Brad Danks is the CEO of OUTtv Media Global and an Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Victoria.
Danks is a frequent writer and speaker on the evolving media landscape, including the nine-part Beyond the Walled Garden series published in CARTT.ca between May and July 2026. 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 — Streaming for Australia, and the Thematic Streaming Coalition. He sits on the Board of Numeris and is a faculty advisor at the Centre for Digital Media in Vancouver. OUTtv Media Global has a direct commercial interest in some of the regulatory outcomes discussed here.
Nine articles, one argument, and a $600 million question: what should it actually fund? Brad Danks reflects on why he wrote the Beyond the Walled Garden series. What’s actually changed about how Canadian content gets funded? And where he thinks the policy debate goes next?
Read the series outside the CARTT.ca paywall here.
Broadcast Dialogue: For readers who haven’t followed all nine parts closely, give me the one-paragraph version. What’s actually broken?
Brad: Canada built a walled garden. Cable and satellite companies controlled how audiences reached content, foreign programming came in through Canadian services, and in exchange, broadcasters and distributors funded Canadian production. It was a closed loop, and it worked because we controlled all the distribution inside our border. The arrival of streaming platforms, starting with Netflix in 2010, began undermining the wall and eroding the structure of the system. Audiences now reach content directly through global platforms, and most of our policy conversation still doesn’t account for the impact of that streaming-driven distribution loss.
BD: You describe it as a “two-layer” problem in the series. What do you mean by that?
Brad: Layer One is production — making the content. Canada built that layer extremely well, over 50 years, at real public expense. Layer Two is what compounds after production: retained rights, direct distribution, audience relationships, data and measurement. Canada has essentially never built Layer Two, because our financing mechanisms were never designed to include it — the loss of distribution was never part of the equation. We finance the making of Canadian stories, then hand the part that keeps generating value to someone else. A single production can generate value across several windows; a company with retained rights and direct audience access can compound value across every title and interaction. Over a decade, the investment in Layer Two builds a much more valuable business.
BD: Where does AI fit into that argument?
Brad: It’s the accelerant, not the cause. AI is pushing down the cost of producing, localizing, dubbing and translating content, fast. Once content gets cheap and abundant, the ability to make it is no longer scarce, and the ability to reach the right audience with it becomes the issue. Everything AI does makes Layer Two more valuable and any single production less valuable on its own. If public funding remains concentrated on production while value moves downstream, the gap compounds every year it goes unaddressed.
BD: Underneath all of this is a funding question. How is the money behind Canadian content actually different today than it was under the old system?
Brad: It’s a completely different kind of money, and that isn’t widely understood. In the Walled Garden, Canadian broadcasters made high-margin profits licensing U.S. content, because their licences gave them close to a monopoly on access to the Canadian market. In exchange, they were required to put money back into the system — Canadian programming expenditure obligations, and payments to the CMF through the BDUs. That was a cross-subsidy: a virtuous circle, funded entirely inside the industry, with every party in it Canadian. Crucially, both the broadcaster and the BDU held licences, and the obligation was written into the licence itself. That gave the regulator real leverage: you get this licence, which lets you make considerable money, on the condition that some of it comes back. It was a negotiated exchange struck at the point of entry, not a condition bolted on afterward.
The Online Streaming Act tries to add a second leg to that stool: contributions from the streamers. But streamer revenue isn’t the same kind of money, and the deal behind it isn’t the same kind of deal — which is part of why streamers are pushing back. A Canadian broadcaster’s profit came from being handed close to a monopoly over somebody else’s content — American content. A streamer’s Canadian revenue comes from selling its own content directly to Canadian subscribers, and it never needed a licence to do that — the internet gave it access to the market for free. So the obligation is being attached after the fact, to services that had already built their position in this market, rather than granted in exchange for a licence at the point of entry. It’s really a market access fee imposed after the fact, which is a big part of why it’s ended up in trade discussions rather than being absorbed the way broadcast licence conditions were. I’m not saying it isn’t justified — but it’s a harder case to make than the original concept, which was really built on the scarcity of distribution in the Canadian market. That old scarcity — the regulator’s control over licensed access to Canadian distribution — is gone. What’s scarce now is different: audience access, discovery, and the data behind them. The regulator doesn’t have the old thing to offer in return, and it hasn’t yet worked out how to leverage the new one.
BD: So if that leg of the stool doesn’t work the same way, what’s actually happening to the money?
Brad: The Canadian side of the system is shrinking. Linear subscriptions have been falling for well over a decade off the industry’s peak, and CMF’s own numbers show BDU contributions down by roughly 40% since 2014-15. Government has been topping up the difference — that’s what articles eight and nine were about. But here’s the part I think gets missed: the old cross-subsidy was a reallocation within the system — the industry funding itself, money moving from one part of the business to another. The government top-up is tax revenue from entirely outside that system, and for years it’s quietly masked how much the underlying structure has already declined. Now that government money is more than half the total, that math changes. They’re not backstopping the system anymore. They’re the majority funder — which gives them both the right and the obligation to ask what they’re getting for it.
BD: Does that change the urgency of your argument?
Brad: It’s the whole reason the argument matters right now. My argument all along has been that we’re focused on Layer One — the production side, particularly the CMF — and ignoring Layer Two. That didn’t matter much when the money came from industry cross-subsidy; broadcasters and BDUs were spending their own money, and how they prioritized it was largely their call. That calculation changes once the money is coming directly from government, and government is now the majority funder. Nobody has articulated a plan for when, or whether, that top-up ends — right now it looks open-ended, tax dollars covering a structural gap with no exit. If public money is going to carry the system, it should be invested in building something that can eventually sustain itself, not just in topping up Layer One forever. That’s the difference between a subsidy and an investment.
BD: You disclose in every single piece that OUTtv has a commercial interest in the regulatory outcomes you’re writing about. Why lead with that instead of downplaying it?
Brad: Because it’s true, and because it would undermine everything I’m saying if I pretended otherwise. I’d rather the reader know exactly where I sit and judge the argument on its merits than have someone discover it later and dismiss the whole series. And frankly, having something at stake is part of why I could write this with the level of detail I did — I’ve lived the distribution side of this problem for years, not just theorized about it.
BD: Article nine argues the CMF can’t fix this alone — that it’s really a decision for Canadian Heritage and Minister Miller through the single screen agency review. What happens if that process doesn’t take up the argument?
Brad: Then the default wins, and the default isn’t neutral. The $600 million has been announced, and the implementing directive being drafted this year is the actual point of decision. If that new capital just flows into the existing envelope architecture, that doesn’t pause the reform question, it answers it — in favour of the status quo. We don’t have time to wait for another cycle, and certainly not for the CMF’s four-year plan. We need to start moving in the right direction now. To be blunt about it: we need to fund what’s sustainable while we still have both the money and the time to fix the system — because once budgets and institutional expectations adjust to an architecture as built, it’s very hard to unwind. That window closes sooner than most people realize.
BD: If you had to boil nine articles down to the one recommendation you most want a policymaker to act on, what is it?
Brad: Direct a meaningful share of the $600 million to Canadian-controlled companies that own direct audience relationships, as its own dedicated stream with its own eligibility and outcome measures — not folded into the existing architecture. Apply a simple test: does the recipient retain meaningful rights and direct audience access, and does the investment create a Canadian-controlled asset whose value can grow across titles, territories and time? That’s it. It doesn’t ask for new money. It asks for a share of a commitment already made, deployed against outcomes that last.
BD: Last question on the near term. Is there anything you’re watching between now and the fall that could change this whole calculus?
Brad: Yes — the run-up to the fall budget. Two things are still genuinely open: the final amount available to the audiovisual sector, and how it will be allocated. What I’ll be watching most closely is the split between the two — how much of it ends up defending what already exists, and how much gets pointed at building what comes next. That split is really the whole argument of this series, playing out in real time.
BD: There’s also a recent story out — an 11-member federal advisory panel on the audiovisual sector has reportedly been asked to sign confidentiality agreements. Does that surprise you?
Brad: I don’t want to speculate about a process I’m not part of, and I don’t know what’s being discussed in that room. But the fact of it tells you something on its own. Ottawa has an eleven-person panel reportedly looking at exactly the questions this series raises, including whether the NFB, Telefilm and the CMF should be merged, and it’s doing that work under NDAs. Put that together with the budget question, and what you’re looking at, clearly, is a government pressure-testing some real ideas before it commits — which is a good thing. It’s a government that is still genuinely deciding. If anything, it reinforces the argument I’ve been making across all nine articles: every institution in this sector needs to be reviewed and realigned at the same time, because right now, nobody outside a closed room knows which pieces are on the table.
BD: Is there a more optimistic reading of that?
Brad: There is, and it’s worth saying plainly. This is a government that has shown real appetite for investing in infrastructure with long time horizons elsewhere in the economy. If the government finally takes on rebuilding the system into one that’s more sustainable for the long term, that will be a huge win for the industry. My concern is the narrower one I’ve already laid out: the current architecture has been propped up by federal top-ups for several years now, and those top-ups have quietly masked how much the underlying system has already declined. If a review happens without confronting that directly, we get a new name on an old structure. If it confronts it honestly, this could turn out to be the most consequential year our media system has had in a generation — in a good sense.
BD: You’ve been in this industry for more than 30 years. Has anything felt like this moment before?
Brad: There are certainly more factors in play now than at any time I can remember. Streaming has been eroding the linear cable system for more than fifteen years, so that part isn’t new, but it’s still a major disruption on its own. Add AI on top of that, and things get much harder to manage. Meanwhile, the government and regulatory response has been so unclear that, put together — yes, this is unlike anything I’ve seen in my career.
BD: Is there anything you’d revise if you were starting the series over today?
Brad: I’d sharpen one point, not change the argument. Layer Two isn’t distribution alone — it’s retained rights, direct audience access, data and measurement together, and I’d have made that clearer from the start. Beyond that, no, and I get asked this a lot. The CMF timing landed exactly where it needed to. The concept all along was that this was a start, not an end. Nine articles is an introduction to an argument that’s going to be built on for years, not a closing statement. There’s a lot of work still to do — our institutions are badly in need of reform, and that doesn’t get solved in a single series, however long it runs.
BD: Let’s conclude by looking forward. Article seven talked about Europe moving from regulating for participation to regulating for leverage. Has that continued to develop since you wrote it?
Brad: It has, and faster than I expected. In June, the European Commission launched what it’s calling a Technological Sovereignty Package — real money and real policy aimed at building European capacity in cloud, AI compute, chips and open-source infrastructure. That’s not instead of the platform rules Europe already has, it’s alongside them. The Commission was still investigating the dominant cloud providers under the DMA the same month it announced billions in cloud and chip investment. Europe worked out that regulating a market you don’t control is not the same thing as building an alternative to the parts of it you’re missing. Those are two different tools, and you need both. Participation ensures contribution. Leverage ensures outcomes.
BD: Is that the same argument you’re making for Canada — build the infrastructure, not just regulate the platforms?
Brad: It is, and I want to be precise about what I’m arguing, because it’s easy to hear this as picking a fight with Amazon, Apple or Google, and that’s not it. Those companies built extraordinary infrastructure, and Canadian content reaches audiences through it every single day — that’s not going away and it shouldn’t. Europe isn’t trying to out-build Amazon’s cloud either. What they’re doing is making sure they have their own capability in the layers that matter most, so they’re a participant with leverage, not just a market. Canada’s version of that is distribution, audience data, rights infrastructure and measurement that Canadian companies own. We don’t need to replace the platforms. We need to stop being entirely dependent on them for the parts of the system that determine who gets discovered, who gets paid, and who owns the relationship with the audience.
BD: Do you have an example of what that looks like in practice?
Brad: A few, and none of them are exotic. France built its own public-sector software platform, and it now has more than half a million people using it every month — not because it’s anti-American software, but because a government decided it wanted its own capability instead of permanent dependency. Germany has done something similar at the federal level. None of that required kicking anyone out of the market. It required deciding that some infrastructure was worth owning. That’s the model I think Canada should be looking at — not restriction, capability. Build the parts of the system we’re missing and let Canadian services compete on the strength of owning them.
BD: Any closing thought for readers?
Brad: Just the line I ended the series on: Canadians deserve a strategy for the future, not a defence of the past.
