Thumbing through a Crutchfield catalog, I noticed some fine print on the text for one of the DVRs: "Tivo service not available in Canada."

It's also my understanding (someone correct me if I'm wrong), that the DirecTV service is also unavailable there, at least not legally. From what I remember, there are plenty of residents of the Great White North who can receive decent signals from the DirecTV birds, but because they live on the other side of some arbitrary imaginary line, must use hacked keycards if they want to see the pictures.

My questions are... Assuming that I've got my facts straight... Does anyone know why this is the case? Why would Hughes and Tivo deliberately just ignore a large potential market?

Tangential question... What about Alaska and Hawaii? Can they see the birds, too, or are they too far away?