Dust off that pile of screenplays. The Ontario government is introducing a new fund that will rebate development costs for content creators in the film, television and digital media sector. As with the current labor- and production-based tax credit in the province, the new rebate will be administered by the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

‘A significant proportion of our current investment goes into the production and marketing end of the value chain. Very little traditionally has been going in at the early stages of the development end of the chain,’ says OMDC president and CEO Karen Thorne-Stone.

She says the new rebate is part of the province’s efforts to provide Ontario content producers with ‘a growing and changing tool kit beyond the traditional [production] tax credit.’

OMDC director of tax credits Jennifer Blitz says the proposal surfaced last March when the Ontario government mentioned a pilot program that would rebate the costs associated with the development of intellectual property for screen-based sectors.

She describes the rebate as part of a fund that ‘is not jury-based’ that will return a portion of the costs associated with developing screen-based content.

‘It will capture film, TV and interactive digital media. If you are producing content for a screen, whether that’s a television, a movie theater or a phone or computer…’ Thorne-Stone finishes the sentence, ‘Those things are blurring together.’

Thorne-Stone says she expects the government to announce the rebate before the end of the year.