A bunch of confused people spent the Super Bowl berating the CRTC and Bell for not airing American commercials
Last night’s Super Bowl will go down in history as one of the most suspenseful ever, but the vast majority of the game was pretty boring. The Patriots’ stunning rally didn’t take place until the last few minutes of the fourth quarter, so until that point the most entertaining parts of the evening were the commercial breaks.
Expectations for those commercial breaks were especially high in Canada this year, because of a 2015 CRTC ruling that officially banned the hated practice of Super Bowl “simultaneous substitution,” where a Canadian telecom (in this case Bell) swaps out all the big-budget American commercials for less impressive Canadian ones. What many viewers didn’t understand, though, is that the CRTC ruling applied only to the Canadian broadcast of the American feed on Fox. Any Canadians who watched the Super Bowl on CTV saw only Canadian commercials.
How do we know that lots of people didn’t understand the intricacies of the CRTC ruling? Because some of them spent the evening spewing misguided insults at the CRTC’s Twitter account. Observe.
Some of the tweets took the form of innocent inquiries:
@JamesWatch Hi Jim! The ruling only affects the Fox feed. If you are watching the game on CTV, you are getting the Canadian ads.
— CRTCeng (@CRTCeng) February 5, 2017
Others were more exasperated in tone:
@john_shier Hi John! Hi Jim! The ruling only affects the Fox feed. If you are watching the game on CTV, you are getting the Canadian ads.
— CRTCeng (@CRTCeng) February 5, 2017
Some doubted the manhood of the CRTC’s regulatory enforcers:
@KirstensDesk Hi! The ruling only affects the Fox feed. CTV and the other Cdian channels will continue to broadcast Canadian ads.
— CRTCeng (@CRTCeng) February 5, 2017
There was widespread heartbreak:
@StephieCaza Hi! The ruling only affects the Fox feed. CTV will continue to broadcast Canadian ads.
— CRTCeng (@CRTCeng) February 6, 2017
Such heartbreak:
@PosterOfAGirrl Canadians who choose to watch #Fox can currently see the American ads.
— CRTCeng (@CRTCeng) February 6, 2017
And much cursing:
@xxxPiemanxxx Hi! The ruling only affects the Fox feed. CTV will continue to broadcast Canadian ads.
— CRTCeng (@CRTCeng) February 6, 2017
Things got really crazy around 8:20 p.m., when some viewers of the American feed saw an incongruous Pizza Pizza commercial mixed in with all the American ads:
@joshmcconnell If you are near Buffalo-Canada border, it seems like Pizza Pizza might have bought ad time on Fox.
— CRTCeng (@CRTCeng) February 6, 2017
People hated that Pizza Pizza ad:
@NedYar1 If you are near Buffalo-Canada border, it seems like Pizza Pizza might have bought ad time on Fox.
— CRTCeng (@CRTCeng) February 6, 2017
Some viewers were convinced that Bell was in the wrong:
@Pickfair Hi! Simsub ruling only applies to the game and not the post game show.
— CRTCeng (@CRTCeng) February 6, 2017
But the general sentiment is best summed up right here:
@ArleneC65 Hi! The ruling only affects the Fox feed. CTV/TSN will continue to broadcast Canadian ads.
— CRTCeng (@CRTCeng) February 6, 2017