Canadian Tech News, October 8th – Groups, CBC v CC, Netflix

So I missed last week’s post due to an unprecedentedly busy week and this week I’m in the US of A. Suffice it to say, this weeks’ post is a little different than the others in this series.

The state of group buying in Canada:

A couple of months ago I had not heard of a single group buying sites for the Canadian market. That all changed this month, there has been a mini-explosion of group buying options:

• RedFlagDeals Deal of the Day was the first site I heard of a couple of months ago. Unfortunately only available in Montreal and Toronto at the moment. They’ve got a great simple web design and they’re owned by YellowPages – which likely gives them extra credibility with potential clients.
• Team Buy – saw these guys on Dragon’s Den a few weeks ago. The site is fairly ugly and their deals are not terribly compelling. Unfortunately, I doubt they’ll be around long term. It’s going to be hard for them to compete with YellowPages and Groupon.
• Groupon quietly launched in a Calgary, Edmonton, Halifax, Hamilton, London, Ottawa, Saskatoon, St Catherine’s, St John’s, Toronto, Vancouver, Victoria, Windsor and Winnipeg this week. Not much to say about this other than A W E S O M E !

CBC Hates Creative Commons

Reddit user mcantelon discovered a thread of comments buried in the Spark show notes. Spark has a history of using Creative Commons music for intros and bumpers throught the show and providing links to this music with every episode.  A commenter asked where he could find the Creative Commons link to the music used in the latest episode. Show producers Dan Misener and Lilly Mills jump in to provide explanation. Turns out, CBC is not allowed to use Creatives Commons licensed due to a collective barginning agreement! One commenter, Andrew Butash, puts it best “…this is incredibly unsettling. The CBC is a public broadcaster that receives funding from taxpayers. They should not be signing exclusive contracts with any agencies or unions. Disallowing the use of creative commons media is excluding tons of Canadian content from being used by CBC, not to mention wasting money by requiring CBC programs to use non-free media.”

Netflix Gotcha

With the launch of Netflix Canada I was wondering what would happen if you try to log in to netflix.com from the USA with a Canadian account. I was hoping that you’d instantly get access to the US content, allowing for the possibility of a way to spoof your IP from Canada. Unfortunately that’s not what happens. Netflix.com simply does not recognize your Canadian credentials, giving a standard “invalid username/password” type message. When you try to access netflix.ca from a US IP, this happens: