As I mentioned in my opening remarks, the thing that preoccupies me the most is that English Canada is the only country in the industrialized world that prefers other people's entertainment programming to their own, by an overwhelming margin. So all the things that English Canadians consume by way of drama, comedy, series, whatever, is American. That's what it is.
To my mind, this is the most fundamental cultural challenge in English Canada. English Canadians read English Canadian newspapers. They prefer English Canadian sporting events. But when it comes to entertainment programming, whether it's on television or in feature films, they overwhelmingly prefer the products of another country. It means that their imagination is completely preoccupied with other people's stories.
The CBC is the only big broadcaster in English Canada that is in any position to be able to deal with that effectively. The schedules of all the American--sorry--Canadian networks.... I called it the American networks because essentially that's what they are--whether it's CTV or whether it's Global or whether it's CHUM, they're completely populated in deep prime time, which is when Canadians are actually watching television, with U.S. shows. They can't get out of that. If they were to attempt to get out of that, they would completely destroy the economics of their business.
The CBC, as Bob pointed out, is the only broadcaster where deep prime time is actually available for Canadian shows. Having said that, the economics of this is brutal. To give you a very straight-up example, if I want to buy an hour of high-end dramatic programming right now, I can buy an American program that would cost $3 million to $4 million an hour to make, for $200,000. At $200,000, I can put it on TV and make $425,000 in revenue. A parallel Canadian program, even if I'm not even in the same ballpark--despite the fact that whether we like it or not, we will be judged by the same production standards as American programming--is going to cost me, say, $1 million to $1.5 million to $2 million an hour. What can I recover by way of revenue? Maybe $120,000 to $150,000, because of the relative performance of the programs. Big problem. Filling this financing gap is a huge, huge problem.
Back to your earlier question, then, to tie it back to sports. You asked earlier on, what is the composition of the revenues of English television? English television is now about $580 million in total, which includes Newsworld. Of that, about $275 million would come from the public subsidy, and about $305 million comes from earned revenue. In other words, about 55% of our total money is earned and about 45% actually comes from public subsidy. Of the earned revenue, approximately $200 million comes from advertising. And if you were to split that into pieces, about half of that would come from professional sport.
So if we're out of professional sport, the first problem is we have a huge hole. The second problem is, as Bob points out, you have hundreds of hours of programming that was previously filled with professional sport that you now have to fill with something else. But as I was saying, if you want to fill it with the stuff that really matters, whether it's documentaries or whether it's Canadian drama or Canadian comedy, it's enormously expensive to do that. So we face a double problem. One is the loss of revenue and the other is the costs of finding replacement programming.
You're absolutely right when you say that if this piece were to move out in a significant way, then the economics of English television would be challenged at the most fundamental level.