From Victoria Ahearn of the Canadian Press:
Link: ‘It’s also kind of a scary time’: Canadian creators on the streaming era
Brent Butt is trepidatious about the streaming era.
While the Canadian comedy star says he’s excited about the “palpable opportunities†that exist as more streamers enter the market here, he also finds it “a little frightening.†Continue reading.
imho,
the Canadian industry can be called ‘mature’, well established, top notch, vibrant, very professional. It produces products that are watched by 100s of millions all over the world.
Problem is, Canada’s Industry produces 98 percent American content.
Where Canada most went very wrong is when $ 500 million Canadian tax dollars were given to Netflix to co-produce-stream Canadian products and most of that goes to producing American content. While the little share of Canadian content by Netflix gets starved, and quickly cancelled, like ‘Anne with an E’.
Add to that the $ 800-900 million Canadians spend subscribing to Netflix and that’s $ 1 billion more in addition to billions more money Canadians still spend on cable broadcasters that goes to fund all the American content.
It must be obvious the Canadian governments are not helping Canadian content, but instead are helping American content to flood and dominate Canada, because, Americans own control and run Canada for their profit benefit, not Canada’s.
The Canadian money is there, the Canadian industry is there, the content is selling like hotcakes and much more is needed by the voracious watchers.
The Canadian industry needs to stop believing and trusting Canadian governments are on their side, the governments in Canada are not. The CRTC is not.
None of the many Canadian industry producers can do what needs doing. But ‘collectively’ the Canadian industry can.
The Canadian producing industry needs to ‘take the bull by the horns’, come together, co-operate, collaborate, and form it’s own streaming service, for direct subscribings, and available as an addon subscription to other streaming services, and also individual productions to other streaming services all over the world.
This ‘collective’ Canadian industry streaming service needs to battle for and get put into contracts the rights and permissions to stream the non-Canadian-content productions that the Canadian industry does.
This would have to be a requirement of non-Canadian-content productions if those foreign companies want to benefit from having their productions done in Canada by Canadian producers.
Then this Canadian Industry streaming service will have a huge enough slice of the several billions that Canadians spend on watching that it can dedicate to producing Canadian content as at least 20 percent of it’s streaming library it provides to all Canadians, and around the world. And, as things increase and expand, that percentage can be increased and expanded to larger and larger percentage.
But as Brent Butt says, the global industry has totally changed in just the last five years, and will totally change more in the next five years.
This massive paradigm shift is because of ‘streaming’. The opportunity to be part of it – is now.
Five years from now will very probably be too late, as the others, mostly the Americans, make it impossible for anybody else to be part of it.
The Canadian Industry can’t take even five years to get off it’s ass and do this. It needs to act fast, act now, it needs to setup it’s own ‘collective’ streaming service in the next 6 months and be streaming by Canada Day 2020.
It can be done.
Right now, there’s nothing and nobody that can stop you from doing it, and succeeding.
All the people of the Canadian Industry have to do is – DO IT –
DO IT NOW.
Steve
1)Netflix commited to investing $500 million into making Canadian content there ar enot getting any cash from the feds.
2)What your pushing for is a North Korea/Russia type of system where people are forced to watch state approved programs.