Thursday, June 2, 2016

Do Borders Matter In A Digital World?

My original plan for this brief blog post was to point readers to an article I recently wrote for the CMF Trends Blog. Simply that. Then something arose the other day that added another dimension to the discussion. The topic for the piece I wrote is the fate of Canadian content -- and the related subsidy and quota systems for its creation -- in a time of Netflix, YouTube, streaming, torrenting, etc., and the full article can be found here. Meanwhile, in Europe, a similar debate has emerged.

More on that in a bit. But first, some Canadian content for you.

For readers outside of Canada the concept of CanCon, the catchy abbreviation for Canadian content, may be not only foreign but also a bit hard to get one's head around. The idea is this: That there is a mandated minimum on the broadcast schedules of radio and television entities across the country for music and television programs created by Canadians. This is part of Canada's Broadcasting Act, supported and enforced by governmental cultural institutions as well as industry partners such as radio broadcasters and cable and satellite companies.

Allow me to provide you with the most unintentionally successful example of Canadian content, created by Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas when they were informed that SCTV, the television show on which they appeared, was 2 minutes short on its CanCon requirements. Upon hearing this was the case, Moranis and Thomas are said to have jokingly responded with: "What...you want 2 guys sitting on beer cases, frying back bacon, and talking about donut shops? Will that do it?"


And so, a phenomenon was born, that led to catchphrases, a best-selling album, and a cult classic movie.

Most CanCon does not enjoy anywhere near this level of success, of course, fuelling ongoing debates about the usefulness and relevance of the governmental mandate in today's landscape of the all-you-can-eat offerings of Netflix and Spotify; not to mention the podcasters and YouTubers able to create content on a shoestring, with a reach limited only by the number of people that like what they're doing and are willing to publicize it via digital word-of-mouth. Competition now comes not only from the usual places, but from the most unusual places as well.

I thought of this conundrum as largely a matter of Canadian cultural politics until I saw this article, in which a department of the European Union "...proposes that video streaming services operating in Europe -- including Netflix, Amazon Prime, and HBO -- be forced to dedicate at least 20% of their local content offerings to European product, and to invest in some European productions....part of a larger effort to create a borderless digital marketplace stretching from Ireland to Greece..."



I'm not sure what a Euro version of Bob & Doug might look like...perhaps smartly attired, baguette-breaking Gitanes smokers, discussing the finer points of post-structuralism?

In the meantime, for those unwilling to wait for sweeping cultural reform or the end of geo-blocking, there's always VPNs.