I'd like to speak to that. I would say the independent production sector and the creative community in Canada are best able to adapt to the changes that are going on in the digital marketplace. We see the changes that are going on, and our members are evolving the content they produce in order to embrace these new opportunities.
Instead of seeing the pie in a defeatist way, as an ever diminishing pie with smaller and smaller pieces that we have to squabble over, we actually see digital media—and that's why we talk about the need for a digital media strategy—as an opportunity to expand the pie. Around the world consumers are spending larger and larger percentages of their disposable income on content. So content isn't dead. And by the way, television isn't dead tomorrow. It still has a long way to go. It's still a mass vehicle. It reaches more homes than any other form of media, so it's still very important. But it does need to evolve.
We thank the minister for having put in place mechanisms like the Canada Media Fund that merge television and digital media and require multi-platform strategies. That's a very innovative thing to do. And that's the kind of thing we need to do more of. What we don't see broadcasters in Canada doing is evolving their strategy. They're saying, “it's broken, give us more money”. But they're not proposing a fix. They're not proposing the solution. They're not proposing a new way to do things other than “make us spend less in Canadian content and give us more money and we'll keep spending more on foreign”. That doesn't get us anywhere.
If you look at the United States, which is very innovative, and Britain and other countries, broadcasters are developing new ways of distributing and monetizing their content. NBC in the United States is a good example. Hulu is now the third most important place where people go to view video. They're making money on that stuff. They're transitioning to the digital age. BBC in Britain, as a public broadcaster, is getting its content out on every platform imaginable. We're not doing those kinds of things. Our broadcasters are still operating with the old model like dinosaurs. It's the independent producers who are pushing them into the future.
By the way, they vacuum up all of our rights, they acquire all the digital media rights, they don't pay for them, and then they don't exploit them. And they prevent us from exploiting them. That's just not balance. We need to bring balance to the system.