It would have been just one bad part of an overarching very silly policy. Exempting it from the policy regime I suppose makes the policy a bit more tractable. But it also makes it a lot less potentially funny.
New Zealand's government supports the creation of cultural content by paying for it through various grants. TV stations and streaming services can then run it, or not, as they want.
Canada does things the dumber way. I'm sure they also have direct subsidies. But they also have Canadian Content regulations that prescribe the proportion of each day's broadcasting that must be Canadian content.
It was bad enough in the linear TV era. The ridiculousness of it all had the excellent SCTV pad out the extra couple of minutes of the Canadian version of the show (fewer ads than on the US side) with a very explicitly Canadian segment: the most over-the-top CanCon possible. Bob and Dough MacKenzie - the hosers.
The first segment including them had a lengthy scroll after the segment explaining how the segment meets official Canadian guidelines for what counts as Canadian content and was almost as funny as the MacKenzie brothers.
That was fifty years ago now - or thereabouts.
Times change.
A decade ago, Canada decided that its regulatory reach extended to the entire internet if the internet could be viewed from Canada. If you wanted to stream to Canada, you'd have to meet CanCon rules. Quite how to make that work when people choose what they want to watch and plenty of potential platforms might not really care what Canada things about anything - well, they've been taking a while figuring out how to apply the principles.
And they've finally decided that, despite or perhaps because of the uniquely Canadian content that might be created, to great hilarity, to meet the rules, the CanCon rules will not apply to pornography streamed in Canada.
This has long been one of the more onerous demands of the CRTC, given the relative dearth of erotic media that would meet their terms as “Canadian content.”
Under the CRTC’s definition of the term, it’s not enough to have a Canadian performer or a Canadian setting.
Rather, it’s determined via an elaborate “points” system that, among other things, requires the producer and at least one of the lead performers to be able to prove Canadian citizenship.
At least three quarters of the financing must also come from “Canadians or Canadian companies.”
In extreme cases, this means that a video of a Canadian couple having sex in Canada and directed by another Canadian would not qualify as Canadian content if only 74 per cent of the financing was provably Canadian.
Whenever one despairs about policy in New Zealand, Canada and the UK provide superb reminders that the rest of the world generally remains even worse.
Meanwhile, Australia's looking to impose Australian-content mandates on streaming services.
The federal government has put laws requiring streaming services to produce Australian content back on the table after postponing them due to concerns about how they would interact with Australia's trade agreement with the United States.
The government has confirmed it will introduce legislation this week to mandate that any streaming services with more than 1 million Australian subscribers must produce Australian drama, children's, documentary, arts or educational programs.
I wonder whether there are enough subscribers to any single platform for Australia to run into Canada's difficulties here. It would be very funny if there were.
No comments:
Post a Comment