Super Bowl fans who missed TV ads can view them online

Bonners Ferry residents, who saw Canadian commercials during Sunday’s Super Bowl, still have a chance to see the commercials everyone else saw.  Go to www.hulu.com.

Many of the smaller cable companies like Time-Warner  in KHQ-TV’s viewing area, which includes  Bonners Ferry, missed the American commercials during the game.

That’s because KHQ viewers in Bonners Ferry receive the Spokane, Wash., television station from Shaw Cable in Canada.  Therefore they saw Canadian commercials during the Super Bowl because of a signal substitution, said Patricia McRae, president of KHQ.

According to McRae, signal substitution occurs when a Canadian TV station requests that larger cable companies or a satellite company insert the signal of the Canadian TV station on the channel of a more distant station (usually an American station) that is showing the same program at the same time.  CTV Network purchased the exclusive broadcast rights to the Super Bowl for Canada. Therefore, any American station carrying the Super Bowl, that was on a Canadian cable system, was blacked out.

“If the smaller local companies knew ahead of time that this was going to take place, they would have made their customers aware of the change,” said McRae. “The irony is that the Canadian feed shows a much clearer picture and local companies didn’t want a fuzzy picture for the Super Bowl; they went with this feed for that reason not knowing that the American commercials would not be seen.”