The CMF has two separate financing streams, the convergent stream and the experimental stream. Through the convergent stream, the CMF provides support to popular television projects, as well as to their digital media components.
To give you an idea of success on the French-speaking market, I can say that among the 20 most popular programs in 2009-2010, 10 had received the support of the Canadian media fund. Several programs, in English and in French, regularly attract more than 1 million viewers. Last July, for example, the first episode of the Rookie Blue series, on Global and ABC, in the US, attracted a total of 9 million Canadian and American viewers. Currently, to get funding from the CMF, projects in the convergent stream must either have value-added digital media components or be broadcast on platforms other than television.
The experimental stream is there to support very innovative digital media content as well as interactive software applications. The success of this stream has led to more than 240 funding applications, for a total of $83 million, during our first round of funding. Out of that number, we have selected 27 projects for funding, including interactive games, web portals, mobile phone applications, web series and web applications, for a total amount of $12.9 million. The second round of funding applications closed a few days ago, on November 12, and we have received close to 180 additional funding applications, for a total of $65 million. We are now assessing all those applications.
Obviously, the new mandate of the convergent stream of the CMF is moving ahead and will allow for the development of content available at any time to all Canadians on their platform of choice.
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