Recently, we had a streamer make an offer for one of our properties. The deal was typical of those offered by the streamers, by the major studios today, whereby we had to give up all of our global distribution rights, our format rights and essentially full creative control to get our show made. In return, we were offered a relatively small participation and a decent production service fee. While we invested heavily in the development of the project and were bringing some of the shows financing to the table through our tax credits, the studio did not recognize these financial contributions as warranting the retention of any meaningful share of our rights.
The challenge we faced, as do many independent producers, is that our potential U.S. partners had taken the position that the government incentives are not for the benefit of building the Canadian industry, but rather to help finance their content libraries.
Given that most producers do not have the resources to push back, precedents have been set where this has become the norm, and we have little or no leverage. Based on the proposed structure—