Here’s something that you won’t find American networks—or any network run by people with brains—doing.
It’s no secret that Canada is behind many countries in many shows. We get a lot of shows the same time that America gets them, but there are plenty of shows that we get much later, after even non-North American countries (no we’re not still stuck in the 80’s—unfortunately.)
A couple of years ago I was watching an early season two episode of The Shield on Global. After the first act the first commercial break began and I was shocked by the first commercial. It was an advertisement for the DVD box set of season two of The Shield. I could not wrap my mind around it. Why on Earth would they advertise DVDs of the season of the show that they just began airing? Don’t they realize that if the commercial works and their viewer go out and buy them, then they no longer need to watch the show on the network? Unless the money per capita from the ads for the DVD were at least as much as the cumulative revenue of ALL of the ads per capita from that point on to end of the season, then they would be LOSING money. Duh!
Later on Space did the same thing, except worse. In this case it was with Stargate Atlantis. We get most Sci-Fi shows between six months and two years after they air in America. With Stargate Atlantis we got it more than 1½ years later, so imagine my surprise when Space began advertising the season one DVDs (which were just released in America at the time). This was even worse than Global’s blunder. Did they really expect us to watch Atlantis on Space if we get the DVDs? Did they really expect to make any advertising money from the commercials of Atlantis when they finally aired two years later?
[Canadian] networks are quite good at screwing up, but this was a particularly amusing idiotic behavior.