Even though Canadians don’t watch their own movies and TV shows, it seems the overseas audiences do, according to a new study from Statistics Canada. Revenue from sales of homemade productions to foreign markets set a new record in 2000/01, climbing 2.7% over the previous year to $177.5 million.

More than two-thirds of all revenue from Canadian productions came from overseas that year, up from 58% in ’99/00 and just one-third in the early ’90s.

Canadian content fared much worse at home, slipping nearly four points to just 9.5% of domestic market revenue, or $101 million. Meanwhile, sales of foreign and Hollywood films in Canada hit $969 million – buoying film and video distributors to an all-time revenue high of $2.8 billion, a 13% jump from the $2.5 billion earned in 1999/2000.

Canuck content also slipped off the little screen with the turn of the millennium – accounting for just 15.7% of conventional TV revenue, down from 24.7%. Pay-TV and home video held steady, however, at 23% and 2%, respectively.

Hollywood and other foreign films continued their near-total domination of the theatrical and home-video markets, making up 98% of theatrical and 97% of home-video revs.

Distributors agree that while business was good in ’00/01, international sales have been in a slump since the collapse of the international markets, most notably in Germany and France, in 2002.

‘The numbers will be very different by the time of the next report,’ says Max Oliveras of Muse Distribution.

Jesse Prupas, also at Muse, says productions that go beyond the traditional definition of Cancon, Muse’s Savage Messiah or the Montreal-shot Bliss, for example, sell better overseas.

‘It’s a challenge out there, no question,’ says Rhombus International president Sheena Macdonald, ‘the market’s not like it used to be.’ She says demand for arts programming has slipped with the decline of foreign pubcasters, although this has been somewhat offset by the rise of digital channels.

Strong cash flow and slower expense rates also pushed distributor profits up for the first time in three years, hitting $347.2 million after expenses of $2.5 billion. Costs continued to climb, but at a much slower rate: by 11.3% in ’00/01 compared to a 15.3% uptick in ’99/00 and 29% in ’98/99.

‘Large gains in…the pay-television and home-video markets contributed significantly to the record revenue,’ says the study, citing an 18.2% jump in pay-TV payouts, to $81.2 million, and a 12.3% climb to 165.8 million in home video. The feds also noted a jump in other rev streams, including grants, subsidies and interest income on investments.