Insights
What changes when we start with audience? Annelise Larson examines how people find stories and what makes them care enough to stay, connecting audience relationships with the wider questions facing screen media and cultural policy.
What Is Audience Infrastructure?
What remains after a release campaign ends? Audience infrastructure is the lasting capacity to connect people with Canadian stories and sustain those relationships over time. New funding approaches offer an opportunity to invest in the work that continues between projects.
When Canadian Culture Becomes a Trade Barrier
The collapse of Canada-U.S. trade talks exposed a fight over who controls the pathways connecting Canadian stories with audiences. Discoverability matters, but cultural sovereignty depends on supporting the full journey from a story’s first encounter to a lasting audience relationship.
We Make Movies. Fandom Grows Between Them.
Filmmakers do not need to become influencers. They need the ability to identify, earn and activate audience relationships. Through the Canadian examples of Middle Life, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie and Indie Game: The Movie, this Audience Reality Check explores how fandom creates leverage, and why our film system needs infrastructure capable of meeting that momentum.
A $600 Million Lifeline Will Not Save a Disconnected System
Canada’s screen sector is fighting over who pays for Canadian content. But the deeper question is what kind of audience system that money will build. A $600 million lifeline may buy stability, but without shared data, audience research, metadata, release-pathway learning, and community connection, it will not create transformation.
Discoverability Is Not Enough. Canada Needs Desire.
The CRTC’s new discoverability decisions recognize that Canadian and Indigenous stories need to be findable and visible. But visibility is not the same as desire. This Audience Reality Check looks at why metadata matters, why AI search raises the stakes, and why Canada needs audience infrastructure that helps stories reach people with meaning, momentum, and measurable learning.
Navigating the Shifting Screen in an Era of Policy Reform
As Canada’s screen sector enters a rare moment of policy reform, the Navigating the Shifting Screen report argues that Canadian films need more than support for production or visibility. They need flexible audience pathways, stronger community infrastructure, better data, and systems designed to help stories reach people where they already are.
The New Audiovisual Panel Is a Vital Step, But We’re Still Building Policy for a System That No Longer Exists
Canada is modernizing its screen institutions, but the bigger challenge is modernizing the assumptions underneath them. Audience Reality Check #1 explores why future-ready policy must bridge legacy systems, digital creators, and the real ways audiences are built today.
Banner photo by Stephen McFadden on Unsplash