MONTREAL – Just ahead of International Women’s Day, the National Film Board of Canada said that it has all but achieved its gender parity objectives set out two years ago when it pledged that half of its productions would be directed by women and half of production spending would go toward women filmmakers by 2019.
The NFB said that for its 2017-2018 fiscal year, defined as April 1, 2017, to March 31, 2018, 47% of the works completed were directed by women (with 38% by men and 15% by mixed teams), and 46% of production spending was allocated to…
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TORONTO – The Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA) has chosen Canadian artist, broadcaster and television producer/director Dr. Rita Shelton as its 2018 ACTRA National Woman of the Year.
The award is bestowed annually on an ACTRA member who uses her passion to support her fellow female ACTRA members and women within the audiovisual industry as a whole. Deverell (pictured) joins past recipients Shirley Douglas, Tantoo Cardinal, Sandi Ross, Mary Walsh, Jean Freeman, Amanda Tapping, Catherine Joell MacKinnon and Tina Keeper.
An ACTRA member since 1974, Deverell coordinated ACTRA’s earliest study on diversity, Equal Opportunities to Perform, in…
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TORONTO – CCEOC Inc. has rebranded its “best employer” award for the Canadian ICT industry to Canadian ICT Employer of Choice Award in an effort to make it more representative of the market and broaden the program's reach.
Formerly known as the Canadian Telecom Employer of Choice, the award is the only national program dedicated to identifying and promoting the best employers in Canada’s ICT industry. All businesses, non-profits and government organizations that compete in the ICT industry are eligible to apply.
Past winners include Mitel, Teksavvy Solutions, Xplornet Communications, Selectcom, TeraGo Networks, Advantage Tower, Execulink, Versature, and Infobip. Winners are…
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OTTAWA – The federal government has followed through on its commitment to top up the Canada Media Fund in the face of declining contributions from broadcast distribution undertakings (BDUs). Minister of Canadian Heritage Melanie Joly first made the announcement last September when she unveiled Creative Canada.
Budget 2018 has committed $172 million more dollars over five years, starting this year, to maintain the CMF’s funding” at 2016-2017 levels. CMF will receive $15 million this year, $29 million in 2019-20 and then $42.5 million in the following three years.
The Liberals noted that the actual amount of money will vary each year…
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FOR MANY DECADES, THE Canadian TV market had the luxury of being a walled garden protected by the limits of technology. We even carved out a national production industry and nurtured significant cultural achievements next door to the world’s largest content market.
Now, however, digitalized content has climbed over the garden’s walls and caused content markets to globalize and flatten.
We responded to this change with the defensive strategy of vertical integration. We tried to create barriers, concentrating our domestic market, but the problem was this just deepened our dependence on our domestic market and made us less competitive globally. We’ve…
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TORONTO – Classic Canadian content is striking a chord with domestic and international audiences as views to Encore+ surpass 1 million.
The YouTube channel showcasing iconic Canadian movies and TV shows said that some 14,000 YouTube users have subscribed to the channel and have viewed videos nearly 1.3M times, totalling more than 169K hours of viewed content, since its launch last November.
Encore+ currently offers hundreds of videos with more content being added on a weekly basis. New titles set to arrive in the coming weeks include A Kid’s View of Canada; Due South (season 2); Il…
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Part V in our series on rewriting the Broadcasting and Telecom Acts. An exclusive interview
BACK IN 1999, WHEN Pierre Karl Péladeau was the CEO of the world’s largest printer and a significant Canadian newspaper publisher, he didn’t know or care about the CRTC’s New Media Exemption Order, released that year. Why would he?
Back then, cell phones were still-new devices that primarily just made phone calls – which only about one in five of us owned.* Everyone got their TV off-air or via cable and just over a quarter of Canadians reported a home internet connection – upon which precious…
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TORONTO – CTV’s new music TV format The Launch is headed across the pond and beyond after Sony Pictures Television (SPT) acquired the worldwide distribution rights to the format.
Bell Media and Big Machine Label Group said Thursday that SPT’s production company, Electric Ray, is on board to produce the format in the U.K. The Canadian version of the show wrapped up this week, and its original songs have already surpassed 4 million streams worldwide, according to the news release.
Reinventing the music competition series genre, The Launch debuts a new and unique format, documenting an authentic, behind-the-scenes look at what…
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OTTAWA – The Federal Court of Appeal ruled late yesterday that a Montreal man was indeed enabling the pirating copyrighted content by making TV shows from Rogers, Bell and Quebecor available online through a website dubbed TVAddons – and that the search and seizure of evidence done in 2016 was done lawfully.
A lower court judge had originally sided with TVAddons owner Adam Lackman, but yesterday’s decision overturns that.
The appellants (Bell, Rogers and Quebecor division TVA and Vidéotron) have established “a strong prima facie case of copyright infringement for the purposes of the Anton Piller order sought, and the Judge’s…
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Part IV in our series on rewriting the Broadcasting and Telecom Acts
THE CANADIAN TV INDUSTRY faces a growing crisis. Financial contributions from the broadcast distributors to support the production of Canadian stories are on the decline. This is combined with the fact that online TV providers, namely Netflix, aren’t required to pay into the Canadian system like their Canadian competitors.
Since Netflix has emerged as a major competitor to traditional broadcasting services, many have called for the U.S. company to being paying into the Canadian system. Some have suggested taxing internet service providers is the best approach. Others have simply…
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