If you're an independent television producer wondering how Entertainment One's recently proposed $51-million takeover of Blueprint Entertainment, Barna-Alper Productions, Oasis International and Maximum Films is going to affect you, you're about to find out.

If shareholders approve the deal, Oasis topper Peter Emerson, who would become president of international TV distribution for E1, will soon be packing his bags and heading out for a cross-country tour. And it's you, independent producers, that Emerson - along with Barna-Alper's Laszlo Barna, and Blueprint's John Morayniss or Noreen Halpern and maybe one or two others - are planning to serenade.

"It'll be a little dog and pony around the country," says Emerson. "We're going to try to be as inclusive as possible - put a little book together of what we can do for people and how we can work with them."

Tee-off time is probably going to be August, once everyone's rested up from the marathon that it took to structure this E1 marriage - six months in the making, and by all accounts extraordinarily complicated.

The deal, which takes E1 into the Big Leagues, represents the teaming up of a handful of old allies: Robert Lantos (a shareholder in each of the four acquired properties) with former Alliance protégés Patrice Théroux and John Morayniss, and producer Laszlo Barna and distributor Peter Emerson, both veterans themselves.

It's also a teaming up of expertise and infrastructure in different ends of the business.

"It's a really nice marriage," said Morayniss. "On the distribution side, we get a much stronger company with more capital, so we can make quick and decisive decisions to invest in shows, and we'll have immediate market intelligence coming back."

Ironically, it's the breakup of Alliance Atlantis that opened the door for this new entity. Just as it was the case when he was a hungry young producer, Lantos still believes this is a distribution-driven business - one in which only the mightiest survive. Once the might of his Alliance legacy was gone, he notes, any Canadian distributor left had little leverage in a marketplace ruled by giants, leaving a huge void.

"I mean, the real giants - Time Warner, Fox, Disney - that's the real competition in terms of placement power in the world. We want to be stepping into that place," Lantos says.

So how do you help E1 fill that? A big part of E1's strategy will be to form partnerships with third-party producers.

"It's great for us to have the [programming] supply from Barna-Alper and Blueprint, but we absolutely don't want to stop there," says Emerson. "This is great news for the independent producers. There's a lot of duplication in this country - backroom operations, banking and tax credits and legal - all of which is really labor-intensive and costly, so we want to position ourselves as a studio that the independents can come to and be financed. They don't have to worry about their deficits; they can focus on the creative. They don't have to worry about the small and sometimes large problems of dealing with the banks, lawyers, tax credits, bonds - all that stuff that takes away from being producers."