Notice that many of these services offer copyrighted contents online. I think the primary issues they had with doing business outside the U.S. is that there are less copyrighted laws to adequately protect the material and that sort of business in those countries. It would also be notoriously hard to sue people who abuse them.
Other services such as telecom have to deal with Canadian collusion and protectionism towards the readily established telcorps. It's an uphill battle. One that Canadians have been paying the price for, with high wireless phone bills, high internet fees and the recent attempt at imposing Usage-Based Billing.
Protection is not the problem. The problem is that each jurisdiction is a different sales market for copyright holders. While selling into Canada, Australia etc the sellers may have given over a total copyright license, or there might be terms trying to prevent "leakage" from the home market and so on.
For example, as an Australian, I used to be able to watch whole episodes of Stewart & Colbert via the website. Then one of the local cable companies got the Australian rights to those shows and blam, no more easily-watched episodes for me.
Not sure why you got downvotes for this. This is exactly my take, too. The regulatory hurdles for online producers are significant and Canada is a small market relative to the United States.
As my previous comment indicated I know the hurt of learning about a product and finding out it's unavailable here. However, I understand the economics at work and feel that–while they're frustrating–they're totally understandable.
