Merci beaucoup pour l'opportunité de présenter aujourd'hui. Je regrette de ne pas le présenter en français aussi.
I certainly agree with many of the things that my esteemed colleague has presented here and the grand vision, a very poetic one, for the future of Canadian media. I'd like to give you a little bit of an understanding of the interactive media industry, which is made up of the people who are creating the content and services on the new and emerging platforms.
I wear two hats. My volunteer job is president of the Canadian Interactive Alliance, or Alliance interactive canadienne, which represents the seven existing regional trade organizations that represent interactive digital media companies in Canada. My full-time job is president and CEO of Interactive Ontario, which is one of those member trade organizations. Together we represent over 1,000 companies across Canada in our membership. Our members span from very large multi-platform media companies to one- and two-person shops. The majority of our members are those small independent companies that are led by new visions for innovative approaches to content.
We've done a little bit of work in defining our industry. We think it's important to focus on what differentiates interactivity from maybe the traditional linear media. I'd like to give you a definition that we've come up with--namely, digital content and environments with which users can actively participate, or that facilitates collaborative participation among multiple users, for the purposes of entertainment, information, or education, and is commonly delivered via the Internet, global networks, game consoles, or media storage devices.
In terms of the composition of our industry, we do a research project, which is the only comprehensive measurement of the interactive media industry in Canada, called the Canadian interactive industry profile. Our industry is not yet covered comprehensively by Statistics Canada. The NAICS and NAPS codes have not yet been assigned. I know that the process is under way.
In our last study, in 2008, we determined that the industry comprises about 3,000 companies across Canada and employs over 50,000 Canadians. That is specifically directly to interactive media companies that identified as primarily that. There are, of course, many more Canadians working in interactive media as part of their employment in other industries such as broadcasting, advertising, and even financial services.
In terms of the industry itself, speaking regionally, Quebec is the most mature industry. It has the oldest companies, on average, followed by B.C. and then Ontario. Coming from Ontario, we're not used to being number three. It's kind of an interesting place to be. We're very aggressively trying to catch up.
Why focus on interactive media separately from traditional media? I think we need to do that. We need to focus on it because computers and networks for the first time enable users to participate in electronic cultural experiences in a unique and meaningful way. Interactivity is a new mode of creative expression, perhaps as important as the invention of montage was to the birth of cinema. It's what established cinema as more than simply the combination of photography and theatre.
The production processes for interactive media synthesize creativity and technology, requiring an integrated approach to product, company, and sector development. Interactive media by the nature of distribution platforms is both national and international at the same time. The interactive media industry is now one of the largest cultural sectors in Canada, yet it receives the least government support at the federal level.
I think it's also important for us to look at interactive media as part of the greater cultural industry's ecosystem. Certainly the new and emergent forms of media draw heavily from traditional media skills, competencies, and formats. Interactive media producers are recognizing a lot these days the need to better deliver compelling narrative and emotional experiences. There are tremendous opportunities for content creators to work across platforms to deliver comprehensive, multi-dimensional end-user experiences.
We believe we need to build more opportunities and incentives for collaboration among industry, cultural, and technological sectors. We think the Canada Media Fund is an excellent first step.
Canada is an emerging global leader in the creation of interactive media content and services. According to the Entertainment Software Association of Canada, who I think will be presenting here next week, their recent study has shown that Canada is now the third-largest creator of video game content in the world, employing over 14,000 Canadians in high-paying knowledge-economy jobs.
Our games industry is also growing by about 30% per year. A lot of that is comprised of large multinational firms. I'm sure we'll get into a bit of a discussion about that later. But we have a very strong momentum, and we're gaining a very strong reputation internationally as a great creative place to create video game content.
We believe that with a strategy to secure access to capital and the ability to attract the best talent, Canada can cement its place as a world-leading centre for the production of interactive media content, services, and technologies.
You asked about successes. There are many, and the NFB is certainly one that we are very proud of.
Tom made mention of the fact that we don't have many big Canadian companies that have made a big splash, but there have been a few. Many of them have been acquired, but I'd like to run through a couple. Distinctive Software Inc., in Burnaby, B.C., in 1991 was bought by Electronic Arts and it now makes Canada the largest electronic arts game studio in the world.
Xenophile Media of Toronto has won an international and a prime-time Emmy Award for their work with alternate reality games in conjunction with television.
We mentioned Flickr earlier, which was founded by Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, from Vancouver. It was actually an investment by Telefilm Canada's new media fund. Although it was not specifically in Flickr, it was in a game they were developing. As was mentioned, it was sold to Yahoo for over $30 million.
Club Penguin, which was also created in Kelowna, B.C., was bought by Disney for $700 million in 2007. When Disney bought it only two years after it was launched in Canada, it already had 12 million accounts and 700,000 paying users, generating $40 million a year in revenue.
And in 2008, BioWare, a computer games company founded by two doctors in Edmonton, was bought by Electronic Arts for $860 million.
I think there are lessons from all of this. In the creation of interactive media, it's sometimes impossible to determine, as with Flickr, whether the greater IP value is in the content or the enabling technologies, and the enabling technologies are crucial toward the delivery of the content and the cultural experience. Our biggest successes are usually right now acquired by foreign companies that have the capital to invest in stealing the product or the service. But those foreign acquisitions are not always necessarily bad things, because the increased capital does give us a lot more footprint in terms of jobs. We tend to retain the jobs here, and we tend to retain the creative talent in this country. The founders of those companies tend to go on and create more companies here in Canada as well. As in the case of Paul Lee of Electronic Arts venture funding, they understand the industry. What's happened in San Francisco, I believe, is that virtuous cycle of having founders who build companies and then exit and start new companies and fund new companies.
How am I doing for time?