An anonymous commenter pointed me to this video posted on YouTube last fall showing all the problems that happen when an NFL football game is substituted by cable companies:
- Bad audio quality in HD
- Bad video quality in HD
- Canadian network bugs pasted over U.S. network bugs
- Coming back from Canadian commercials in the middle of a sportscaster's sentence
- Coming back from Canadian commercials in the middle of a play
- Accidentally running a Canadian network promo in the middle of game coverage
- Covering game information graphics with Canadian network's pop-up promos
- Canadian ads pasted on the screen over a flying football
- Cutting off the end of a game on a U.S. channel to simsub a scheduled program on another Canadian network (usually 60 Minutes, which is constantly delayed by NFL games going long).
Theoretically, CRTC rules don't allow for any of these (well, the popup ads are debatable). Canadian networks can't substitute U.S. signals with Canadian ones that are of lesser quality. Cable and satellite providers (they're the ones who actually "throw the switch" based on schedules provided to them by the Canadian networks) would be in their rights to refuse to substitute the broadcast.
But what happens in reality is that they don't really care (at least, outside of Super Bowl Sunday), and so errors like these are common. Usually they're not so bad, either repeating the first few seconds of a program or cutting off the last few seconds of the credits because the stations aren't in perfect sync. The problems are worse during NFL games because they're live and their commercial schedules and end times aren't predictable in advance.
If this kind of thing annoys you, you could try petitioning CTV and Global to get them to stop, but there's no way they're just going to give up on free ad money. Instead, you have to focus your efforts on the CRTC and your Member of Parliament to get them to eliminate simultaneous substitution.
