Saturday Night Live no longer exists

I was going to continue my Lorem Ipsum post but this struck me just recently.

Saturday Night Live no longer exists (on the Canadian internet).

See, back in the heady days of 2008, I got into Saturday Night Live, largely because of the American election that year, and even more so because of the internet. 2300 to 0100 on Saturday night (technically, it's mostly on Sunday morning) is not really a time I watch TV. At home I usually don't stay up that late, and at university I don't have a TV. Also, the few times Ihad seen it it was... well, live comedy, good when they hit it but with a high proportion of just painful sketches that went on too long. I preferred Whose Line Is It Anyways, which tended towards the consistently brilliant and even better was on at a reasonable time. But in the fall of 2008 I kept getting link after link to SNL, especially Tina Fey's dead-on impression of Sarah Palin. So I watched it online at the NBC site, found it pretty funny, and kept watching on and off for a couple of months.

Cut to yesterday. I decide for various reasons that I want to see the SNL vice-presidential debate ("I would throw myself on a live grenade for John McCain! But for the sake of every man, woman, and child on Earth, we must never allow him to become President!") So I look up "SNL Vice President Debate" on youtube and get... nothing. A couple of brief clips and some longer clips that look like they used to contain the whole skit but currently consist of a single still and a textbox directing you to the NBC site. Apparently NBC has run amuck on youtube taking down all the SNL clips and replacing them with redirects to their website. All right, so I go to the NBC page...

Well, that's annoying. And pretty much every hit for the video, and every other SNL video, is either down or a direct link-through to NBC or the similarly geographically restricted hulu. So essentially, SNL no longer exists on the internet for Canadians.

The particularly hilarious bit - apart from the fact that a little judicious proxying can get you around it anyways - is that it seems so, well, pointless. NBC broadcasts in Canada. SNL goes on the air in Ottawa at the same time that it does in New York, on the same channel (it also goes on the air on Canada-based Global, although the video section of the Global website is pretty sad). The whole point of web-based videos is to expand your audience - you can sell ads on the net just as well as TV spots, and because you're no longer limited to watching the show once at 2330 on a Saturday night six months ago, you'll get more viewers in total. So why stick geographical restrictions on it? Hulu I can see, maybe, because they're working with other people's content and are probably trying hard to stay on the very conservative side of copyright laws. But NBC owns SNL. They can publish it anywhere they like. So why don't they?