The hype around branded content says that the combined forces of audience fragmentation and advanced commercial avoidance technologies will have the effect of devaluing commercial spots to a point where advertising will need to look for an alternate common currency. Proponents insist that with its ability to integrate a brand’s message directly into the flow of programming, branded content is the best logical substitute.

The brief was very simple: Make the brand famous and make guys laugh out loud.

If there is a single message that federal regulators have been trying to get out to broadcasters in recent years it is that they need to better represent the multicultural reality of Canada.
This was a point driven home April 8 when the CRTC awarded new Southern Ontario over-the-air licences to Calgary-based Craig Broadcast Systems and Toronto-based Rogers Broadcasting. Both emphasized an ethnic component absent from the other competing bids.

Two new local stations in the Toronto market will cut into CHUM Television’s revenues by an estimated $12 million, the broadcaster says, forcing it to cut local programming.

With the U.S. Screen Actors Guild set to unilaterally impose its Global Rule One May 1, Canadian actors’ and producers’ representatives have seized this as an opportunity to take pot shots at each other.

As recently as four months ago, Toronto was being criticized as a barren wasteland in terms of mega-studio space – a place to eschew if you’re making $50-million-plus Hollywood productions and looking for a clear-span, state-of-the-art soundstage.
But at the current rate of new plan unveilings, the lament may soon be a distant memory.
Still, questions linger about the viability of two recently proposed mega-studios, not the least of which is whether they will get off the ground at all.
On April 4, the government of Ontario announced it will lease 350,000 square feet of the former R.L. Hearn Power House on Toronto’s portlands to a new studio consortium.

The CRTC altered the national broadcast landscape earlier this month by awarding a southern Ontario TV licence to Calgary-based Craig Broadcast Systems.

When the North American economy began to slow early last year, commercial production was one of the first sectors to feel the drag. That trend appears to be holding as economic indicators out of the U.S. point to recovery and, true to form, production work appears to be picking up as well.
Commercial producers have been seeing a lift in both board flow and true production out of domestic and U.S. agencies since late January, and many report more shooting days through February than over the same period last year.

So, they say the recession is over. And we barely felt it.

With foreign sales slowing, Canadian broadcast production is turning attention to what many believe is Canada’s greatest unrealized resource: comedy.
While sketch comedy, one-hour dramas and documentaries have long been the staples of homegrown production, there has been less emphasis traditionally on broader narrative-style comedies in this country. But that is about to change.
Canadian viewers can expect to see a new crop of sitcom-style programs premiering in the fall plus an assortment of innovative comedy series and specials up and down the dial.

Should Vision TV’s Lord Have Mercy get the green light from its funding sources, the new series will be the only true-to-form sitcom – three cameras, studio audiences and only a handful of sets – being produced in Canada.

The situation for young directors is nearing a crisis point as work in Canada has all but dried up and commercial production companies are forced to focus on channeling what little work there is to their established helmers.
The board flow has in fact become so slow for neophytes that the fate of the 2002 First Cut Awards – presented annually to directors with less than two years in the business – is up in the air.