go to that trouble in the information age. CBC is hurting Canadian culture if they engage in geoblocking, and should stop immediately.
ADDED: How’d you like it if you couldn’t see this video because you don’t live in a tiny part of Asia?
Saskboy's Abandoned Stuff 
The BBC geoblocks material to viewers outside of the UK. It’s common practice for a lot of content providers. Maybe we should chip in and send a brain to Ian in Hamburg
There’s no evidence he doesn’t have one.
It’s common practice, and not common sense. The Internet is useful if people from around the world are able to share ideas and information. It’s the best way to spread culture overseas, and fight the Hollywood effect, but the BBC and CBC don’t realize how important it is in culture wars.
The Internet is the ultimate free market of ideas. From 4chan to TED, there is an incredible array of content out there for anyone to digest and the more information people are exposed to, the better we can all grow intellectually. Restricting this intellectual market is unfortunate if not a little bit predictable.
I tried to watch the CBC’s hockey night in Canada feed last week when I was in Israel, it was blocked. Of course, that would also have to be for licenensing reasons, as the CBC only buys the right to broadcast the content within Canada.
When I was living in South Korea I often got a messge from CBC that I was in South Korea and therefore unable to access CBC….they knew where I was….hmmm!!! So does Ian in Hamburg have a brain?…Yes he does. It is obvious Gene Rayburn has not lived outside of Canada. Spendng six weeks in the US is not living outside of Canada either. Try 10 years.
All these laws about copyright are part of the problem. A viewer doesn’t really care if CBC has purchased rights to something or not, it just looks silly to offer something to some people on the WWW, and not to others. The Daily Show and Colbert Report are broadcast on Canadian TV, so there’d really be no issue with us seeing Comedy Central’s clips, but they geo-segregate the WWW into going to Comedy Channel instead, where the links are broken if Americans and Canadians attempt to communicate regarding the same TV show. It’s an absurd use of the Internet.
I’m glad everyone else said it before I did.
Then again, a clever fellow can watch anything on the interwebs from anywhere, and watch it live.
CBC was in habit of torrenting their programs, so who knows why they aren’t doing live broadcasts.