CMF guidelines pushed back three weeks, CTF president asks for patience

OTTAWA—The release date of the new Canada Media Fund (CMF) guidelines has been tentatively pushed back from March 1 to the third week of the month, Canadian Television Fund (CTF) president and CEO Valerie Creighton said Thursday. Creighton noted the change during a speech at the Canadian Film and Television Production Association’s (CFTPA) Prime Time in Ottawa conference. Announced by Heritage Canada in March 2009, the CMF was originally billed as an amalgamation of the CTF and the Canada New Media Fund (CNMF). However Creighton said the CMF is “not an amalgamation,” as both original funds will effectively cease to exist on April 1, the CMF’s official launch. “Be patient with us, it’s going to be messy the first year,” Creighton said. “But we will do our to get it in the door and get it back out to you with appropriate turn-around time, so we don’t lose our cue on this during the transition ... It is a transition year. It is a brand new concept and idea.” Details of the CMF’s strategic plan could not be revealed yesterday as the CMF’s board will be meeting next week to approve the fund’s recommendations. Around the third week of March, the CMF’s guidelines will be revealed, along with the broadcast “envelopes” to support special programs, she said. Creighton said the guidelines will be announced in the morning, to be followed by a town hall meeting with industry officials in the afternoon to work out the details. She said an outreach program will then be initiated across the country to deal with the industry’s needs. CTF vice-president of policy and stakeholder relations Stéphane Cardin, who also spoke at the conference, said the CMF will have two streams: convergent and an experimental. The streams will conserve the four-genre admissibility component currently approved by the CTF: drama, children’s and youth, documentary, and variety and performing arts. “The experimental stream’s purpose is to support the creation of leading edge, innovative, interactive content and applications that will be made by Canadian-controlled, for-profit companies,” Cardin said. “We are trying to keep the barriers of that program to an absolute minimum … It will be up to the applicants to demonstrate how and why they are being innovative.” Producers, broadcasters, Internet service providers (ISPs) and mobile wireless companies are all eligible for the experimental stream, Cardin said. The convergent stream will be dedicated to projects using a minimum of two platforms. “One of those must be television and an online component, a mobile component, or a game component, but essentially we’re talking about a digital distribution platform for audio-visual content,” Cardin said. To encourage digital content creation, the CMF will not set minimum value-for-license fee thresholds for digital platforms, Cardin said. “To be clear, we will not be setting any minimal value for each of these rights because we feel that there are a variety of business models out there,” Cardin said. During its first year, the CMF will accept digital projects in the convergent stream with “less of a rich, more static nature than what we will be looking for on a forward looking basis,” Cardin said. He said the fund’s managers hope to move away from video on demand (VOD) and online streaming towards more interactive content. In the future, VOD will be considered the equivalent of television broadcasting. “The distinction is that if you go that route to qualify in year one, we will not be funding costs associated with the creation of that content,” Cardin said. “If you do, right from year one, create rich, value-added content, we will be funding both the television piece and the media piece. So there is built-in incentive to try to go that route from year one.” Cardin added that the CMF plans to launch two programs in mid-2010. The first will support third-language programs based on the current aboriginal languages program. The second will be a recoupment sharing program to offer incentives to producers who “regularly return recoupment revenues to the fund.”

CMF guidelines pushed back three weeks, CTF president asks for patience

News | 02/19/2010 5:30 pm EST

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