Celebrating our fifth anniversary...

More and better than ever!

After five years of operation, the Cogeco Program Development Fund has proven to be essential to the development of high quality Canadian television series. During the year ending August 1997, the Fund participated in its largest number of projects and injected a higher level of funds into the script development process than ever before. Twenty-one projects were supported in 1996/97 for a total of $287,000 in development advances.

In celebration of our 5th anniversary we undertook two special development projects; we were pleased to join the industry to support the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television's Prix Gémeaux and Gemini Awards. And at the 1997 Banff Television Festival, the Cogeco Program Development Fund was there to host the very successful "Breakfast With" series.

Since its creation in 1992, the Cogeco Fund has chosen to encourage the development of scripts for dramatic series destined for Canadian television broadcasters. The Cogeco Fund reacted to a strong need in a sector of the industry which, because of the time required and the expense associated with development, had been consistently under-developed. Yet, dramatic series are a critical part of Canadian television production. Throughout the past five years, the Cogeco Fund has advanced a total of $765,650 in the development of 75 series. To date, 21 of these have gone from development into production. It gives us great satisfaction to know that our mandate fills a need and that the results of our efforts to support writers, directors, producers and broadcasters can be seen daily on Canadian television.

We are looking forward to even more and even higher quality scripts in the years to come!

Henri Audet
President