Tag: movies

Catching up on MediaPolicy – Netflix is Rex – Miller is minister – CRTC vets Meta’s news ban

AI image

December 7, 2025

This week’s blockbuster news is that Netflix edged out Paramount to buy Warner Brothers for $82 USD billion. The deal immediately depleted the supply of adjectives at the disposal of media analysts. 

If the deal closes as scheduled in late 2026, Netflix buys up the world’s biggest movie archive and keeps it out of the hands of a major rival with the second biggest (Netflix is number three).

Netflix is paying a heavy price tag and arguably overpaid (you know who pays for inflated merger valuations, it’s subscribers and workers). Netflix goes from its status as the streaming industry’s 900-pound gorilla to, I dunno, T-Rex stature?

The public commentary on the deal is mostly doomsaying. 

It speeds up the chiselling of the tombstone for the theatrical release industry.

In a press release, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos said shareholder value would flow from adding HBO and the full Warner Brothers archive to the Netflix “best in class streaming service:” his pro forma commitment to theatre release was relegated to a subordinate sentence clause.

But if the merciless dispatch of theatrical-release seems inevitable, and just the law of the marketplace jungle, what is of long term concern is the anti-competitive effect on the pipeline of big-budget premium video entertainment. The Globe & Mail’s Barry Hertz has a good analysis here.

The Netflix deal is a prime candidate for anti-trust review by the Trump administration (especially as Netflix outbid Friend-of-Trump Paramount). 

That review could go in any direction but things to watch for include (a) Trump reviving his threat to levy tariffs on foreign movies and the offshore shooting of Hollywood blockbusters, and/or (b) using the anti-trust hammer to get something that he personally wants, which could be commitments to US-based production or some vanity trophy we can’t imagine right now.

It’s not that Sarandos can’t see that coming. In his press release he said the acquisition would allow Netflix to expand its US based production, a gimme that doesn’t commit him to a rate of new releases equal to “Netflix plus Warner Brothers” but only “Netflix plus a dollar.”

Any Trump-driven re-shoring of studio production could hurt the two offshore leaders of Hollywood production, the UK and Canada (and hurt Hollywood too, but that’s a longer discussion).

Beyond that, the effect on Canadian-owned broadcasting could be massive. Netflix is buying Warner Brothers’ Home Box Office streaming service and catalogue which may or may not be integrated into the Netflix platform, once subscription pricing is figured out. The press release suggests HBO content will be on the Netflix platform, at least in the US. 

Here in Canada, there is no HBO streaming service and Bell Media holds the exclusive license to distribute HBO on the only Canadian streaming service of consequence, Crave TV.

You would have to question whether Netflix has any interest in continuing that Canadian licensing arrangement when it expires and, in fact, Netflix has an excellent opportunity to severely wound its only Canadian-owned competitor.

Without that profitable HBO content, Bell’s ability to keep funding Canadian content takes a big hit. 

***

Canada has a new Heritage minister, Marc Miller.

That’s the fallout from Steven Guilbeault’s cabinet resignation over Prime Minister Mark Carney scrapping the Trudeau/Guilbeault policies on oil production, emissions, pipelines, oil tankers and clean energy regulations.

Miller continues a long tradition of the Liberals appointing an MP from the island of Montréal to the Heritage portfolio.

But of course Miller is the first anglophone the Libs have picked for that job since Hamilton’s Shiela Copps —-who was born ready to butt heads with the US on cultural sovereignty. She did the job from 1996 to 2003 under Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. 

The feisty Miller is prone to speaking with candour, as a rule. That’s already got him into a spat with CAQ premier François Legault who didn’t like Miller insisting on making a distinction between “the decline” and “fragility” of the French language in Canada and Québec. The Bloc dutifully piled on.

Guilbeault was the federal champion of Canadian and French language content in Québec and as the new Heritage minister no less will be expected of Miller. His life will get very interesting in about six months when CUSMA negotiations begin.

Will Miller become the political reincarnation of Shiela Copps? It’s up to Mark Carney, just as it was up to Jean Chrétien.

***

It looks like the CRTC’s investigation into whether Meta is selectively enforcing its made-in-Canada ban on news content has come an end. The CRTC’s brief discharge letter to Meta was published last week.

You can still find news items on Facebook and Instagram in Canada, despite Meta’s avowal that it banned news to take itself outside of the scope of the compulsory licensing of “news content” in the Online News Act.

Meta must have satisfied the Commission staff that it is sticking to its ban by taking down news items posted by Canadian users and by deleting user screenshots of articles. If you want to know how the Commission reached its conclusion, you won’t find it in the letter. 

What remains unresolved, or perhaps resolved only to the Commission’s private satisfaction, is Meta permitting posts from news outlets like Narcity and The Peak who successfully applied to Meta for what they describe as “exemptions” from the news content ban.

Without more transparency, one can only guess if Meta’s exemption of hand picked news outlets violates the statutory prohibition against digital platforms discriminating for or against selected news outlets. 

In the case of Narcity, its publisher claimed that Meta granted an exemption because Narcity was refused certification for federal journalism labour tax credits on the grounds that it doesn’t publish enough original news on current affairs. 

But certification for federal subsidies program doesn’t mean that a news outlet isn’t producing some news content, or pieces of news content, as defined by the Online News Act, which Meta says its banning to avoid paying for it. 

The Peak also recently announced that Meta gave it “an exemption” and I invite you to have a look at the news articles it’s allowed to post on Facebook and Instagram.

If you go looking, keep in mind that the “news content” that Meta is supposed to be banning in order to escape the gravitational pull of the Act includes “any portion” of news content. 

The Commission’s original inquiry into the news ban appears to have been its own idea, so the fact that it hasn’t published its reasons at any length is not a total surprise. No Canadian news organization has filed a complaint. 

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This blog post is copyrighted by Howard Law, all rights reserved. 2025.

Catching Up on MediaPolicy – Fake News for credulous Lefties – the YouTuber farm team – Google news payouts take a haircut – Picky about The Sticky

Guelph Ontario’s Jus Reign

January 5, 2024

For those of you who are returning from a proper holiday break and have not checked your MediaPolicy feed, the last two posts dove into a poll and report from The Dais on Canadians’ trust in news and also the current state of misinformation and online harms.

Since then, Reuters Institute at Oxford University dropped a related report with global results here.

The Dais’ Canadian report included poll results suggesting that right-wingers answering a panel of true/false questions were especially credulous of online misinformation whereas left-wingers were not. The test questions however seemed more likely to catch out misinformed (or defiant) right-wingers than progressives. 

A friend of mine made the same observation, so over coffee he demonstrated his prowess with Chat GPT and conjured up an alternative set of true/false questions more likely to trip up left-wingers. The AI program said all of these statements are false. Enjoy:

1. “The world will be uninhabitable by 2030 due to climate change.”

2. “All genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are harmful and unnatural.”

3. “The majority of police officers are overtly racist.”

4. “All billionaires became wealthy through exploitation or illegal practices.”

5. “Big Pharma is suppressing natural cures for cancer to maintain profits.”

6. “Vaccines are completely risk-free.”

7. “All multinational corporations avoid taxes and exploit workers.”

8. “Facial recognition technology is being used primarily to surveil marginalized communities.”

9. “Elon Musk’s electric vehicles are just a greenwashing scam.”

10. “Every war the U.S. has been involved in was solely for corporate profit.”

11. “Countries with universal healthcare have no medical shortages or challenges.”

12. “Canceling offensive content will completely eliminate systemic inequality.”

13. “All nuclear energy is dangerous and unnecessary.”

***

Almost every New Year’s prediction about video entertainment in 2025 painted a portrait of a cresting wave of YouTuber content, increasingly driven by AI tools, crashing down on the Hollywood streaming and TV industry and, in the long term, taking all of the growth. 

The Globe and Mail’s TV critic wrote about this after an interview with Bell Media’s content VP Justin Stockman. One observation was that as a television and streaming company Bell is adapting to the success of YouTubers in the “creator economy” by seeking to draw on the Canadian corps of YouTubers as a farm system for emerging talent, especially in comedy.

For example, the CTV multi-season hit show Letterkenny began as YouTube videos before Bell Media signed the creator/actors. A more recent example is CTV’s Late Bloomer, starring Jus Reign. 

I asked Digital First Canada’s Scott Benzie about this and he cautioned that YouTubers scouted by mainstream media can succeed there as talent, but rarely in the role of the YouTube show or character that got them noticed. As a rule, audience tastes and interests on YouTube are different from those on streaming and television platforms.

Also, says Benzie, YouTubers won’t keep the intellectual property in their talent once they pass through the gates of the broadcasting fortress. That’s why YouTubers continue to branch out into other monetization strategies including live performances, branding deals, and merchandise sales.

Benzie thinks the CBC is doing a good job of platforming creator content on its YouTube channel and, as a non-profit public broadcaster, conceding that the participating Canadian YouTubers continue to own their own shows.

***

The simmering feud between Canada’s mainstream media and the Google-anointed Canadian Journalism Collective seems closer to blowing up.

If you recall, a term of Heritage Minister Pascale St.-Onge’s deal with Google for $100 million in annual news licensing payments was that Google got to choose which of the two coalition of news publishers would broker the distribution of the $100 million to eligible news outlets. Google chose the CJC, representing Canadian news outlets —-employing about one per cent of Canadian journalists—- that had by no coincidence linked arms with Google in opposing the Online News Act, Bill C-18.

The rest of the industry —-including the broadcaster and news media associations, as well as the CBC —- expressed skepticism that CJC would play the role of Google-money banker impartially.

The news is out now that CJC has approved an unexpectedly high number of “print” online publications applying for the $100M and, hence, the per journalist salary subsidy has been diluted to $13G per year down from a figure originally estimated by News Media Canada as $20G. Payouts for 2024 are on their way.

Taking a 35% haircut on Google licensing payments that are already far less than publishers thought they would get after the Australian experience is bound to rankle.

Whether such a big gap will be closed over the next few weeks is up for grabs. The CJC has already included about 400 more journalists than expected by including newsroom hires funded by the federal Local Journalism Initiative. [An earlier version of this article inaccurately identified the new hires as “interns” when they are in fact journalists hired on one year contracts.]

In addition, the CJC’s invitation to media organizations to stick their hands up for Google money is likely to have flooded the CJC with applications from media outlets that don’t do original news reporting of current affairs. Comments from Paul Deegan of News Media Canada suggest a concern that payments will flow to applicants that don’t meet the C-18 definition of publishing “news content of public interest that is primarily focused on matters of general interest and reports of current events.”

Lastly, the CJC invited news organizations to include freelancers in their newsroom headcounts. The CRTC subsequently ruled that federal regulations make it clear that only payroled employees are eligible. News Media Canada’s Deegan has also expressed a concern that the CJC may have accredited applications that include audience engagement employees who are similarly ineligible.

CJC interim board chair Erin Millar told MediaPolicy that “the CJC is in the process of verifying eligibility of all news businesses that applied for funding. We also have a process for auditing journalist hours.”

Millar added “we have a policy and procedure for distributing funds in a risk adjusted way that accounts for ineligible claims.”

Stay tuned on this one.

***

From IMDB

The recommended read and video watch for this weekend is directed to the CRTC commissioners and staff who are plotting to remove regulatory spending minimums on Canadian TV drama on the grounds that the US streamers will fill the void.

A few weeks ago Amazon Prime released its comedy-drama series The Sticky, based ever so loosely on the memorable maple syrup heist in Québec in 2012. As MediaPolicy commented, the series was written by Americans. It’s funny. It’s entertaining. It’s got a hip soundtrack. And it’s painfully inauthentic CanCon.

Don’t take my word for it, read Globe TV critic Kelly Nestruck who has absolutely nailed it. And then watch the series.

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