The CRTC will keep a watchful eye on how broadcasters handle the ad switches, threatening penalties for mistakes that compromise broadcasts.

Live-event simultaneous substitution makes $40 million for CTV, which currently owns the broadcast rights for the Super Bowl.

The change may reduce the incentive for any Canadian network to carry the game, suggested Adam Shine, a telecom, cable and media analyst at National Bank Financial.

"The broadcaster has effectively been stripped of material revenue related to the game, and domestic advertisers get no exposure during the biggest TV event of the year," he said in an e-mail.

This year, CTV is believed to be charging between $170,000 and $200,000 for 30 seconds of airtime during the game.

They expressed dismay at the news, saying it will cost Canadian jobs.

"Sure viewers will get to watch Wells Fargo ads in the Super Bowl instead of RBC, or Target and Wal-Mart instead of Canadian Tire," said Scott Henderson, the vice president of communications for Bell Media, the parent company of CTV, in an e-mail.

"But those advertising dollars will go directly to American companies instead of Canadian content creators and broadcasters."

Canadians already flock to YouTube to check out the latest crop of U.S. commercials, some of which cost millions to produce and look like miniature films.

One of them is the CRTC's Blais, who admitted to going online to check them out himself.

"There are ways of seeing it but in this decision we are saying Canadians are adult enough to be able to see it along with everybody else on the platform they were designed to be broadcast on," he said.

Another CRTC decision Thursday gives consumers a little bit more flexibility to watch ads on their mobile devices.

The regulator ordered Bell Mobility and Videotron to stop giving their own mobile television services an unfair advantage over other Internet services.

The two companies had exempted their own TV services from standard monthly data charges while content from other websites or apps — like YouTube — was counted against a customer's data cap.

By Stephanie Levitz, The Canadian Press