How I Hate Sportsnet

There is a professional bike race on. This is exciting for fans of the sport. Even better is the fact that in recent years it's become possible to actually see most of the bike races on live TV in Canada. For a long time your only option was the Tour de France, but in the past couple of years a large number of other bike races have had similar coverage.

If you live in Europe or the US, the stations that carry the bike races also offer a live streaming service. You can pay some amount of money and watch the race from wherever. Currently, these paid services are geographically locked.

These geographical locks can be worked around, but those work arounds should not be required.

This is a contractual failure. NBC and Eurosport cannot offer the paid streams in Canada as presumably Sportsnet has the rights. Sportsnet's failure should open the door for a more capable company.

Cycling, and presumably other sports, need their organizing bodies to start splitting the streaming and TV rights to different bidders. Or, perhaps, if a provider is not offering access over a particular medium, that geographical area is open to another provider for that medium.

Tangentally, maybe someone who knows about these things can explain why a company like Sportsnet does not want people to view a live stream complete with advertisements in it. From what I understand, advertising is still somewhat lucrative for sports channels.