Nova Scotia TV Lottery

The big news being discussed over the TV blog-o-sphere (ed. blog-a-verse?, world-o-blog?) is the release of the schedules for the big networks in the states. Most decisions about what shows come back and those that don't, are made from a financial standpoint. (ed. and here?)

It must be getting harder and harder for the money people down there to figure out which shows stay and go. They have to factor in ratings with advertiser dollars, the rising costs of production, money from second windows and the great unpredictable, possible motherload, of DVD sales down the road. As long as they leave Cops alone, I'm okay. Why mess with success?

At least the rise in second plays on channels like USA, A&E etc, plus money from DVD sales have resulted in a the networks spending money on quality productions. Plus they finally clued in that if they put on crappy shows people were going to go to the other 499 channels.

It's not like in the day when you had to choose between Love Boat, Dukes of Hazzard and The Kallikaks. (ed. the who?) And there was no Blockbuster.

It's true, kids, listen to grampy.

But that's all I'm going to say on that topic. Today it's time to focus on the Nova Scotia TV industry. (ed. Yes, Virginia there is one)

The final, absolute last, official listing of money spent by the CTF on Canadian TV for the 2006/07 fiscal year, came out today. (ed. Tah Da! Fab!) But not like that.

Anyway the winner in Nova Scotia is the Halifax Film Company which received
$4,068,482 dollars of taxpayer dollars (ed. no! its from the CBC! Well, their envelope anyway, actually it came from the gov't and begrudgingly from cable company operators).

Most of the money was for kids shows Lunar Jim, Jungle Jim (ed. theme?) and Animal Jim, sorry, Animal Mechanicals. All from the mind of Jeff Rosen who years ago predicted the worlds fascination with Pirates by putting huge paper mache heads on people and having them flay their arms about as if they were talking to each other.

Also, This Hour is in there for about $400K.

(ed. Halifax film raised $20M through a share offering and is set to receive $1M in assistance from the province of Nova Scotia in payroll rebates plus $$$ from the province in tax credits and Nova Scotia Films Development money.)

Anyone want to make a shaky cam video about vampires for a BravoFact grant? My sister said we can borrow her betacam and a friend of mine has some fake fangs.

But I promised not to pick on millionairre lawyers leaving crumbs for the latest crop of aspiring Stephen Spielbergs. Go to Toronto if you want to make "filims"! you creative non-bottom line losers!

Other Nova Scotian productions (ed. for the rest of you cfa's, this doesn't stray outside the province so you might as well hit the knitting blog) include something called "Go Deep". Now unless this is a Friday night Showcase show, its probably yet another documentary about ships that have sailed. (ed. and sunk! At least show us a skeleton or two. Or have a bikini clad diver/explorer on board. Remember the poster for The Deep? Va va voom!)

There's Delilah and Julius for Teletoon in which local producers Collideascope are doing the grunt work for Decode. Decode was puchased by Halifax Film Company last year. (ed. okay, let it go. You're sounding like some sort of conspiracy nut!)

The last one on the list is Trailer Park Boys. Their CTF contribution is.............$2,771,704.

$2,771,704.

Math time.

Now I don't know if this represents the 20% License top up fee or the equity investment or a combination of both. I've read all the mind-numbing CTF Guidelines until my latest cosmopolitan hit it mark.

If it's 20% then the budget would be

$2,771,704/.2 = $13,858,000 which would be rediculous.

Let's say the license fee/equity combination is 35% of the budget. Fair enough?

$2,771,704/.35 = $7,919,514

Hell, that can't be right. Let's use 50%

$2,771,704/.5 = $5,543,000 (rounding)

Um, so that would mean that each episode of the 10 episode season would cost $554,300 each.

Um...

You all have seen Trailer Park boys, right?

Methinks this year, Bubbles get's his own furlined trailer with a golden hooker.

Hey, Michael Donovan, stop smirking.