At 10, Teletoon is focused on growing from its original incarnation as a linear toon destination for a school-age TV audience to a multi-channel, multi-screen animation incubator for viewers of all ages.

The specialty channel received its licence in 1996, but president Len Cochrane says the idea for the channel was conceived back in 1995 by the board at Family Channel (which at the time was owned 50% by WIC Western International Communications and 50% Astral Media). At the same time, however, YTV, Cinar (now Cookie Jar Entertainment) and Nelvana had joined forces to pitch the CRTC for a licence to launch another all-toon channel.

After the CRTC rejected two applications, Cochrane called upon former Nelvana CEO Michael Hirsh (now CEO of Cookie Jar Group) to combine forces with his partners to make Teletoon a reality. They came on board, the pitch was successful, and the commission greenlit an October 1997 English-language launch date.

The French-language Télétoon bowed in Quebec a month earlier. The en francais station runs as a separately fed channel, and is programmed to fit the Quebecois marketplace. The programmers, however, look to acquire and coproduce bilingual shows for both channels whenever possible. This year, for example, the Quebecois satire Punch will be versioned for the English-language channel.

The original five partners (Astral, WIC, Cinar, YTV and Nelvana) each owned 20%, but that equation evolved over the years as consolidation changed Canada's broadcast landscape.

When WIC was gobbled up by CanWest Global Communications in 2000, the commission stated its Teletoon share must go to Astral, increasing its ownership to 40%. Corus then doubled its share when it bought Nelvana in 2000, and the final 20% owned by Cinar was split between the two remaining owners in 2006 for a reported $96 million.

Cochrane says the Astral-Corus 50-50 ownership split provides synergistic services to keep the channel running. Astral, for example, provides the office space and its admin management, while Corus looks after ad sales, master control, uplinks and studio space for Teletoon's in-house interstitial filming.

Much of the funding for the channel comes via ad dollars and subscriber fees, but production partnerships play a big role in Teletoon's growth. It currently has a requirement to invest 47% of its gross revenues to support the Canadian animation industry (amounting to $23 million for English- and French-language productions in the 2006/07 fiscal year), upped from a 40% requirement in its first seven years. "That's a huge amount of money," says Cochrane.

Trent Locke, VP of finance and planning, says the spending on national productions is a win-win, however. It helps Teletoon meet its investment and schedule goals (whereby 60% of its sked is Canadian programming) and opens doors for local toon producers to get coveted Canadian Television Fund funding. "[The CTF is] a huge partner," he says.