User:Thelawfulgood/sandbox

History
During the 1950s, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) had a monopoly on television broadcasting in Canada (its first television station, CBFT, began operating in Montreal in 1952). In 1960, the Board of Broadcast Governors, the predecessor of the CRTC, began granting licenses for commercial stations in order to provide an alternative to the CBC. These broadcasters began operating in 1961, and through international distributors, acquired the domestic broadcast rights to many American television programs.

Since about 30% of the Canadian population – those who resided close enough to the Canada–US border – had access to over-the-air broadcast signals from networks based in both Canada and the United States, they could choose to watch American programs on either a Canadian or an American network. Many of these Canadians chose to watch the American network (either CBS, ABC or NBC) rather than the Canadian networks' broadcasts. Consequently, many Canadian broadcasters began broadcasting programs purchased from American-based broadcast networks before they aired on the American networks to attract more viewers and to earn money from domestic advertising, and some Canadian businesses that advertised on the domestic stations also purchased broadcast time on the American stations that were receivable in the same areas, although federal legislation was eventually passed that limited the tax-deductibility of these purchases.

Several of the stations in smaller border markets in the United States openly targeted the larger cities in Canada by getting as close to the border as possible. 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.

When cable television began to proliferate across Canada in the early-1970s, viewers far from the Canada–US border began to obtain access to American television services that were once unobtainable. In 1972, in response to pressure from Canadian broadcasters, the CRTC introduced the simultaneous substitution regulation as a method to circumvent diminution of the value of Canadian networks' exclusive broadcast rights to American programs (within three years, KCND was effectively moved to Winnipeg and relicensed as CKND-TV). Through the 1990s, as direct-broadcast satellite television services gained popularity and then were granted licenses in Canada, simultaneous substitution became a requirement on these as well.

By the late 1990s and early 2000s, the simultaneous substitution regulation had reached its full potential, with Canadian broadcast networks telecasting nearly all of their American programming at the same time as the U.S. network's broadcasts to ensure maximum eligibility to request substitution.