If there’s one word that comes to mind when talking about the state of Canada’s animation industry these days, it’s ‘ouch.’

It’s a challenging time. Canadian producers and broadcasters are facing stiffer and stiffer competition from niche channels, video games and VOD, and our jobs are getting harder every day. Producers are being asked to imagine and deliver content in multiple formats on multiple platforms. Unions are jockeying for payments against revenues that don’t exist yet, and cash-strapped broadcasters are scaling back commissions and delaying airdates.

But the news isn’t all bleak. My good friend, editor Ellen Fine, recently took me as her date to the Prime Time Emmys telecast in L.A. There were so many celebrities that every conversation was interrupted with the words ‘Oh my God, that was Tina Fey!’, or ‘Oh my God, that was the guy from Lost!’ The ceremonies themselves were littered with ominous comments about the imminent death of broadcast television, but there was no denying the excitement of the event. I couldn’t help but feel confident that the world will never stop watching TV.

And what about animation? Not many people were saying ‘Oh my God, that’s Seth MacFarlane!’, since he largely went unrecognized by the throngs of fans lining the red carpet, but Family Guy and The Simpsons were very much a part of the event and Robot Chicken’s Seth Green rocked the red carpet with his star power. Canada’s very own 6teen won a Daytime Emmy for best theme song a few weeks before, generating excitement here at home.

So why am I going on about an American award ceremony? Because with every passing day, the international market for animation content becomes more and more important to Canadian producers, and the U.S. is one of our most important foreign markets. If we are going to continue to thrive as an industry, we need to compete head-on with U.S. and European content.

Thanks to the National Film Board and groundbreaking studios like Nelvana, Canada is already known around the world as an exporter of excellent animation. At Fresh TV, we’ve been following in that tradition by obsessing over quality and selling our shows into the U.S., Europe and throughout the world.

Fresh has had to take a leap of faith and plenty of financial and creative risk to launch each of our international hit shows.

Total Drama Island, for instance, took an entire year of sluggish international sales before becoming Cartoon Network’s top-rated series and, subsequently, an international hit. The series is a high-concept ‘animated reality show,’ and it took a lot of pitching for international broadcasters to get behind a serialized parody of reality TV for kids. Despite Fresh’s Canada-wide online focus testing as a proof of concept and a hands-on approach to crafting the series, it was a tough sell at first.

Sometimes you have to be very persistent. 6teen, an animated sitcom for tweens from Nelvana and Fresh, was the little show that could. The odds were against us. People told us that no one could make a tween animated series – that tweens had moved beyond animation and refocused their attention on live-action Hannahs, Carlys, Zacks and Codys.

The series’ ratings were slow out of the gate in Canada, and its U.S. launch on Nickelodeon was a complete bust. Only after a long, slow build on Teletoon was 6teen picked up again in the U.S. by Cartoon Network and, subsequently, around the globe. Today, 6teen is getting great numbers on networks in many territories, including Canada, the U.S., Australia, the U.K., Poland and Latin America.

Lastly, don’t be afraid to ask for help. With Fresh’s newest animated music-driven surf comedy Stoked, we leaned heavily on the expertise of our sister company, Elliott Animation, to create a look that’s never been seen before in television animation. Studio head George Elliott worked with series director Faruk Cemalovic to combine Flash, traditional 2D and 3D animation techniques.

Stoked has begun its worldwide rollout on Teletoon in Canada and Cartoon Network in the U.S., and will soon launch on Disney XD across Europe.

All four partners at Fresh are established writer/creators. As such, we are heavily involved in the development and scripting stages of all projects. Each of our series features highly immersive online experiences including gaming, streaming video and UGC components.

Animation has the advantage of working well on just about any platform – traditional TV, phones, gaming consoles and the Internet. It will live just fine on DVD, VOD, SVOD, and all the other initialisms that will inevitably crop up tomorrow.

Conan O’Brien recently christened a new online time-waster that combines the features of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook – he calls it YouTwitFace. We should be seeing plenty of animation there.

Tom McGillis is president of Toronto-based prodco Fresh TV