The digital revolution has redefined many things, including how people relax. For the longest time, in Canada, and especially in its smaller cities, leisure time was chiefly tied to physical and communal activities.
The digital revolution has redefined many things, including how people relax. For the longest time, in Canada, and especially in its smaller cities, leisure time was chiefly tied to physical and communal activities. Before the Internet blended into everyday life, residents of more compact areas socialized at churches, festivals, hall-type gatherings, and hockey rinks. They too went fishing, exercised, or took in a play or film at their local cinema. Doing many of those things is still popular, but high-speed Internet access and affordable tech have led to the democratization of entertainment, allowing people not to be limited by the constraints of what was around and provided them with curated content that matched their needs.
Canadians are also no longer limited to what movies will get distributed via CA theater chains, because different video platforms now supply them with a wealth of films through streaming, among other things. Social interaction has been reshaped as well, thanks to messaging apps, forums, and social media platforms, with gaming and many other fields undergoing seismic evolutions also due to the rise of the Internet and devices such as smart TVs, smartwatches, smartphones, tablets, and laptops, which now represent robust tools for diverse entertainment. These changes have morphed how free time gets enjoyed in smaller towns too, and that is something we explore more in depth below.
Online Gaming Becoming in Demand
For much of the 20th century, casinos were illegal in the Great White North, with the first one opening up at the tail end of the 1980s, and the second in the early 1990s. Over the 1990s, a fair share of decently sized and a few impressive venues, especially in the Niagara Falls area, started to open up. Nonetheless, gaming establishments were not widely available in the country, and this also held for the 2000s.
Hence, many Canadians had to drive to different provinces to enjoy real-money games of chance legally. Something that many people do not know is that Canada, in a way, is a pioneer in the Internet gambling domain, as it was one of the first nations to have an online gambling regulator. In 1996, the Mohawk territory of Kahnawake birthed the Kahnawake Gambling Commission, which licensed one of the first online casinos ever. In 2004, the British Columbia Lottery Corporation debuted the country’s first regulated one. Now, Canadians everywhere have access to high-end secure platforms like Wildz and loads of home-based regulated options.
Post-2022, following the legalization of online gambling in Ontario, Canada saw an online casino boom. Sarnia residents are free to partake in slot, table, and lottery-style games at licensed websites from anywhere at any time, playing the industry’s best gaming products, protected by state-of-the-art security, with iGaming Ontario and the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario ensuring that operators do not welch on wins and pay out on time.
Gaming Turning into a Dominant Hobby
Not just the console and PC kind, but the mobile form as well. According to the latest projections, around 61% of Canada’s residents are into video games now, with the average age of the Canadian gamer being 34.
Canada has long been a game development hotbed, home to many top companies from this arena, like EA, Ubisoft, Relic Entertainment, Velan Studios, and Rockstar. In total, estimates put the number of studios in CA at over a thousand, with mobile titles posting the highest penetration rate.
The country has always been heavily into gaming, boasting high console use in the 1990s, when around a quarter of households owned NES devices, but the COVID pandemic, no doubt, cemented gaming as a super-established pastime among youth and young adults, drastically increasing their participation rates by 2022.
The Rise of Streaming Entertainment
Without question, streaming services, or video on demand hubs, as they were called over a decade ago, represented a mega shift in how media got consumed. Netflix, the world leader in this arena, initially began operating as a DVD service, but started to switch to streaming in 2007. Canada was one of the early adopters of this tech and is second only to the US when it comes to subscription penetration.
In fact, Canada had one of the earlier streaming services, a website called iCraveTV, which launched in 1999. It had a short lifespan of just over a year and focused on available over-the-air TV signals. In 2014, Crave, not connected to iCraveTV, debuted, owned by Bell Media, and went live. It is a local competitor to streaming giants like Disney+, Netflix, and Amazon. It is the biggest native service of its kind in CA, with CBC Gem offering Canadian shows, the Cineplex Store functioning as a platform from where Canadians can rent movies, and Sportsnet Now being the preferred choice for live sports broadcasts.
Video streaming broke the tyranny of scheduled broadcasts, letting people plan their lives how they want, and not be slaves to TV and cinema showtimes. They also allowed customers to take in shows at once, not waiting week after week for new episodes, and their algorithms personalize recommendations to match tastes. This went a long way in how individuals perceived downtime, as they are now sure they’ll find something they are highly likely to enjoy when they are free. Moreover, in 2023, Canada passed the Online Streaming Act, which guarantees that Canadian arts are widely available throughout the nation.
The Explosion of Short-Form Content
Attention spans have dwindled everywhere. This phenomenon has too affected residents of smaller cities, in particular those under forty, who are hooked on video platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. The swift videos posted on these apps supply quick dopamine hits that many seem to crave now in pockets of free time, given how stressful and busy our lives have become.
The brevity and instant satisfaction delivered by short-form content fit well with modern fragmented attention spans, particularly in the post-pandemic world. In slightly isolated communities, social media as a whole, helps create a perceived connection to something bigger. Sadly, information overload and overreliance on this kind of swift entertainment have negative effects, bringing down attendance numbers at local events and affecting business for social spots like bars. So, this produces economic drawbacks as well.
