Source : Globe & Mail

Independent TV producers want more home-grown shows on the air by James Adams

Canada's independent television producers are calling for "significant changes" to federal broadcast policy following the release today of a study that shows the country's big broadcasters are reaping huge revenues while the production sector languishes.

The study, prepared by Nordicity Group for the Canadian Film and Television Production Association, which represents about 400 companies, looks at relations between producers and the country's eight largest broadcasters and TV services, including BCE Inc. (which owns The Globe and Mail), CanWest Global and CHUM Ltd., in the years 1999 through 2004.

CFTPA president and CEO Guy Mayson is using the study as leverage in his organization's demand that Heritage Minister Liza Frulla start to spearhead a "new policy framework" for the country's TV industry, including more money to producers from broadcasters, improved tax credits, a redesigned Canadian Television Fund and programming expenditure requirements for conventional broadcasters.

Among the Nordicity findings:

In 2003 the earnings-before-taxes margin for Canada's largest broadcasters was 9.7 per cent, well above the 5.8 per cent average for the Canadian economy as a whole. In 2002 that margin for broadcasters was 6.1 per cent, while for film and TV producers, it was just 1.6 per cent.

In 2003 the country's largest broadcasters earned $4.8-billion from their conventional, pay and specialty divisions. However, with the exception of mandated contributions to Canadian content in their specialty divisions, their contributions to production supported by the Canadian Television Fund declined by 14 per cent between 1999 and 2004. (For example, foreign programming acquisitions for pay and specialty services cost broadcasters $251-million in 2003 compared with the $315-million spent on Canadian programming, a difference of 26 per cent.)

In 2004 Canada's private conventional broadcasters spent four times more on buying foreign programming, largely of U.S. origin, than they did on acquiring independent Canadian shows: $535-million versus $124-million. Of this, $354-million was spent on foreign dramas, with only $68-million going to Canadian-made equivalents -- a difference of more than 500 per cent.

In a release issued today, Mayson places much of the blame on the divergence between the broadcast and production sectors on the TV policy that was announced in 1999 by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. That policy required large broadcasters like CTV and Global to put more Canadian content in their programming and to help them do so, the CRTC expanded the definition of Canadian "priority programming" to include entertainment magazines, variety shows and documentaries. At the same time, the federal broadcast regulator increased the definition of prime time to include the hours 7 to 11 p.m. seven days a week (previously it was 8 to 11 p.m. Monday through Friday), and tossed out the requirement that broadcasters had to spend a percentage of their revenues on Canadian content.

The findings of the Nordicity study echo a report issued in July by the Coalition of Canadian Audio-visual Unions, which includes the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists and the Writers Guild of Canada. That report, titled The Need for a Regulatory Safety Net, calls on Canadian broadcasters to spend at least seven per cent of their annual gross advertising income on Canadian drama. It says that in 1998, before the introduction of the CRTC's new TV policy, private broadcasters spent almost $75-million on English-language drama; six years later, this expenditure had "bottomed out" at about $53-million, a decline of about 30 per cent.

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