For Canada’s 150th anniversary in 2017, the Canada Media Fund (CMF) launched a pilot project to curate, restore, and digitize treasured Canadian audiovisual content and make it available to audiences at home and around the world through a YouTube channel. Encore+ was born.

With the help of many industry partners, the CMF team unearthed Canadian gems buried in analog catalogues. Once discovered, we worked to secure permissions and required rights and collaborate with third parties to digitize the works, including an invaluable partnership with Deluxe Canada that covered 40 per cent of the digitization costs. The new, high-quality digital masters were made available to the rights holders and released to the public on the Encore+ YouTube channel in English and French.

The success of the Encore+ pilot project was made possible through a collaborative effort between CMF teams and the industry (Telefilm, unions and guilds, producers, creators, distributors, etc). In total, the project helped preserve our cultural heritage by digitizing and restoring over 3,000 pieces of content that directly contributed to Canada’s audiovisual legacy. In addition, the project resulted in some global sales of the newly digitized Canadian content, new opportunities for fans to see older works that had not been available online, and renewed interest in the content and creators that the CMF (and former CTF) proudly funded.

After five years of contributing to the ongoing digitization of Canadian classics, the CMF has decided to end the Encore+ pilot project on YouTube. A very special thank you to Programming and Operations Lead Paulina Abarca-Cantin for her unmatched dedication—she really was the heart and soul of this project. Paulina moved on from Encore+ in September, and the CMF wishes her all the best with her new endeavours.