As part of its overhaul of the Broadcasting Act in Canada, the CRTC has issued orders to streaming services that operate in this country, regardless of where they originate.

Effective immediately, any streamer that earns more than $10 million a year (with the exception of online audiobook and video game services) will have to fill out a registration form with the Commission as well as inform them of the kind of content they provide and their subscription numbers. They are also not allowed to restrict their offerings to just one service. So for example, Bell could not stop Rogers from carrying Crave.

That $10 million figure was a bone of some contention among national broadcasters here, with many arguing it gives too many advantages to the out-of-country originators. 

"Interveners also considered that such an approach would be unfair for Canadian broadcasting ownership groups given that they would be required to include revenues from their traditional services, while foreign ownership groups would only be required to include revenues from online broadcasting.

Interveners including BCE Inc. (BCE), the CAB, Corus, Pelmorex Weather Networks (Television) Inc. (Pelmorex) and Rogers submitted that the proposed approach would include a broadcaster with $15 million in annual revenues from traditional services even if it earns almost no online revenues, while allowing an independent foreign player not to register even if it earns annual revenues of $9.9 million."

But in the end, the $10 million figure was the one that was approved. That's the easy part - the hard task will be what comes at the end of November, when the CRTC starts a three week hearing into how much all these guys are going to have to pay to support Canadian and Indigenous programming. I suspect that is when the fur will fly. 

You can read the CRTC press release on this new policy here.

It's easy to think this all just applies to video, but it doesn't. Among those caught in this new regulatory web are podcasting services, over the air radio stations live streamed on the net and subscription based audio services, including SiriusXM.