TORONTO – Winning the struggle to get Canadians to pay attention to the financial problems of content producers hammered by the digital revolution will depend on how the debate is framed, experts told a digital media conference Saturday in Toronto.
“Words matter and how we frame our thoughts matter, and how one frames an issue has a huge impact on the outcome,” Michael MacMillan, CEO of Blue Ant Media, a Toronto-based international content producer, distributor and channel operator, told the fourth annual Digital Media at the Crossroads conference.
“We’ve been attacking the CRTC for 40 years,” he said, and try to avoid being tarred with supporting a “Netflix tax” on over-the-top providers now when this subject is raised. “The problem is we’ve been confusing the role of citizen and consumer for a long time and the neo-liberal experiment for the past 40 years that sought to impose marketplace solutions on social problems, which goes well beyond the media industry.
“That absurd experiment plays itself out in pretty horrible ways in the Canadian media landscape, and I think we have to try somehow to refuse to define the issues in the way they’ve been defined for us… Trying to talk about a Netflix tax is stupidly ridiculous,” he said. “We should talk of a fair playing field … Unless we re-frame these issues in our terms we’re pooched.”
MacMillan was part of a panel at the end of the one-day conference in Toronto assessing suggested solutions raised by other speakers.
There was lots of agreement that somehow over-the-top U.S. providers like Netflix, Facebook, Google and others expected to come here should in some way be forced to pay their way. Or, as Heather Conway, executive vice-president of CBC English services put it, “If you benefit from the Canadian system you must make a contribution.”
Some supported an idea raised by former CBC executive Richard Stursberg that foreign-owned OTT providers be allowed to take advantage of Canadian tax credits for making productions here as long as those shows have Canadian themes. That’s the British model, he said. In other words, unlike Canada, Britain doesn’t reserve tax credits only for British film companies.
However, Carole Tongue, chair of the European Coalitions for Cultural Diversity, warned of following the British too closely. A producer has told her export revenues of British independent films have dropped substantially.
Conway warned the price will be foreign providers will also demand to have all the lucrative international sales rights. CBC co-produces the series “Anne” with Netflix, she noted, with the Canadian broadcaster only having Canadian rights. That’s fine, she noted, but a small Canadian documentary producer who wants Netflix as a partner would want world rights, and would be unlikely to get them.
“Trying to talk about a Netflix tax is stupidly ridiculous. We should talk of a fair playing field … Unless we re-frame these issues in our terms we’re pooched.”- Michael MacMillan, Blue Ant Media
One solution, said MacMillan, is giving tax credit preference to Canadian-owned companies.
Print media advertising has been suffering since the dawn of the Internet, and has only gotten worse with portals like Facebook and Google freely aggregating their content.
John Honderich, former publisher of Toronto Star and current chair of Torstar’s board, said one solution would be getting Internet sites to pay for that content, but it would take a change in Canadian copyright law “or threat of some sort of government action. That’s happening in Europe, he said and “once you do that Facebook and Google come to the table.
“Twenty countries around the world” – including Australia, he said — “have engaged Facebook and Google and had similar conversations. And normally what happens is when you do that they end up paying a licence fee to the content providers. Which is what we are saying: Pay for what you put on Google News. But it will only happen if the government brings them to the table.”
However, Tongue said that kind of pressure hasn’t worked in Germany or Spain, where providers have said, in effect, ‘Fine, we won’t carry your news stories.’
As for the layoffs at Canadian newspaper newsrooms, blamed on falling print revenue, Honderich said one solution might be for Ottawa to subsidize the Canadian Press news agency to hire reporters in towns where newspapers have closed.
Photo of, from left, Peter Grant, Carole Tongue, Michael MacMillan, by Howard Solomon.
