The Canada Media Fund is to reward English Canadian broadcasters more for ratings over historical performance, according to new fund access criteria unveiled Monday.

The industry fund, unveiling new 2011-2012 program guidelines and so-called factor weights to calculate performance envelopes, has bumped up the audience success, or total hours tuned, factor to a 40% weighting for English language drama production.

That move aims to reward broadcasters for airing first-run Canadian drama in prime time, a key objective of the recently-revamped industry fund.

The CMF will also give a newly-added 15% weighting to audience success when it comes to original first-run series, as opposed to re-runs, with the same 15% weighting going to historic performance.

Another 20% weighting will go to regional production licenses, which reward job creation, and a 5% weighting each for above-threshold licenses and digital media investment, respectively.

The French language performance envelopes will do more to reward broadcasters for historical performance.

The French envelopes will have a 35% factor weighting for total hours tuned, a 15% weighting for original first run programming, and a 25% weighting for historical performance.

They will also have a 10% weighting for regional production licenses, a 10% weighting for above-threshold licenses and 5% for digital media investment.

The fund released separate factor weightings for French and English language broadcast envelopes for documentary and kids TV productions.

The CMF last July announced the factors for 2011-2012 to help decide the size of broadcaster performance envelopes, or the main way the fund backs Canadian indie TV production, especially for primetime.

The CMF on Monday announced the specific percentage weights to be assigned to the factors.

The new factor weights follow a key meeting of the fund’s board of directors on November 25.

Other key changes for the 2011-2012 year unveiled by the CMF Monday include on the experimental stream providing incentives to indie producers to return recoupment revenues to the industry fund sooner.

And on the convergent stream, the CMF said it will encourage video content to get to Canadians wherever and whenever possible by rewarding the creation of rich digital media content, especially when it is distributed on a CRTC-licensed VOD platform, or if the content is streamed online.

“Basic digital media components will no longer qualify to make projects convergent,” the CMF stated.