Canadian Media – The Full Mountie

Alright, the blog has been getting deep. We’ve looked at the Trivium, talked about Transaction Cost Economies, and looked at the effect of the Dot Com Bubble Burst. Let’s take it in a new direction. Let’s dive into the wild world of Canadian media production, and look at some of the pieces that make it all tick.

A history of media in Canada would look quite different from that of our neighbours to the south in the USA. Canada has been called a socialist country because of our many regulated services, but arguably this is most apparent in our media. I’ll cut straight to the point – media does not get made in Canada without government involvement, and almost always funding.

If you’re from the interactive media world (and began in it as I did), you might not be fully aware of the extent that the government is involved with all the Canadian television shows, radio, and print publications out there. That’s because interactive media, or rather the online distribution it is based on, is a disruptive technology to the other medias. Online distribution has evolved on a completely separate path from the rest of media, completely oblivious to the regulations and processes that have evolved around it’s more traditional cousin.

timeline comparison illustration

Think about it. Television, Film, and even radio and print production are highly regulated areas of media production. You have labour unions, trade associations, standards organizations, funding groups, and many more levels of assistance and moderation. Outside of the government involvement, you have the distribution companies – but it is hard sometimes to see where government ends and private for-profit company begins. Future articles will examine why this is so.

In the meantime, think about the difference in interactive media distributed online. Almost none of these regulatory bodies exist. You don’t really have Canadian Content rules. You don’t worry if your production is “broadcast safe”. You rarely need a “two pager” for your idea. And you’ve never had to think about union dues. Nope, your concerns are completely different.

You think about bandwidth. You worry about moderation. You plan to keep your channels from being fractured across multiple outlets and you carefully consider your brand message. And most of all, you live by your analytics. How many clicks? How much time spent? What are your search words?

From the standpoint of the film or television producer, all of that is babble-speak. Why? Because they never had to worry much about whether people were viewing their work, especially in Canada. It was always someone else’s job to track whether their production was getting the necessary views (and frankly the tracking of views was never that good, conducted by a small cross-section of people willing to participate in polling).

You wind up with two distinct groups. First you have the interactive media “developer” – someone completely concerned with analytics and media tracking who creates for maximum distribution and sees success in lots of visitors and interaction. On the other hand you have the traditional “producer” who is mostly unaware of analytics and tracking, whose primary concern is to achieve funding for an interesting narrative, and sees success in critical acclaim. The two goals are fundamentally different, and at each step along the production path, they will do things differently.

The two will not even have language in common. They might as well live on different planets. Take the term “development”. For the interactive guy, development is one of the last steps of the production process, when code is being written. But the term means something entirely different in film and television, where development is one of the first steps of the process.

The traditional producer lets the distributor worry about everything outside of the actual creation of the narrative. As a result, finding a distributor or combination of distributors is the primary mission. And linked to that (in Canada) is finding government funding – something only possible in almost all cases with the cooperation of a distributor. Even so, the distributor sees thousands of applications, and so this all-important step is handled (at least initially) with the creation of a one to two page document describing the concept of the production.

For the interactive guy, this whole process is entirely foreign, because for him (and this is a key point) distribution is a non-issue. Youtube is his distribution. The App Store is his distribution model. This means that he will not see directly eye-to-eye with the traditional producer because he is utterly unconcerned with something that is of major importance to his cousin from television or film.

However, the interactive producer is going to have a tough time of it should he venture into the world of the traditional media producer. Why? Well doing so is going to bring him in contact with government processes very foreign to him, composed in a language he doesn’t speak, and which largely do not address the things he is most concerned about. At the same time, every form he attempts to fill out, every meeting he attends, will be a very poor fit for him as they are all streamlined for the traditional producer and their goals. Many of them will not see his distribution method as a valid one since they fall entirely outside of the traditional distributors, who….and this is important…actually provide cash to the funds! Again, this is a big issue, so more on that in a future post.

So why would he do it? Why would the interactive producer with the online distribution model step outside of his free creative world where thought becomes product. He’s the master of his own destiny, bound only to his analytics and able to change course in a heartbeat. Why would he step into the highly regulated, slower-moving world of traditional media? Well, the answer is two-fold.

Firstly, the prime motivation would be money. Systems were put in place long ago to help fund film, television, and radio, and the amount of funding that goes to projects in these fields is enormous compared to the budgets of interactive media projects. It is literally more than ten times the size of funding going to the interactive side, and that is changing at a snails pace. The interactive developer has evolved processes that let him operate at what traditional producers would consider not even low-budget, but rather nano-budget or non-existant budget. It is impossible for him not to think ‘if I had even half of the budget of a low-budget film, I would make something that rocks the world’.

The second motivation is a social one. Many people working in interactive media, particularly rich media where video converges, have a secret desire to be recognized for their prowess in narrative. They want to rub shoulders with directors and producers, and they gaze at TIFF wondering when their work is going to get it’s due. They would love to get their hands on some of the amazing content made with those massive (from their view) budgets and remix them through interactive media.

But there is a problem with that second motivation. The traditional producers are not that keen on having the vision they have worked so hard on, in many cases slaved on for two years, remixed into interactive media. They do not want their property being altered by some Johnny-come-lately web dude with no sweat-equity in the production, who pops up when all the hard work (from their view) is done.

And so a stalemate occurs! And it’s a tricky problem, a big problem, and one that threatens Canadian media. Over the course of the following articles, we will look at more details and examine some of the efforts underway to unravel this tricky situation. There are people out there finding new opportunities and solutions every day, and it is worth shining a spotlight on some of them.