After more than two years of waiting, Canadian Apple fans can finally join their American cousins in purchasing television shows through the iTunes Store. The interesting twist is that the content is mostly Canadian, with shows from CTV (Corner Gas, Degrassi, Instant Star) and the CBC (Rick Mercer Report, Little Mosque On The Prairie) making up most of the titles for sale and only and handful of US shows such as the animated series South Park and Avatar: The Last Airbender making up the rest.

As the new service went online this morning, I met with Peter Lowe, director of marketing for iTunes Canada to discuss the delays behind the launch and the issues of offering online content in Canada.

Kris Abel – What has been the delay?

Peter Lowe – Well, everything in the media industry involves rights, whether it be artists, directors, writers, clearances, publishing rights, all of these things and different providers have different rights and different regions. So, whether it’s a song or a TV show or anything else to make it available to customers in a given a country you have to get the owners of the rights to agree, to allow you to do that and strike some sort of business relationship and that takes time. It’s something we’ve been working aggressively on, on the music side and on the TV side to make as much content available to Canadian customers as possible.

The other thing is, with this launch you’ll notice that not only do we have some of the US content from Comedy Central for example, but we’ve managed to launch with great local Canadian programming from CTV and CBC as well. So that also just required the work of working with those guys, to get the rights in place, to make that content available.

Is this because it’s a new format? A lot of the confusion I hear from people around me is that there is no delay between the countries when a movie is released in theatres or when its released on DVD, the release dates tend to be the same, so why would there be a delay between South Park hitting iTunes Canada and iTunes US? Why can’t it be done at the same time?

That’s a great question, movies and DVDs and things like that is a process that’s been in place for a great while and things flow through it and sometimes the digital download rights aren’t either part of the existing deals and they have to be re-negotiated and sometimes they are part of existing deals and you know, obviously there’s technology that has to be deployed and made ready as well. All of these things together result in us having to roll out different parts of iTunes for different Geos (geographic regions) and different times, but we’ve been working really really hard to get TV launched in Canada as quickly as we can.

Can we expect the two stores to synchronize up? Now that the initial process has begun, will the release dates

–It’s impossible to anticipate that, again we’re going to bring in as much new content as we can in Canada to iTunes as quickly as we can, but obviously new products or new content may become available in the US or in Japan for example or in Europe and we’re not going to hold something back to another country because we want to synchronize it necessarily worldwide, sometimes it makes sense to do that, but a lot of times it just makes sense to get content into the hands of customers as quickly as you can in any given country and we’re going to continue to do that. Again, we’re off to a great start with Canadian programming and some US programming with Comedy Central and NHL as well, but we’re going to continue to add to it over time, just like we’ve done with music in Canada and just like we’ve done with TV in the United States.

The process of clearing those rights, its just seems to take a very long time, many people are curious to know just how does that work? One of the comments I often hear is “If everyone wants this to happen, why can’t they just sit down at a table and make it happen?”

Well, you know there are multiple different networks, all of those networks works with multiple different production companies, all of those different production companies work with multiple different directors, writers, actors, sound people, people doing music, there are multiple different licensing agencies, so there’s a lot of different people involved in the entire media industry obviously, these products, these TV shows are the result of a lot of people’s efforts, and it just takes some time some times to get all of the little details in these relationships worked out so that everybody is represented fairly.

Does the presence of both English and French language markets create any kind of a snag? Will you be offering TV shows in French?

The programmes we’ve launched today are all English language programmes, again, we’re going to be adding more content over time, over the weeks and months, and next year. Obviously we want to make as much content available for all Canadian customers.

All of the shows available on iTunes are currently for purchase, do you plan to get into video rentals?

We have nothing to announce, we don’t talk about future plans that we may or may not have.

In addition to TV shows, are you also working on bringing movies to iTunes Canada?

Again, we don’t have anything to announce today, today is about TV on iTunes in Canada.

Will today’s launch be an important step towards launching the iPhone in Canada? A big part of the delivery system for TV Shows and movies on iTunes is the iPhone, is it part of your strategy to have TV shows available before you see iPhones falling into Canadian hands?

It’s as simple as we want to get as many great products into the hands of our customers as we can and we want to do it as quickly as we can, sometimes its easy and sometimes its hard. So whether its Macs, iBooks, or the whole line of iPods we have, iTunes with its great music library of international content as well as Canada and now TV, we just want to get stuff into the hands of our customers. We obviously would love to get movie and iPhone are available to Canadian customers as well, but sometimes it takes time to get all of our ducks in a row.

Another matter you can clear, one that gets a lot of chatter online, is who is responsible for allowing the addition of US content to iTunes? Some feel it must be a deal you’d have to do with CTV, Global, the CBC, etc. and then others feel that the Canadian networks are not involved and it’s a matter that goes straight to the original American networks.

Our relationships and agreements with content providers are confidential agreements, y’know they’re business agreements, so we don’t comment on them short of the inner workings of those relationships.

How much of an impact has the recent developments with NBC had on your services, when you have a major content provider like NBC pull out, does that change your overall strategy for this particular service.

Obviously we’re very committed to TV in iTunes as we continue to expand it as we did to the U.K. recently and now to Canada, we want to bring great products and great content to our customers, we’re disappointed like I think a lot of our customers are that NBC/Universal content is not being made available to them and we’re going to work with those guys to try to get their content back on the iTunes, but who knows when that might happen.

One of the big issues brought up as a point of negotiation between yourselves and your content providers is the price point. This is your first time working with Canadian television networks, they seem to be happy with the $1.99 pricing, is that still an important issue that you have to press forward with? To make sure that all of the episodes have the same price?

At the end of the day its about providing a great product and a great service to customers. One of the things we felt was important since we introduced iTunes originally, is having it be super simple. Anything that makes it a complicated process for a consumer runs the risks of driving them to the piracy networks, right? So having 99 cents per song, having a $1.99 per episode across the board makes it very, very simple for consumers as they’re browsing through the store and they’re thinking about buying something, there’s not a lot of confusion there, they click the “buy” button and they know what it’s going to cost them. We think that’s an important part of the customer experience. At the same time we want to make sure that we’re building a great product and a great content offering for our customers and at the end of the day we want to make that happen with the broadest library possible. Who knows what might happen in the future, but today we think that very simple, direct pricing is an important component of why people love iTunes so much.

There’s been a lot of discussion over Digital Rights Managements with the music on iTunes, just to clarify is there DRM being used on the television shows?

Absolutely. The FairPlay technology that we use to protect a lot of the music content that is available on the iTunes Store is also used to protect the TV content as well. Customers can play back the TV shows on up to five different Macs or PCs, they can sync it to an unlimited number of iPods, they can sync it to Apple TV to play it back on their widescreen TVs as well. There is Digital Rights Management infrastructure there to manage and protect the people who own that content and make sure that it is not being pirated, not going places where it shouldn’t, but its so seamlessly integrated into iTunes and the rights are broad enough that we believe that the vast majority of our customers never ever bump into the Digital Rights software at all, they’re able to play it back on multiple computers, they’re able to play it back on their iPod, all of the authorization is managed completely by iTunes, so they don’t have to type in codes all the time. As soon as they sync to their iPod, their iPod is enabled to play back that content. FairPlay is there to protect the people who have created the content and own the content, but we’ve tried to make it super easy to use so it doesn’t get in the way of the people who want to enjoy the content.

Apple TV is a product that has already been available in Canada for awhile, but clearly is designed to work with this new service, how does today’s launch change the role of Apple TV in Canada? Are you going to do a bigger push around it now?

Well there’s no question that Apple TV is a great product already, because you can take the videos and photos you’ve taken of your friends and family that you already have with iPhoto and iMovie on your Mac and put those things on your TV and enjoy them on the most comfortable room in your house, you can enjoy music anywhere in the house with an Apple TV, but there’s no question with the introduction of TV on iTunes in Canada, Apple TV becomes even more valuable for customers who might consider it because now they can get Corner Gas and Degrassi, and again sit in the room their house where they are the most used to watching those programs on their TV and enjoy the use of their widescreen TVs.

A recent industry study suggested that 1 in 3 Canadians own a High-Definition television set and so with your current offerings being only available in Standard Definition, will we see a Hi-Def service down the road? Are their technical difficulties in offering High Definition?

Yeah, again we have nothing to announce about that today, we don’t talk about our future plans as you know. The video as you’ve mentioned that we offer today in iTunes, the TV shows are all near-DVD quality, up to 640 x 480, so very high quality compared to the DVD sets that people might be purchasing to watch these shows at home.In the future, as technology advances, we’ll have to see what happens.