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Comment by kranke155 | Hacker News Reader

Quotas are great exactly for this reason. In France before quotas in cinemas, the quality of the films was poor.

But when you he cinemas were forced to show French film in. x amount of screenings, desperate not to lose money they started to fund the films themselves and make films that were as profitable as possible.

This led to a positive loop where 1. The cinemas would look for lucrative films to fund 2. Creating a demand on local filmmakers to make films that people wanted to see 3. Which became hits 5. Leading to cinemas looking for more French films to put on

Etc

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I'm not sure it always works. Canada has had this system in place for radio and TV for ~50 years. Radio has sort of worked maybe but TV? No way. Maybe once a decade there's a half decent show worth watching.

It’s definitely interesting to think about - why is it that it’s worked so well for radio, creating a big music and global stars coming from the Canadian music scene.

But not for TV? Is it maybe the fact that music has lower entry requirements for smaller artists to take off ?

While TV requires large scale production, thus if an overworked producer is making a “quota” product for TV, they might actually do what people are describing and rush something just for the 30% time they have to fill in.

It’s interesting because certainly it seems like there’s some relation to scarcity. The time on cinema screens is very scarce so the French cinema example seems to have worked. While radio, even though there are a lot of radios you still have some limits due to AM/FM bandwidth, plus radios differentiate with genres so 30% time on Canada radio means 30% time on rock, rap, jazz, etc.

But TV doesn’t work like that. So I wonder what factors played into the TV quotas not working.

You Can’t Do That on Television aired on Nickelodeon in the US and was a staple of my childhood. Degrassi came later and was also popular.

But there's a massive industry of film shot in Canada. Start watching the credits and the supporting actors are very often Canadian, with projects shot in Vancouver or Toronto and 'local' hires to fill out the cast.

Which often or usually aren't considered Canadian content due to non-Canadian actors, writers, financiers, etc. so they don't contribute to the quota anyways.

It's an industry nonetheless. Would it be as prominent if such a system were not in place?

It’s a foreign industry that’s outsourced a part of production, not a canadian industry. Without tax subsidies it wouldn’t be there I suspect?

It's an ecosystem. There's a need for Canadian Content, thanks to media regulations, which creates a little-league feeder of actors, producers, etc. Then the best of these are easily available to call on when outsourcing work from the US.

There's a clear quality funnel here: In any creative work, we're really looking for positive outliers. Suppose talent is normally distributed. Increasing the size of the funnel's input means you've got more chances to find the best outliers. If you've got a very tiny funnel, most great actors and cinematographers will become accountants and bicycle racers instead of winning Oscars.

This only exists due to tax subsidies and the increasing difficulty and price of shooting in the US.

Trailer park boys. Never forget.

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