OTTAWA – As streaming giants continue to disrupt the traditional industry, a revealing exchange at the Canadian Media Producers Association’s Prime Time in Ottawa came Friday when, during a panel on negotiating today's deals, Noel Hedges, EVP at Entertainment One, was asked whether content distribution is still a good business.
"Yes, I think it is. I'm still here. For now," Hedges answered.
It was a familiar story told at Prime Time. It's so competitive out there as the industry's shift to streaming platforms that Canadian content producers, not finding enough scale or budget for their projects at home, have to go overseas to complete the distribution puzzle as never before.
"Cardinal (pictured) is one of the few TV shows that's not a co-production," Sienna Films co-founder Julia Sereny said of the CTV-developed and airing crime drama that today is distributed to over 100 international markets, including to Hulu in the U.S. and BBC in the UK.
"We definitely had a deficit, we did explore the idea of was this a co-pro? It really was not. We would have compromised the material to make it that," she recalled. So Sienna brought Cardinal to eOne, with whom it had a first-look deal, and they helped find an international audience for the homegrown drama.
eOne's Hedges said it's rare these days for the company to come on board as it traditionally has – after a Canadian producer had nabbed a domestic broadcast deal and was looking for that last international piece of the financing. Hedges insisted he usually starts conversations earlier, often at the one-page concept stage, well before a broadcast commission.
That calls for taking bets on the creative that weren't required before Canadian producers faced a global distribution landscape entirely in transition.
"If we find something from a really good producer, a really dynamic proposition, and we feel there's something we can do internationally, I will use every facet of the eOne machine to try to attach ourselves as the distributor in some way," he argued, whether that has eOne boarding as a co-producer or offering distribution coin.
"The conversations are happening earlier. We're getting more involved in financing, not only from the distribution advance, but helping put co-productions and pre-sales together. It's morphing more into the distributor being a co-financing partner," he explained.
On the movie front, Neil Shah, vice president of analysis at Vancouver-based film and TV studio Bron, said the international market for his film titles has grown in importance as the license fees global distributors are paying for indie titles has fallen in value.
"With that market being a bit softer, it's more than a challenge to make it up in the domestic market," Shah said.
