Thank you very much.
Epitome Pictures Inc. is a small business. We're a mom-and-pop shop: I'm the president, and my wife is the CEO. She's more important than I am, as it should be.
We have been in business for nearly a third of a century. We're a television production company. The one that you would know the most is the Degrassi series that we produce.
I'm also the chair of Orange Lounge Recordings, which is a record company that does the things that a record company does on the Internet, including using all the facilities available—the Topspins and the iTunes and every conceivable form of exploitation of digital rights.
We also do an innovative co-venture with Sympatico in which we produce video concerts of artists who come into Toronto. We bring them into the studio and do live sessions with them, which are then broadcast on the Internet. They're called Live at the Orange Lounge. Dozens of Canadian acts have done this. Some are well known, like Nelly Furtado and Avril Lavigne, while others are not as well known. There are many famous international acts, and I include Katy Perry, Amy Winehouse, the Pussycat Dolls, and OneRepublic. That's just to say I'm immersed in the digital world.
Coming back to the television production side, our Liberty Street series, which started in 1995, was the first series in the world to launch simultaneously on air and with a website. Our Riverdale series, which we started in 1997 and which starred some very famous and talented Canadians—including, most notably, Tyrone Benskin—was the first series in the world to launch a companion web video series. It was a weekly series and, in effect, a behind-the-scenes soap opera. The new version of Degrassi, starting in 2001, launched a groundbreaking website, at a cost of more than $1.5 million, to enroll fans in the Degrassi school and engage them in interactions with our fictional characters. In effect, it was a proprietary Myspace long before Myspace was ever invented.
Degrassi was the first series in the world to produce video webisodes presenting ongoing stories that featured our main sets, main cast, and main writers, and being shot with our main crew. Degrassi was also the first series to make full episodes legally available in Canada both for download and streaming. We've experimented with various alternatives since then, including making episodes available on the Internet prior to broadcast. Then we tried a week prior. We tried 24 hours prior; we tried 24 hours after; now we simply go simultaneous on iTunes and on the web. An entire season of Degrassi, which is now 45 episodes, is available in Canada on the MuchMusic website for free. There's advertising, but an entire season is available for the fans.
If you search “Degrassi” on Google, you'll get over 11 million hits. We have over three million “likes” fans on Facebook. Interestingly, if you search “Degrassi mashup” on Google, you'll get more than a million hits.
The list goes on. We have very active Twitter accounts where our writers provide Twitter feeds for our characters. We do vlogs and blogs. We have a Degrassi game already in the iTunes App Store. We have another co-viewing app coming out this summer. We're doing everything digital we can think of.
I'll note that our new series, The L.A. Complex, which launches next month in the United States, will launch simultaneously on The CW, which is an over-the-air network, and on iTunes, Amazon, all the download services, and also on Hulu, which is a Netflix type of service.
I mention all of this not to pat ourselves on the back, but rather to make it clear that while we are grateful for the legacy modes of distribution—we love our television broadcasters, and they are a linchpin—that is not where we are fixated at all. We are and intend to always be on the absolute forefront of the new media. I am not a university professor who has well-intentioned but perhaps ultimately misguided theories about what might or might not work on the Internet; I am part of a passionate, active, and engaged team that is immersed day in and day out in the practicalities of the digital world.
I have two key take-away messages that I would like to put to you today.
First, we producers are devastated by the torrents and the cyberlockers who take the shows that take us so much time and effort to produce, make money from them, and return nothing to us. More and more every day we rely on return of our investment from digital rights—from legal, authorized streaming from broadcaster websites, from Netflix- or Hulu-type services, from legal, authorized downloads from iTunes or Amazon-type services, and from dozens of other legally authorized digital services that make Degrassi available today; therefore, the first key take-away from us is to please pass Bill C-11 as a matter of extreme urgency.
The second key message is also a plea: please make all the technical changes necessary for the intent of Bill C-11 to actually be carried into effect.
I am not here today to discuss commas here and reasonables there. I leave that to the experts, such as my brilliant friend Barry Sookman, and to our CMPA producers' organization, and to others such as Music Canada and the Motion Picture Association - Canada. It is my understanding that if implemented today as currently drafted, Bill C-11 would have the perverse effect of inadvertently sheltering the very websites, services, and illicit activities that the government was intending to eliminate, so please give us absolute clarity that the BitTorrent sites like isoHunt and the cyberlockers like Megavideo will be put out of business in Canada.
Finally, I'd like to discuss mashups. We love mashups. As noted before, there are myriad Degrassi mashups available throughout the web; to us, they are a confirmation of our fans' loyalty and engagement, and that is something we embrace and applaud vigorously.
What we don't love is drafting in Bill C-11 that we are told may permit all, or substantially all, of an episode to be downloaded or streamed under a wraparound loophole in the mashup language. We also don't love anyone making money from these mashups, including through placing advertising around or adjacent to the mashups, without our being mandated to share in that revenue. We need revenues from our digital endeavours to continue producing our shows. We can't compete with material that is free and we don't want others making money from our hard work and investment without being allowed to share in the return.
In summary, our plea is to pass Bill C-11 urgently, but to please include the technical amendments necessary to clearly eliminate torrents and cyberlockers and to ensure that the mashup exception truly applies only to what the government and all of us really mean by a mashup, not to wraparounds and other loopholes.
Thank you very much for your invitation to make these comments.