MIPCOM: World TV Business Braces for Downturn, Disruption and “Blood within the Water”

Main development work alongside Cannes’ famed Croisette has turned this most glamorous of French seaside cities right into a chaotic constructing web site. Tv executives, on the town for the MIPCOM Cannes worldwide TV confab, which runs by means of Thursday, Oct. 19, have been compelled to run a gauntlet of concrete slabs and roped-off hazard zones.

It’s an apt metaphor for the temper at MIPCOM this 12 months. A conflagration of things — the actors strike, rising inflation, a hunch within the promoting market, and a pull-back in funding by the worldwide streamers — have mixed to weaken the foundations of the worldwide TV enterprise. Executives are treading rigorously as if in concern the entire construction may collapse beneath their toes.

“There’s a number of concern on the market, a number of corporations are anxious they may not be round in six, 12, 18 months,” stated one MIPCOM veteran, the CEO of a mid-sized European manufacturing and distribution firm. “Netflix and Amazon have gone from shopping for nearly every thing to purchasing one to 2 reveals in most markets. Should you’re not a kind of two, you find yourself with nothing.”

The high-end of the market, these producing big-budget drama sequence, have been hardest hit. With most networks and streamers now unwilling to cash-flow premium fiction, small and mid-sized producers are discovering themselves squeezed, with inflation consuming up their margins and the danger of default growing.

“There might be blood within the water earlier than that is over,” notes Danny Fisher, CEO and co-founder of AVOD group FilmRise.

If high-end drama has develop into a dangerous proposition, non-scripted leisure and actuality TV is having fun with a revival at MIPCOM. This has much less to do with the continuing actors strike within the U.S. and extra with the cost-benefit evaluation of particular person channels and platforms. The streamers, specifically, are embracing lower-cost leisure reveals. Prime Video at MIPCOM introduced it signed a deal to adapt the British recreation present The 1% Membership, and ITV quiz program produced by BBC Studios, for its service in North America. The information follows the launch of Fremantle’s hit competitors format Received Expertise on Disney+ in Italy and the reboot of the long-lasting Australian cleaning soap Neighbours on Amazon’s Freevee within the U.Okay. and U.S.

“I’m having conversations with the streamers for leisure and actuality reveals, even for soaps,” stated Sascha Schwingel, the brand new CEO of German manufacturing large UFA, a part of Fremantle. “On the scripted facet, what everybody needs is much less ‘edgy’ reveals and extra mainstream, procedurals and the like.”

What makes the non-scripted offers notably noticeable is the brand new willingness of world streamers to share rights to codecs with producers and different channels — Neighbours premieres on Australia’s Community 10 a part of Paramount World for instance — as an alternative of insisting on locking up unique worldwide rights.

“The modifications available in the market imply lots of people must change the way in which they do enterprise,” stated Andrea Scrosati, group COO and CEO of continental Europe at Fremantle, who famous that windowing — totally different broadcasters and platforms sharing rights to the identical present throughout time-restricted durations — was again in style as consumers start to favor cost-efficiency over exclusivity.

Bob Bakish, president and CEO of Paramount World, made an identical level at his keynote deal with at MIPCOM this week, arguing that the way in which ahead was a return to the good-old licensing enterprise. As an alternative of “pulling again content material and placing up walled gardens” as Bakish argued, Paramount’s studio rivals have performed in an effort to construct up their fledgling streaming platforms, promoting off native rights to programming to worldwide companions was a “worthwhile, multibillion-dollar enterprise” and “a vital driver” to world enlargement.

“I’m nonetheless very assured about the way forward for the streaming enterprise,” stated Man Bisson government director at digital analysis group Ampere Evaluation. “The present downturn has extra to do with macroeconomic elements, inflation, and so forth. Because the platforms and the studios return to licensing and windowing and focus much less on subscriber development than on ROI (Return on Funding), we must always see a return to development.”

MIPCOM Cannes 2024 might be held October 21-24, 2024. Companion market MIPTV might be held in Cannes April 8-10, 2024.