European TV distributors are weighing up the impact of the global streaming reset — and a key challenge is explaining the value of content to producers and global streamers.
In an opening Meet the Distributors session featuring French firms Newen Studios, Studiocanal, Mediawan Rights and Oble, Austria’s ORF Enterprises and Germany’s Bavaria Media here at Seriencamp in Cologne, the topic of how content is priced internationally a key theme.
Newen Studios SVP, International Acquisitions and Co-Productions Elliot Gustin said he had been approached about a European project whose first season was financed through an all-rights deal with a global streamer. Newen’s investment was sought to fill gaps in the budget and get a second season into production, with the streamer keen to keep the show in some territories, but also unwilling to fully finance it. “It is more an adjustment of value,” he said.
The streamer had contacted Newen directly about the unnamed scripted series, highlighting the general move away from all-rights deals, especially in terms of international content but also how financial expectations had grown further apart.
“They asked us the value of the rest of the world and we came back with a number,” he said. “They said, ‘What? That low?’ We were simply providing an assessment of the value and basically they thought that value was higher.”
The same can be applied to production companies and IP owners, Gustin added. “Most of the time we are here to explain to producers that their content has international potential, but the value to us and what our clients are willing to pay [might be different]. Our job now is really to bring back reality to the international market.”
Gustin also noted that International producers would sometimes equate the global success of a small number of non-English-language shows on U.S. streamers with their own content, but that his contacts at the SVODs said this was often “small business” compared with the likes of Wednesday and The Night Agent.
Newen sells shows such as TF1 series HIP, which was remade for ABC in the U.S., French political thriller In the Shadows and UK show The Serial Killer’s Wife.
Alix Lebrat, COO of the Studiocanal TV division that makes shows such as Of Money and Blood, which makes the likes of said the situation was “a question of spend.”
“When Netflix spends on a [global rights deal for a ] show, it is amortizing that cost on 300 million subscribers. That could be €1 or less per subscriber — it’s nothing. But if you come back to a territory-by-territory approach, you can never reach this number of people, so the amortization is not the same at all. [Streamers] have overspent over the last few years because they had so many subscribers that they could do it, but now they understand that the dial has shifted and they have shifted as well at their end. It will take time… and it’s all a question of understanding each other.”
Later in the session, Bavaria Head of Acquisitions & Co-Financing Lisa Fidyka said a key issue for distributors in the current economic landscape was windowing.
“It is a question of who is getting what kind of rights in which territories,” she said. “More people are getting involved in financing, so it is harder to keep the rights. It’s more important to focus on windowing — being very precise in what kind of windows you give to who in what territory.
“No one is taking risks and so distributors are becoming decent financing partners more, and that is great because we are partners early on, but that is also high pressure and high investment. Therefore we do need the rights for the upside.”
Seriencamp began this morning in Germany and will through Friday (June 7). Deadline is on the ground and will handing out the inaugural Deadline Disruptors Award tomorrow.
