Last year, to howls of intervening protest, the prize of a digital licence for a documentary channel was awarded to Corus Entertainment of Toronto.

With the winning digital channels now just months away from launch, everyone knows they have to get their acts together soon. So what’s up? Is The Canadian Documentary Channel out there buying or is it mainly tire-kicking for now?

CBC veteran Michael Harris has been installed as vice-president, general manager of CDC since February. ‘I am the team,’ he says. ‘These are small-budget channels and no one wants to incur costs too soon. From what I understand, everyone is in the same boat. There’s a howling frenzy going on right now.’

Harris is still some way away from filling in the blocks on the schedule. ‘Within two weeks we can sit down and actually propose a schedule to make it real, and once we get a look at the day, we can get the docs and fill up the baskets,’ says Harris. ‘The harder conceptual job is to figure out what the baskets should be. There’s a wealth of documentary material in Canada and around the world that’s not being seen.’

Harris anticipates the channel’s schedule will be ‘some kind of rotation through the day, primarily because of the time difference [across the country]. It won’t be straight rotation.

‘We’re going to have all kinds of docs on the channel. Our primetime focus will be on one-off docs, point-of-view docs, feature-length docs.’

Series are certainly on the cards but are likely to be ad hoc. ‘It’s not like scheduling Friends at 7 o’clock. I’m sure we’ll be doing seven-part series, or we may run five or 10 docs in a hall-of-fame series. Other streams may be docs about women, for example, and those I imagine would be one-offs. Monday to Friday of a given week we may feature documentaries by a given filmmaker or docs that have won best director awards or best cinematographer awards. This will be a channel that is excited about docs and speaks to the people who make them,’ says Harris.

Some good news for producers: ‘We will be commissioning documentaries right from the start. It’s our plan to be commissioning documentaries from the first year. I’m already getting calls from people who have a proposal. I think our licensing fees will be lower…we will be helping lots of first-time filmmakers and student filmmakers make their first film. The licence fee in the application is $25,000.

‘Established independent producers are going to be looking for bigger licence fees at a network or analog channel. Where we come into play is to keep their [older material] in circulation, and to be a friend to new filmmakers and a friend to the genre as a whole.

‘My best vision is that every night [among the newspapers’] picks for the best viewing of the night, one of them will be a documentary on our channel. We’ll get a lot of people watching documentaries and finding out about documentaries and the issues documentaries explore, even if we can’t give licence fees to a filmmaker making a $500,000 documentary,’ says Harris.

‘There will be a hierarchy here, and we can’t compete with broadcast networks in general. The specialty channels should be paying more than the digitals. We’ll be slotted in below the bigger specialty channels,’ he says.

However, this doc-dedicated channel has other things going for it that Harris feels could give it the edge over broadcasters with deeper pockets.

‘We have so much more time and flexibility in our schedule to show 40-minute or 90-minute documentaries. Our doors are open to a broader range of doc than the networks are. So hopefully that flexibility will attract interesting documentaries that networks might have trouble scheduling and hopefully find ones they’ve missed.’

When it comes to price, ‘everybody’s prepared to talk,’ says Harris. ‘I think that people are used to making their margins on sales to the U.S. or networks and then picking up specialty sales and sales to smaller countries. They’ve got flexible pricing. In a majority of cases we’ve got the flexibility to get stuff other people won’t be able to get.’

As Harris points out, the sheer space available on the channel makes it easy for him to cast a wide net.

‘At MIPDOC, [most] Canadian buyers might be interested in two or three docs. We may well be interested in 40 or 50. [CDC’s] a channel that’s got the space to show the best docs being made all around the world.

‘I’d be surprised if even dedicated documentary viewers saw more than 15 docs in the last year, but this is a channel where you can count on them being there. Because you’ll be assured of the quality of programming, it will be a channel that you keep coming back to.’

As part of the licence, public sector partners the CBC and the National Film Board contribute 200 and 100 hours of programming a year, respectively. Won’t this amount to the CBC competing with itself?

‘The CBC views this as a terrific opportunity,’ responds Harris. ‘One of the problems at CBC is that airtime is so scarce, documentaries are hard-pressed to get on the air there. The CBC has a wonderful backlog of Academy Award-winning and Emmy Award-winning docs and docs from two years ago that they can’t find time to show again. Pieces that people slaved on for years and years go by and no one gets to see them, or they go by and are out of circulation. This is a chance to get docs by Canadian independent producers back where people can see them.’ *

-www.corusent.com