Cookie Jar iTV proposal draws CFC support

Cookie Jar Entertainment has submitted an application for an interactive educational channel in both official languages. Ana Serrano, director of the Canadian Film Centre’s Habitat New Media Lab, recently expressed her support for the proposed channels in her comments to the CRTC, excerpts from which appear below. Dedicated to the training, production and research of compelling interactive experiences, Habitat is a hybrid educational institute that incorporates the intellectual rigor of post-graduate university curricula with the results-driven intensity of a production studio environment. For the past seven years, Habitat’s original design for new media education has achieved the following: over $12 million dollars worth of support have been garnered from both private and public sectors; produced over 50 interactive prototypes in a variety of platforms and genres; 80% of our graduates are in leading management positions across a variety of industry sectors including broadcasting, ICT, and advertising; 26% of our graduates created media start-up companies of more than three employees; 15% of our interactive prototypes are currently in different stages of commercial development...and; in 2001, we received $5 million dollars for the Bell Globemedia Content Innovation Network, a partnership with the Banff Centre For the Arts and Institut National de L’Image et du Son to create a pan-national, bilingual incubator for new media projects and emerging companies. To date, Habitat has delivered on its promise to seed the emerging new media industry with leaders and with innovative cultural content. In order to keep apace with this promise and with the rising global interest in ITCP, the current Canadian new media environment must continue to make forward-thinking investments (such as the ones it took in supporting Habitat), and grow its capacity for innovation. Part of this innovation strategy requires Canada to support not just the creation of indigenous content, but also to support the growth of indigenous, ingenious distribution channels for such interactive content. Cookie Jar’s @cademy TV integrates three pillars in what ought to be part of Canada’s new media innovation strategy: @cademy TV will be building integrated, cross-platform, interactive original content produced by Canadians for Canadians and global audiences who care about quality programming. @cademy TV will be building Canada’s first integrated distribution platform solution that embraces the ways in which technology and business models have evolved in the past ten years. @cademy TV will be creating much needed learning programming for young children that leverages the power of digital networked media. I have not had the pleasure of supporting a licence application that speaks to all the things that I believe everyone in the Canadian industry ought to be doing: supporting Canadian new media production talent; creating new distribution and business models; and last but not least serving the learning needs of a demographic that are largely ignored by mainstream media. I am in full support of Cookie Jar’s licence application for @cademy TV.

Cookie Jar iTV proposal draws CFC support

News | 12/22/2005 5:00 am EST

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