One change in the Canada Media Fund (CMF)’s 2025-26 program budget was years in the making and in response to the evolving Canadian screen industry, Rod Butler (pictured), VP of content and regulatory, tells Playback Daily.

As reported last week, the change Butler is referring to was announced for the organization’s fiscal year that started on April 1, and involves the funder’s Broadcaster Envelope Program. Now, broadcasters no longer have to provide the larger share of financing to unlock CMF funding. The policy adjustment has the goal of increasing collaboration between producers, distributors and broadcasters while also adapting to the evolving Canadian industry and media landscape.

Butler says that Canadians today are consuming content from a variety of sources, including those outside of traditional broadcasting, with the change being the next iteration of an ongoing process to try and widen the aperture for creators.

Examples Butler provided of where Canadians are consuming content more frequently than before are online platforms and social media. In CMF’s inaugural genre report released in January, which highlighted the struggles present in the kids’ content genre. The organization found that, between 2013 and 2020, the number of Canadian households that had cut or never had cable increased 219%.

The report goes on to say that, by the end of 2023, 42% of Canadian households did not have a TV subscription with a traditional provider and, by 2026, more than half of households will not have a traditional TV.

Butler notes that financing for projects is similar to a patchwork quilt and the structure for each project will be unique, necessitating a system that provides distributors a larger role in the financing of projects. The change also gives producers more options when seeking support for their work.

Another factor for CMF’s policy this year was to mitigate issues due to CMF’s decreasing budget, mainly attributable to a drop in contributions from BDUs. Butler says that as its budget continues to fall, the volume of production CMF is able to support may not be the same, but the organization will never walk away from the types of projects it funds.

This year’s program budget is set at $338 million while the two previous years had budgets of $357 million and around $366 million, respectively.

A change designed around present and future budgetary concerns is in the Prototyping Program, a part of its Interactive Digital Media stream, where the funder has introduced a two-step evaluation process, in order to limit the strain on CMF’s capped administration costs, that sees only projects scoring above a certain threshold advancing to the second stage.

“There’s going to have to be some barriers to entry so we can whittle the applications down and focus on [those] that have the best chance of success,” says Butler.

He also noted that, as the budget decreases, similar models to the one introduced in the Prototyping Program’s  process could make their way to other programs, including those in CMF’s linear stream.

In order to address the struggling kids’ content genre CMF has opened up funding from non-Canadian broadcasters and streamers, who, as of this year, can contribute up to 25% of CMF’s threshold for kids’ content in production.

“Obviously our priority is companies that are Canadian, but the way that content is made is so collaborative that we just wanted another tool in our tool belt,” says Butler. “Given the crisis of kids’ content in Canada right now, this was a practical step that was measured in order to provide more flexibility to try and get kids’ content made.”

CMF’s report on the struggles facing kids’ content suggests that broadcasters have increasingly turned away from the genre as linear total hours tuned has continually dropped with the rise of streaming services and digital platforms such as YouTube, which has become one of the leading destinations for kids viewing, according to the report.

Butler notes that non-Canadian contributions applying to the CMF threshold are limited to kids’ content at the moment. He could not say whether a similar change may be applied to other forms of content in the future. Any CMF policy or budgetary changes must be in accordance with the rules set out in CMF’s contribution agreement with Canadian Heritage and obtain approval from its independent board of directors.

Other additions to the CMF kids’ content landscape include program carve-outs for the genre across CMF programs and lower finance thresholds along with extra evaluation grid points, which CMF hopes will incentivize a resurgence in the genre.

“Every time the CMF announces a new policy, it is trying to offer carrots,” says Butler. “Sometimes we have a requirement and we have to have sticks, but the goal is always to try and be a useful tool for the industry.”

Butler says that the goal of the CMF is to be a stabilizing force, but that it cannot be a static one and finding that balance for a dynamic industry can be a challenge.

“We’re going to adopt anything that works, or we think can work, and adapt our policies as necessary,” says Butler. “The future may not look like the past, but we’re committed absolutely to serving Canadian creators, broadcasters and distributors.”

Image courtesy of the Canada Media Fund