Playback opens submissions for 2025 Indie List

The annual list measures production and development spend from Canadian independent prodcos. Complete the survey today.

Playback has launched submissions for the 2025 Indie List.

The list provides valuable insight into the annual spend of Canada’s indie production companies, as well as a deep dive into the challenges and opportunities facing independent producers right now.

Companies that take part will be recognized among the top domestic indies, based on production and development spend during the 2024 calendar year. The Indie List report will be published online and in our 2025 Spring print issue.

How the survey works

Playback‘s annual Indie List ranks Canadian independent production companies based on the volume of film and TV/OTT production and development spend, tracking both service and domestic production volumes.

Volume is expressed in terms of total screen-entertainment production budget(s) handled by a company. It does not include advertising, corporate or commercial production. Proprietary independent production and service production are tallied separately. Spend is self-reported and works on the honour system, so we ask that companies be as accurate as possible. Productions of all languages are eligible for inclusion.

What we will publish

Total production spend, total development spend, total service production spend, total feature production spend and total production spending broken down by genre. A separate chart will be created for companies whose overall spend is exclusively under service production. Playback also captures qualitative data about the state of the industry, which will be used in our reporting in addition to the Indie List. This year we’ve added questions on the use of AI and the ownership of companies. The results will be published unattributed in online and in print.

What we won’t publish

Per-project production spending, per-project development spending – while we ask you to include the spend for individual projects, we will not publish any of this information. Other than where specified, any qualitative data will be published without attribution to maintain anonymity.

Click here to access the survey.

The deadline to submit is March 6.