CANNES – You know those many reports of the death of Canadian TV you've been hearing about? Ignore them. Canadian TV is alive and well, as evidenced by last week's Canuck contingent in Cannes for the annual MIPCOM TV bazaar.
The dark clouds that hang over Canadian TV were nowhere to be seen on the Rue de Croisette, next to the beach in Cannes, where radiant sunshine reigned after deadly flooding that had turned roads into rivers on the eve of the world's largest TV market.
Canadian heavy-hitters were among the thousands of buyers and sellers streaming to and from the giant Palais des Festivals, or regal seafront hotels like the Carlton, the Majestic and the Martinez, each hoping they have cooked up the right TV shows to play to a global audience.
"Yes, we're a broadcaster in Canada. But that's a means to owning rights to programming to sell around the world," Raja Khanna, CEO of television and digital for Blue Ant Media, told Cartt.ca.
He's not alone.
Jet-lagged Canadians filled all three levels of the Palais after late-night studio dinners and bar-hopping to get on the deal-making dance floor in Cannes. Many came with product from production bases in Los Angeles and London, and most are eyeing co-productions with foreign partners. Everyone is scouring the annual French Riviera TV market for buyers from conventional and cable networks, pay-TV channels and catch-up streamers to buy their series.
To be sure, homegrown Canadian talent is part of their elevator pitch, but so too is flaunting new international relationships and partnerships, like being able to structure a TV co-production like the back of your hand. "The companies that understand their bread isn't necessarily buttered just in Canada have been coming here for years," Brad Pelman, CEO of Fremantle Corp., explained.
The Canadian biggies are no strangers to disruption after the CRTC's recent Let's Talk TV decisions and the prospect of cable unbundling and losing simultaneous substitution of U.S. Super Bowl commercials.
Scratch beneath the surface bravado of Canadians in Cannes being smart, aggressive and competitive as they target linear channels competing with SVODs like Netflix and Amazon, and you find indie producers and distributors buying and selling series catalogs in a climate of fear.
"International is key. If we just think locally, we won't be able to create content." – David Miller, A71 Productions
"Everywhere, TV markets are seeing the amount of money they have shrinking. International is key. If we just think locally, we won't be able to create content," said David Miller, president of Toronto’s A71 Productions.
Canadians in Cannes last week exploiting foreign markets were doing so because the much-vaunted digital future is already with us, just unevenly distributed. MIPCOM, with keynotes and meetings with top execs from Hulu, Facebook, AOL, Spotify and Full-stream, brought home to Canadian producers who are developing content to be pushed onto and pulled off of the Internet or mobile phones, that everything is wide open and up for grabs.
“You work for an audience that could be worldwide. It's not just for Canada or for the States. It's more about who you're targeting and the content you're targeting," Telefilm Canada executive director Carolle Brabant, told Cartt.ca.
Not surprisingly, confusion and ambition abounded as Canadian digital producers and distributors look for new business models in Cannes and new and different types of business relationships. "We want to bridge the traditional and the digital," said Shahrzad Rafati, CEO of Vancouver-based BroadbandTV during a MIPCOM keynote address in the Palais' grand auditorium. "And in the kids and family verticals, we want to do that to create the next Disney," she added.
Equally, it was about spotting new business models for high-end dramas that, again, appeal to global audiences and expanding digital and online pipelines.
Canada Media Fund president and CEO Valerie Creighton pointed to the recent pact between Netflix and Rogers Media to co-finance the Canadian survivalist thriller Between, with the U.S. streamer putting in the biggest license fee. "That would have been an unheard of model a couple of years ago," she said.
David Cormican, executive vice president of Don Carmody Television, a co-producer on Between, agreed that, in this new digital order, duets will be central to financing TV series, and without well-matched partners, projects may not make it to camera.
"Rogers put in a very aggressive bid, so we had an order of six scripts to write, and we partnered up with Netflix, they had the scripts to read and that's what led to pushing us into production," Cormican recalled.
