MONTREAL – In its appearance Monday at the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage hearings, Quebecor Media took the opportunity to pat itself on the back for spending over $370 million on “cultural content” in 2008.
Calling the impact of its investment in cultural industries “substantial”, the Quebec media giant said that in fiscal 2008, it spent more than $373 million on developing, creating, producing, broadcasting and promoting Canadian content, making it the largest private producer of original content in Canada. The figure includes $123 million spent by its TVA Group on original television content for the Quebec market.
Describing its business model as “rooted in an unshakeable faith in local content and culture", president and CEO Pierre Karl Peladeau implied in a statement that the company’s investment may not be able to continue at this level during this “time of crisis and unbalanced regulatory framework”.
"However, our investments, particularly those by TVA Group, are being made in a time of crisis, when over-the-air television is seeing ongoing audience fragmentation and erosion of advertising revenues," Peladeau said. “They are also being made under a regulatory framework that unduly favours the specialty channels, granting them exclusive access to fees for carriage without placing them under the same obligation to invest in ambitious projects, such as dramatic series and big-budget variety shows."
Pierre Dion, president and CEO of TVA Group, said that the majority of its funds are spent on “genres that are critical to our broadcasting system”, such as television dramas, which he said “demand the greatest resources and, given their immense popularity with audiences, have for decades played an important role in fashioning our collective identity."
Quebecor is in support of fee-for-carriage for the over-the-air TV industry.
