Like any good dinner party, it’s the mix of guests that can make or break the night.

An industry panel is no different: like a tiny, hour-long Hunger Games, alliances form, attacks are made and repelled and sometimes the action spills out of the ring.

All of the above were on tap at Prime Time in Ottawa Thursday, as five of Canada’s top broadcast execs once again lined up to pit speaking points against speaking points in a particularly fraught year for the Canadian broadcast landscape.

On the “Getting Ahead of Change” panel were Bell Media president Kevin Crull (also a Friday keynote speaker), eOne Television CEO John Morayniss, CBC head of English Services Heather Conway, new Corus CEO and president Doug Murphy and Blue Ant Media CEO Michael MacMillan.

Trading barbs across the table throughout the session were Crull and MacMillan, representing the big media corp and indie underdog, respectively.

On Netflix: “Eight or nine dollars a month doesn’t pay for the content that people are enjoying today,” said Crull. “Netflix is an artificial economic model, and one third of it is based on piracy. It’s really sad that it’s establishing the expectation that that kind of behaviour is going to support the kind of content that viewers are responding to.”

MacMillan: “Then why do you charge so little for Crave TV?”

The panel criss-crossed throughout on two tangents: the health of the Canadian broadcast “ecosystem” and the role of Canadian content and content creators in the global broadcast ecosystem.

Arguing repeatedly for reduced regulation were Morayniss and Crull.

Morayniss argued that he sees a global market receptive to Canadian content, but that the competitiveness of the content landscape today means a high bar – one that he sees reduced regulation as key to meeting:

“The Canadian creative brand needs to elevate in terms of promoting Canadian content on a global scale, not just in Canada. The content, as good as it is, needs to be better and I think one of the ways to do that is we need to have more flexible creative rules. I think the system that we had in place for 40 years, the points system, is too simplistic to determine ultimately what is Canadian and what is not Canadian.”

Crull repeatedly argued that in order for companies such as Bell Media to contribute to a “healthy domestic marketplace,” three things are key: “If we are to sustain, we are at a critical juncture. The frog is enjoying the warm water right not but it’s about to take our skin off. We need a legitimate and secure rights market, we need a level playing field with all participants and we need a light touch and a general free market.”

Conway, on the other hand, argued that a healthy domestic marketplace is one in which non-vertically integrated companies can afford to promote programming on the same scale as verticals. Having marketing spend built into funding structures is something “worth looking at,” she said.

“The promotion is critically important. And we don’t fund the promotion. When you have scale – and this is not a criticism, it’s an acknowledgement – when you have 40 channels over which to promote any one piece of content, never mind, an entire schedule, you’re in a pretty good place.”

Corus’s Doug Murphy boiled it down more simply, arguing that it’s about finding the best Canadian talent, regardless of where they live: “Our business hinges on the hit,” he said, recalling the joke that L.A. is the “third-largest Canadian city.”

“It’s our job as Canadian broadcasters to work within the points system and find [the Canadian talent] in LA and structure the deals – this is all the flexibility we need to create hit shows. At the end of the day a hit solves a lot of problems.”

In what perhaps is the strongest sign of the times, all execs on the panel expressed support for the health of the CBC, with Morayniss expressing his belief that the CBC should be a “hot bed of creativity and risk-taking.” But it was Michael MacMillan who launched into the most strident defense of the pubcasters’ place in the so-called healthy Canadian ecosystem, putting the onus on the public and the industry to call for more support.

“Unless we smarten up and give the CBC long-term, reliable funding, we’re all screwed,” he proclaimed. “It’s table stakes. I don’t think we are competitors to the CBC, none of us are. We are beside you, around you, but I think that collectively as an industry, we have to stop using the CBC as a whipping boy. It shouldn’t be. It isn’t. It’s been essential to developing generations of Canadian competitors. It’s a small amount of money per year folks, per capita, that goes to the CBC. They can’t nibble it to death.”