Brad Danks | CEO, OUTtv Media Global
Part 2 of 7 – CARTT Series: Beyond the Walled Garden
Canada’s media sector consistently produces strong creative talent, compelling content, and flashes of international success. The deeper issue isn’t simply decline, it’s that we haven’t redesigned the system to capture the new opportunities streaming and AI now offer. As a result, Canada keeps missing out on the real upside, time after time.
Canada invents, but rarely converts. We produce cultural milestones that spark briefly and then fade, rather than building momentum that endures.
Institutions need to adapt when technology shifts bottlenecks. When the CRTC and CMF were designed, production was the scarcity. That assumption is now eroding, but the institutions built around it remain. Innovation still happens, but just at the edges, while the centre clings to what it knows.
Two Kinds of Diffusion
Canada excels at spreading creative ideas: exporting formats, talent, and concepts globally. But we struggle to build ownership of rights, audience data, and real distribution leverage. That gap matters. Policy rewards the first, but it’s the second that creates long-term advantage.
This isn’t a mystery. Internationalising the business – owning the rights, building the distribution, following the audience – is what every successful media company at scale eventually does. The BBC did it. The major studios and global streaming platforms did it. The Koreans built an entire national strategy around it. Independent producers across Europe have done it deal by deal. The model is well understood. What’s missing in Canada isn’t knowledge of what works. It’s a system willing to back it.
We export creativity, but import control.
Just because we succeed creatively doesn’t mean we end up with stronger finances, greater ownership of rights, or greater distribution power. Too often, the real benefits slip away.
You can see this pattern in some of Canada’s biggest international hits. Schitt’s Creek built a global following on POPtv and Netflix. Orphan Black found fans worldwide through BBC America and BBC Worldwide. Heated Rivalry reached its biggest international audience on HBO. Canadian producers and broadcasters maintained connections with homegrown audiences, but it was the international platforms that forged direct relationships with global fans who showed up for these shows.
That difference matters more than ever. A domestic audience relationship brings in local subscription revenue and guides Canadian commissioning. But building direct ties with international audiences does something more:
- Unlocks global revenue
- Reduces churn across markets
- Shapes future commissioning on a greater scale
- Builds audience intelligence that compounds over time – especially in an AI-driven world
For Canadian producers, a licence fee is real revenue, but it’s a one-time gain. A global audience relationship however, grows in value every year.
The goal isn’t to give up our domestic audience, it’s to build the international relationship too. The trouble is, the current system has no way to do this, so we don’t even know what opportunities we’re missing.
Canadian media policy still acts as if it’s designed solely to spread creative ideas, but it keeps overlooking the need to build strong media companies – including in the small and medium enterprise (SME) sector. It focuses on content spending and exhibition rules for everyone, but the rules are weakest on distribution and ownership. New models are usually judged by old categories, not by how well they reach audiences, keep IP, or generate export revenue.
The Incumbency Bias
When new public resources are introduced, they tend to flow toward organizations already embedded in the system, where outcomes are legible, and risk is manageable. Large incumbents are optimized for equilibrium. Their mandates emphasize risk management, the protection of existing revenue streams and, in Canada, media cost reduction. A system that selects for equilibrium management is not selecting for global competitiveness.
Smaller, export-focused companies working at the margins often excel at experimenting, adapting, and learning. Their survival depends on ownership, direct audience connection, and rapid adaptation – not just rule-following. Yet policy rarely spotlights these qualities as models. Success at the edges is treated as an outlier, not as evidence of what actually works.
What the Data Suggests
Nordicity’s research for the CRTC on Canadian content discoverability is revealing. The main takeaway? The system has prioritized creating content for its own sake rather than connecting it to real audiences. Simply boosting production volume doesn’t achieve policy goals. The current system still rewards spending and size over innovation, domestic commissioning over global reach, and labour activity over IP retention. Now, AI accelerates this trend: as production, localization, and distribution costs drop, value shifts away from volume and toward IP, audience intelligence, and distribution power – areas where Canadian policy has lagged. Unless we redesign the system, that gap will only grow.
If we don’t make these changes, Canadian production may keep delivering creative work – but only for as long as the talent stays and the platforms still need it. The economic potential will remain chronically unrealized.
In Brief
Canada exports creativity and surrenders the value it creates. Platforms keep the audience, the data, and the compounding advantage. We consistently produce talent and international hits, but a system that doesn’t reward ownership or direct audience relationships will keep generating cultural moments that never add up to lasting economic strength.
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.
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