Brad Danks | CEO, OUTtv Media Global
Part 3 of 7 – CARTT Series: Beyond the Walled Garden
Whenever Canadian media lands an international hit, our reflex is always, “How do we make more of those?” A show succeeds, the spotlight follows, and we assume all the system needs is more ambition, better marketing, or extra funding for lookalike projects.
That logic makes sense, but it’s only half the story.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: just because a show succeeds doesn’t mean the business does, or that Canada gains any lasting edge. Focusing only on big hits distracts us from where real value is created. Chasing content success without building the systems underneath keeps the creative sector forever dependent.
Content grabs attention, but it’s the systems that keep the value. That distinction is crucial to how Canada should invest.
The Trap
The core problem is what Bharat Anand (Dean of NYU Stern and author of The Content Trap) calls “the central fallacy”: believing that better or more popular content alone will fix structural problems. In harsh economic terms, content is mostly a customer acquisition cost. The real asset is the system that turns attention into lasting audience relationships – and sustaining economic value.
Streaming has already turned the market into a sea of content abundance: YouTube, TikTok, and social media add billions of hours of competing content daily, and Samsung TV Plus alone now offers more than 4,000 channels globally. AI is just starting to accelerate this even faster. Soon, the sheer volume of content will dwarf anything from the old linear TV days. As that happens, individual shows become increasingly substitutable. Audiences hop from service to service. Even the most beloved programs struggle to make a lasting impact if they exist outside a system designed to keep the audiences they attract.
A Canadian series can travel the world, earn cultural recognition, and bring in export revenue – but the underlying business stays the same. Any subscriber bump is temporary. When the show ends, viewers churn. The platform’s relationship with the audience dissolves because people came for the show, not for the service. This isn’t a failure of creativity. It’s a failure of system design.
The economics are simple. When a Canadian series is licensed internationally, the license fee is real, but limited. The platform that carries it is the one that gets the real prize: the subscriber, the data, the lower churn, and the next recommendation. In an AI-driven world, those audience relationships get more valuable over time. The license fee doesn’t.
But the problem goes even deeper. Sometimes a Canadian show can’t find a buyer in a given market – no broadcaster or streaming platform will pay a licence fee. But that doesn’t mean there’s no audience.
In today’s platform era, FAST channels, direct distribution, and global partnerships let us reach audiences directly, bundling content into a service that can go places individual shows can’t. The current funding system, built around licence fees as proof of demand, has no real mechanism to either recognise or support this approach. OUTtv’s distribution in Taiwan is a case in point: there is no broadcaster or streaming platform to license to directly, but Taiwan’s largest cable operator, Chunghwa, will carry a channel. The audience exists. The pathway exists. The funding system doesn’t recognise it.
Edge content – the genres and communities that give Canada its competitive edge – is especially suited to this model. Specialized audiences are scattered around the globe, but when you add them up across markets, they become powerful. When a Canadian broadcaster operates directly in international markets by running its own channels rather than licensing content to foreign platforms, it doesn’t need to depend on licence fees at all. Instead, it generates direct, ongoing revenue from subscribers and advertisers across those markets: a compounding stream that funds new production and builds a distribution position no single licence fee could ever match.
Canada’s traditional answer to the investment question has been the National Champion model: concentrate resources in big, vertically integrated players who can operate at a domestic scale. That made sense when distribution was scarce, when a few licensed broadcasters controlled access to Canadian viewers, and when the goal was to get Canadian voices on screen. But that approach no longer fits today’s competitive landscape. The general entertainment market is now dominated by a handful of global giants – Netflix, Amazon, Disney, and the new Paramount-Warner Bros. group – whose scale, budgets, and deep libraries Canadian companies can’t match. Competing with them, on their terms, is not a realistic path for a mid-sized market like ours.
But global consolidation has also created something else: a growing set of audiences that big platforms just can’t serve well. The UK saw this and focused on building depth and cultural distinctiveness instead of just chasing volume. Denmark did the same, investing in its national broadcaster’s local dramas rather than competing on scale. Neither tried to out-Netflix Netflix. And both built globally competitive content industries precisely because they didn’t follow the major platforms.
Canada’s strengths as a content exporter are often overlooked and underused. We have co-production treaties with nearly 60 countries. Our production workforce can create in English, French, Indigenous languages, and dozens of diaspora languages. We have deep expertise across drama, documentary, animation, and unscripted genres. And our talent consistently punches above its weight globally. These aren’t just cultural obligations – they’re competitive assets. However, every day without action, these advantages erode – claimed by platforms that move faster and systems that were built to scale.
AI is already lowering the costs of distribution and will soon start to meaningfully bring down the costs of production. The countries best positioned to serve fragmented global audiences aren’t those with the biggest catalogues, they’re the ones with the most authentic cultural entry points. Canada has these advantages. But our policy framework doesn’t recognize them as strategic assets or help us build on them. The real question isn’t whether Canada can compete globally; it’s whether we’re willing to compete where we actually have an edge.
Canada’s strategy shouldn’t be about size – it’s about precision. The audiences global platforms miss – those that are linguistically specific, culturally distinct, and community-rooted – are exactly where Canadian content can win. And this isn’t just about culture. New research on streaming shows that content for defined identities and communities performs differently: stronger discovery, higher retention, and less winner-takes-all. Canada’s precision is an economic advantage, not a consolation prize. It’s a far more defensible and cost-effective strategy than trying to copy Netflix’s massive investments.
Why Generalist Platforms Are Exposed
Generalist broadcasters and streaming platforms have their place in this ecosystem. Curated national services have demonstrated real international viability – reaching diaspora audiences, expat communities, and cultural enthusiasts in ways that purely algorithmic platforms cannot replicate. But when a specialized title performs well inside a general environment, it does so without the infrastructure to convert that affinity into long-term retention – because the environment was never designed for it.
Specialized and affinity-driven services operate on different principles. Their advantage is not scale but coherence – content that reinforces belonging, familiarity, and trust. Viewers aren’t just watching a program, they’re entering an environment built around a community they identify with. That depth compounds over time in ways a generalist service can’t replicate. But specialized advantage in an AI-discovery environment is conditional. Fragmented presence across a category is not enough. The services that win are those that become authorities in their space – a definitive destination, not one of multiple options. Canada’s affinity-driven strengths are real. The question is whether the system supports building that kind of depth, or simply encourages participation.
What Public Investment Means
Canadian policy has historically focused on supporting content creation and that made sense when production was expensive and distribution was limited to a handful of linear channels. But production costs are falling and global distribution is rapidly expanding. When both happen at once, the scarcity shifts. The new bottlenecks aren’t production or distribution: they’re rights retention, prominence and monetization. That is what policy needs to support.
In this environment, funding content without also funding the Canadian-controlled media or systems that distribute it is both a misallocation and a missed opportunity. Public investment goes in, but the infrastructure needed to turn that investment into lasting value remains underfunded. The result is predictable: cultural visibility may rise for a while, but dependence on global platforms grows, because those are the systems that circulate content and capture its value.
This does not mean Canada should stop backing projects with breakout potential. It means those projects should be embedded within strategies that strengthen Canadian-controlled ecosystems: services, brands, and distribution infrastructure that can convert attention into durable audience relationships and recurring revenue.
The question is not whether Canada can keep producing hits. It clearly can. The real question is whether we are willing to redesign the system to capture the full value those hits create, including the economic benefits that now disappear once the moment passes. In a global media economy defined by abundance, prominence and endurance are more important than spectacle. Systems that understand this will not just make great content, they will own the infrastructure that keeps it going.
There is also a structural tradeoff worth acknowledging. Co-production treaties are a genuine strength of the Canadian system – a risk management tool that makes ambitious projects viable when domestic financing alone cannot carry them. But co-production also distributes value. When a hit emerges from a multi-partner deal, the upside is shared across jurisdictions, broadcasters, and distributors – all of whom can legitimately claim credit. Schitt’s Creek and Corner Gas are celebrated as Canadian successes, and they are. But they also illustrate how the value generated by a breakout hit can fragment across multiple claimants before it has a chance to compound within a Canadian-controlled system. Co-production is better than holding no rights at all. The question is whether Canada is using these structures strategically to build toward greater ownership over time, or accepting them as a permanent ceiling.
In Brief
A hit show is not a business. It’s a customer acquisition cost – and the platform that carries it captures the real prize: the subscriber, the data, and the next recommendation. Canada’s instinct to chase more hits without building the systems underneath keeps the creative sector permanently dependent. The question isn’t whether we can produce great content; it’s whether we’re willing to redesign the system so the value it creates stays here.
Brad Danks is CEO of OUTtv Media Global and an Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Victoria. He is a frequent writer and speaker on the evolving media landscape. He represents OUTtv’s interests as a member of industry groups, including Beyond Mainstream – a global alliance of independent streaming companies advancing innovation and competition in digital media, and Streaming for Australia. Brad also sits on Numeris’ Board and is a faculty advisor at the Center for Digital Media in Vancouver.
HIGH QUALITY JOURNALISM REQUIRES AN INVESTMENT.
Cartt.ca publishes breaking news, in-depth feature stories, analysis, and opinion geared specifically for those working in the cable, radio, television, and telecom industries in Canada.
Breaking news, top-notch analysis and commentary is posted as it happens while twice-weekly newsletters compile those stories and deliver them directly to more than 4,000 industry subscribers. Cartt.ca offers credible journalism for the industry professional.
