Where can I watch "Mr Bates vs The Post Office" in Canada?
Here's where the acclaimed British miniseries starring Toby Jones will be available in Canada.
Bel-Air, a dramatic reboot of the 1990–96 sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air based on a 2019 fan film by Morgan Cooper, starring Jabari Banks and Adrian Holmes, was released in the United States on the Peacock streaming service on Sunday, February 13, 2022.
In Canada, where Peacock is not available, Bel-Air will air on the Showcase cable channel on Mondays at 9:00 p.m. ET / 6:00 p.m. PT, beginning on February 14. Each episode will run for a little over an hour (with commercials), so be sure to add a bit of buffer time at the end if you're recording on a PVR. Alternatively, the day after broadcast, each episode should be available to stream through the Global TV website and app for authenticated subscribers.
Showcase will be airing a single episode each Monday, whereas Peacock released the first three episodes upfront and will release future episodes weekly on Thursdays, beginning with the fourth episode on February 17. This means that episodes will premiere in Canada up to eighteen days after their U.S. releases (i.e., the fourth episode will not air in Canada until March 7).
If you do not have a cable or similar TV service that includes Showcase, you can access its programming, including Bel-Air, through StackTV, a streaming package that includes live and on-demand access to programs from Showcase, Global, and several other Canadian TV channels.
The simplest way to subscribe to StackTV is as an add-on channel to Prime Video, where it costs $12.99 per month (all prices in this article are in Canadian dollars before applicable sales taxes), which is on top of a subscription to Amazon Prime ($7.99 per month, or $79.00 per year). However, a 30-day free trial is available to new subscribers to both Prime and StackTV in most parts of Canada, if you haven't tried one or the other before.
StackTV is also available through Rogers' Ignite TV and SmartStream platforms ($12.99 per month on SmartStream or $9.99 with Ignite TV, both with a 30-day free trial). Access to Showcase and the other channels included in StackTV is also part of RiverTV, the $16.99-per-month over-the-top bundle offered by VMedia.
Corus, owner of Showcase and StackTV, has Canadian broadcast and streaming rights to Peacock's "marquee" original programming under a deal with Peacock owner NBCUniversal announced in June 2020. Since Bel-Air is being produced for Peacock by sister company Universal Television – successor to NBC Productions, which made the original series – it falls under this deal.
Where can I watch the original sitcom, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, in Canada?
The full run of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which ran from 1990 to 1996 and starred Will Smith and Alfonso Ribeiro, among others, is available to stream in Canada on Crave. The series' 2020 reunion special produced for HBO Max is also available in Canada on Crave. Pricing for that service starts at $9.99 per month.
Although NBC Productions was the underlying producer of the original sitcom, at the time it didn't have a significant syndication operation (it didn't merge with Universal until 2004), so it sold the distribution rights to Warner Bros., which has kept them ever since. Hence, the American streaming rights to the series have most recently ended up with WB sister company HBO Max. The Canadian rights have meanwhile ended up with Crave, whose parent company Bell Media has a long-term partnership with WarnerMedia.