Interactive Media – The CMF

If you’ve been keeping up on the previous articles, you’ll have already seen a discussion of film and television. Hopefully we have a pretty decent picture of how they differ significantly between the Hollywood model based on sales and profit, and the Canadian model which relies on government subsidies.

There is a third aspect to this discussion however, that goes right back to the sixties. It’s a then little-known technology being dreamed up by scientists working on a project called ARPA. To put it in perspective with our timeline, this is 12 years after the golden age of the American movie studios ends, and it is about 7 years before the Canadian CRTC will create Telefilm.

The technology is different. It relies on distributed networks rather than single point broadcast stations like television or radio. The makers envision a world-wide network of communications. But it will take another 30 years before it begins to become possible.

As communications go, this world-wide web of information sharing looks pretty pathetic in 1990 compared to television or even film. And compared to the period between 1950 and 1960 when Americans adopted television, it seems to have taken a long time to get created.

However, while it took the world-wide web a relatively long time to be created, when it finally does launch, riding on the wave of personal computers suddenly appearing everywhere, it grows at an alarming rate, and it grows globally, mostly unhindered by regional regulations like earlier medias had to contend with.

By the year 2000, a mere 10 years after appearing, there are 20 million websites on the world-wide web. Unhindered, unchecked, content producers for the web fracture off from both the Hollywood model in the USA and the government subsidized model in Canada.

For once, American producers and Canadian producers are relatively the same! In fact it is safe to say that to the average consumer, the country of origin is mostly invisible!

The web progresses far too fast for regulatory bodies to know how to handle it, even in Canada. Think about our timeline. In the year 2000, the dot-com bust happens and the bottom falls out of a lot of internet-based businesses. It looks like this thing might not be as carnivorous as it initially appeared.

Yet in 2005 a little site with a strange name is created. Youtube is a video-viewing service, one of any number that launch around the same time. Perhaps it is remarkable only for the founders who create it, three former employees of ebay, one of the few dot-coms to come through the bust and thrive.

On April 23, 2005 the first piece of content is uploaded to Youtube. By any standards of traditional media it is crap-tacular – one of the founder’s trip to the zoo. It features no actors, no story, no narrative. Yet within a year, 65, 000 new videos are being produced and uploaded by visitors every day.

Within three years, the former powerhouse studios of traditional media such as MGM are looking to deal. And by October 2006, the site is acquired by search giant, Google for 1.6 billion dollars. In less than three years, it will have a viewership greater than that of any of the US networks (which took them 40+ years to acquire)

In no way are the Canadian governmental bodies like the CRTC equipped to handle such widespread and rapid deployment of content.

And so, the interactive content developer goes off on their own path, relatively unaware of the life of the traditional content producer in Canada. They develop a separate language, separate criteria for success, and completely different revenue streams. For the most part they answer to nobody, and learn to get by without the usual funding sources.

Keep in mind that it is around this time that the CRTC is attempting just to deal with television and trying to make up some of the ground lost to our American friends. The last thing they need is yet another medium, utterly strange in appearance and unpredictable in it’s growth.

And that brings us forward to today friends. In 2009 a plan was created by the Minister of Canadian Heritage, James Moore, to clean up the Canadian Television Fund by dissolving it into the newly created Canadian Media Fund. But the CTF was not the only fund to be consolidated – the Canadian New Media Fund was rolled in as well. It was one of the few funds supporting interactive media, and as tiny as it was compared to the CTF this move marked the first concerted effort by the Minister to bring together all the medias into one place.

The CMF is regulated by Telefilm, the group who created the CTF in the first place. When the CMF went live on April 1 2010, new regulations also kicked in. Chief among these was an insistence that any Canadian media production funded by the CMF would be required to launch across more than one distribution platform. In layman’s terms – no interactive, no money!

A short grace period of one year existed, during which traditional producers could get by with very simple interactive media accompanying their productions. But in 2011 that period has ended, and many producers are now left perplexed as to what this new requirement means for them.

And so we’re now full-circle with the conversation that started this whole history lesson. We have traditional and interactive producers, at long last in the same room, starring squinty-eyed at each other. And nobody is quite sure what to say.

Where does it go from here?