Ever since Netflix started producing its own content, video-on-demand streaming services have become some of the largest entertainment companies in the world. Likewise, the largest production houses and broadcasters pivoted to offer their own streaming, to market and distribute their movies, TV shows, or sports events on an international scale.
A majority of these services are based in the United States, but they use talent, crews, and locales from all around the globe. Now, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is looking at ways this gigantic industry could support homegrown talent in making film, music, and TV.
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How Streaming Relies on Canadians
Over the past decade, Netflix has firmly cemented itself as one of the most subscribed and most profitable entertainment platforms on Earth. It helped reinvent the traditional streaming business model by not just offering a library of aggregated movies and shows, but also producing its own in-house.
Naturally, this included a lot of collaboration with Canada for filming locations, crew, and talent. The movie business loves to use Canada’s sprawling forests or snow-white taiga, as it’s often closer than finding similar locations in Europe or anywhere else. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Canadians who were born and educated in Canada hop across the southern border to start a career in American media.
This includes some of the biggest actors in the world who have collaborated with Netflix for in-house productions, like Ryan Gosling for The Gray Man, or for distribution like Ryan Reynolds and The Adam Project. Being an international industry, it makes sense that some of the most famous Canadian actors have appeared in streaming service projects that raked in tens of millions of people and even more in profit. As neighbours, the US and Canada have closer ties with one another than most other nations, so more Canadians find their way into the industry than from places further abroad, like Europe or Asia.
The Great Streaming Boom in Canada
So far, we have just talked about Netflix, but since 2019 competitors like Amazon Prime and Apple TV+ have also burst onto the scene, each benefiting from a talent pool of Canadian actors, technicians, and other supporting roles. The arrival of these competitors was arguably the start of the great streaming boom, which pushed more people toward streamed media than ever before.
Since 2020, larger and larger audiences have been tuning in from countries all over the world as fierce competition ignited between leading streamers. Despite catering to an international audience, some services like Amazon Prime published its own Canadian originals library to highlight the contribution of Canadian creatives, and to signal boost Canadian media on the world stage.
While it may be happening at a larger scale today, it has been a long-standing tradition for Hollywood productions (and now streaming) to film in Toronto, Vancouver, and other Canadian locales. That’s how the term Hollywood North came into existence and became the namesake of our magazine. Now, however, organizations like the CRTC are looking at ways the streaming industry could help support talent in Canada at a local level.
CRTC’s Response to the Online Streaming Act
Though they are an independent body and the leading supervisor of broadcast and telecommunications content in Canada, the CRTC’s solution ultimately comes from the Online Streaming Act. In 2023, Bill C-11, or the Online Streaming Act, passed through the House of Commons and the Senate with royal assent. While it didn’t introduce its own terms, it opened the door for the CRTC to suggest conditions that broadcasters and telecom companies have to follow if they want to do business in Canada.
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Those terms came in the summer of 2024 when the CRTC announced that non-Canadian streamers would have to contribute more to support local Canadians in the areas where they do business. In particular, this meant giving 5% of the streamers’ yearly earnings if they made more than $25 million for that year.
That 5% would then be broken down into three separate funding avenues. The first 2% would go directly to the Canadian Media Fund. This is a joint partnership between the Department of Canadian Heritage and leading cable providers, who use this fund to get local projects off the ground. To that end, the streamers would be directly funding more content made in the country.
The remaining 3% is split in half, with the first 1.5% going to the Independent Local News Fund. Like the media fund, this is a similar initiative that intends to deliver localized, impartial news content to as many Canadian communities as possible. That last 1.5% would go towards producing content promoting underrepresented groups, from French-speaking content to Indigenous media.
By collecting this payment, the CRTC hopes to reinvest in Canada’s media industry based on the success of these streaming services, in exchange for allowing them to operate at Canadian locations. However, this approach hasn’t been finalized yet and has been challenged by some of the leading streaming services.
Only time will tell if this payment comes into effect, with or without amendments. If it does, Canadian directors and even music artists at the local level could find a stronger support base here, ultimately generated by streaming’s success in the country.