In early 2008, I launched my first webdrama. It was small experimental and massively fun.
I have devoted many months since to figuring out a business model for creating web drama, a thorny problem especially for someone who has spent her life on the creative side of things. I would have preferred to spend the last couple of years experimenting with the medium, creating drama on the web, building an audience, but it’s hard to find even the small amounts of money I need for creating web drama.
There are various funding agencies who hand out money to producers of TV or film and even to help create cross platform components for old media productions. But finding money to kickstart stand alone digital is much harder.
I fear Canada is getting left behind. Other countries are turning out cool stuff hand over fist. We who were poised to lead the revolution just a year or two ago are just standing around watching the massive explosion of original digital entertainment getting made outside our country.
Every day I hear about new projects that are ready to go but for the financing. We’re not talking a lot of dough here. The average development budget for a TV series would produce a full cycle of a cutting edge digital drama with the potential to reach a global audience.
That global audience is one of the reasons the funding agencies should jump in here. In TV, our reach has been limited. With digital production, our potential audience is massive.
When I ran boymeetsgrrl, the first drama I created under the Story2.OH banner, within days, I had active participants from Indonesia, England, China, Israel, Australia. In a single week, my story spread far and wide. I didn’t have a distributor, a broadcaster, a funding agency, anyone helping with promotion or even very much content, but I was able to reach thousands of people on four continents. Imagine what I could do if I had some money and the resources it would buy me.
I was in the audience at NextMedia in the fall of 2007 when an executive of one of the ISPs argued against giving artists subsidies comparing it to getting them hooked on crack. I think an influx of government money will have exactly the opposite effect. We’re hooked on crack now. Television isn’t a sustainable industry, the Canadian audience isn’t large enough. On the other hand, a digital entertainment industry could be very profitable. It will help to turn art into business and make artists self-sustaining. If we can get into this marketplace while it’s still young, we can build a successful self-financing industry.
Without an early injection of cash though, we’ll have to continue working in the old media which will continue to cling to the funding life support systems.
With digital we have a real chance of building an industry driven by market forces. If we can reach 100 thousand… a million… 30 million of the 2 billion people currently connected to the web, we can make money, hire workers, pay taxes and entertain the world.
We just need a little seed money to get started.
The price of entry is still low, but it’s rising daily. Now is the time for government investment in digital at three levels: development, production and promotion.
We don’t want the digital boat to sail without Canadians on board.
