Shaftesbury president and chairman Christina Jennings raised alarm bells about the future of Canadian stories, CBC and children’s content while speaking at a panel at Content Canada.

“I am worried about our stories. The truth is, our linear broadcasters are making fewer shows than they’ve ever done before. Now you’ve got the streamers who ‘look like’ they are poised ‘to fill in the void,’ but I’m not sure they’re going to make Canadian stories, to be candid, I’m really not,” said Jennings during Content Canada’s Navigating the Future: The State of the Canadian Screen Industry panel discussion on Tuesday (Sept. 12).

The panel included Jennings, Canada Media Fund (CMF) president and CEO Valerie Creighton, and Blue Ant Media CEO Michael MacMillan.

Jennings said any moves to defund the CBC would be a blow to the industry. “I am really, really worried about the CBC. It commissions more Canadian content right now than all our privates together,” she said.

To fill the commissioning and funding gaps, Jennings said the Canadian industry has needed to lean on partnerships because “we have only ever known about partnerships to make our content.”

“So that’s our advantage right now, in a world where there are tons of opportunities for partnerships. That’s partnerships with linear broadcasters around the world, like-minded public broadcasters and streaming platforms,” said Jennings, citing Ireland, France and New Zealand as some countries that need to “partner with us.” She also warned about a lack of support for children’s programming, calling for more government funding to support it.

On financing, Creighton said she keeps hearing how “ridiculous” the CMF model is and how it’s not in line with the market. “And that’s true,” she said. “The model is broken. We have an old model.”

“Right now we have a system where we’re still tied to a broadcast licence with three broadcasters in the English market, three in the French who occupy 86% of our money. That is not going to last,” she added.

She said that the broadcasters are still an “important piece” but “they’re not the only piece anymore,” with MacMillan adding that there were “very important parts of this [screen industry]” who can’t trigger CMF funding in the way those broadcasters can.

MacMillan added that financial support from federal and provincial treasury should give priority to those projects where “Canadians do own the IP.”

Global industry continues to see opportunity in Canada

Domestic and international executives are feeling “bullish” on the opportunities in Canada’s film and TV sector as the screen industry heads toward a “reset” in the wake of the strike environment, according to comments made during the Content Canada panel The Content Ecosystem: Global Production Companies on Tuesday.

Speaking on the panel, Boat Rocker Media CEO John Young said the industry is seeing “a broader environment of resetting a lot of what we’re doing.” This reset has been helped along by cost-cutting measures by global broadcasters and streamers, and dual strikes from the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), according to Young, who said companies need to “figure out where we can point ourselves to win in that fight for profits and getting content on screen.”

He added that Canada is well-positioned for a “resurgence” in that landscape, thanks to a cheaper dollar to allow studios to stretch their budget, and no shortage of local talent.

Arvand Khosravi, SVP, head of scripted television strategy at Fifth Season, concurred with Young’s picture of the current situation. “There was a moment where budgets were unbelievably massive,” he said. “Now that budgets hopefully are coming down a little bit, expectations are being tempered. When you let a little bit of steam out of the bubble, it hopefully creates an opportunity for more risk-taking, since there’s not as much money at stake.”

For her part, Brenda Gilbert, co-founder and president of Vancouver-based Bron Media Corporation, echoed Young’s comments about the importance of keeping local talent in Canada. She also addressed the current restructure at Bron, which entered creditor protection a few months ago, saying that the company has shifted its strategy to animation to keep up with consumer interest. “We’re a smaller-sized company, so we’re much more agile than most studios,” she said.

How can indie producers tap social platforms to make content?

In the session Mining for IP on Social Platforms, TikTok’s head of content programming, North America, Gave Lindo pointed to Crave’s upcoming scripted comedy series Made for TV with Boman Martinez-Reid as a good example of how networks can “dig into ways” of working with creators.

The 6 x 30-minute series produced by Toronto’s Alibi Entertainment centres on Canadian content creator and TikTok star Boman Martinez-Reid, as the social media personality tries to make the jump to the world of television.

“It appears what Crave has allowed [Martinez-Reid] to do is to stay in the lane that has made him so successful on [TikTok]. He has primarily done pop culture, entertainment, movies, so that’s the lane that he’s playing in. They’re not giving him a nature show or making him a chef. They’re keeping him in the space he’s thrived in historically,” said Lindo during the Wednesday (Sept. 13) panel.

Lindo added that he was surprised there weren’t more examples of traditional media embracing the “power of social, both from a creator perspective and IP perspective.”

He also pointed to “rich communities” like Book Talk and Van Life on TikTok as ecosystems that could be leveraged for content, adding that producers should look at “trends” in the context of these communities, which “have so many engaged users,” rather than the virality of single videos.

Lindo said some “forward-looking” companies were leveraging insights and partnerships with social platforms for that purpose, giving the example of Reese Witherspoon-founded Hello Sunshine.

With files from Kelly Townsend

Image: Unsplash