Heavy hitters in the global content creation space discussed the state of play and key trends in a Content London conference session, entitled “State of the Nation: Unlocking fresh opportunity in The New Content Economy,” on Tuesday.
Discussing what’s hot and not, as well as the challenges and opportunities were Fox Television Network president Michael Thorn, All3Media CEO Jane Turton, and Mo Abudu, founder and CEO of EbonyLife Group, Banijay U.K. CEO and executive chairman Patrick Holland, and Heather Jones, general manager, U.K., and chief creative officer, Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at Hearst Networks EMEA.
“Total screen time has leveled out now,” Jones said. “Younger viewers are massively engaging with factual content” on TikTok, YouTube etc, which should be good for Hearst, she noted. The exec also mentioned that in the U.K., some people are now scrolling up to 2 kilometers a day, more than they walk.
Can Hearst succeed in streaming and digital? Jones has no doubt, sharing: “We got SVOD growing like a weed,” where the company repurposes TV content.
Meanwhile, Turton offered that “complexity is something we have to [contend] with more,” because “the rules have been ripped up.” And she touted the importance of scale and experience in this environment.
What happens to producers without scale? Smaller producers can now go to larger groups and look for collaborative deals, suggested Holland. “The buyers are Netflix, Amazon and Disney,” he said. “If you do that on your kitchen table, … that’s impossible. We are in an age of collaboration.”
Thorn agreed, touting the opportunities for companies with “shared wins.” He explained that he was in London partly to look for partners for “great creative,” which is the name of the game. “Small can be nimble, and nimble can create opportunities in this marketplace,” he concluded.
When Thorn started building Fox into what it is today, he came to London to sell Fox animations abroad and look for creative partners. In the past year or year and a half, British networks and producers have called Fox to come in as the U.S. domestic buyer to push a production with a green light over the final financing line.
“Our number one goal is to find breakout original content at any price point,” said Thorn. “We don’t have an IP library. We don’t have hundreds of millions of writers’ deals,” like the likes of Disney. So, Fox must find the best creatives and ideas.
“We are an independent network and have to find the right project, but the phone calls say that this show could work for us if we take North American rights and the blinking light becomes a full greenlight,” he added. “We get a win of a brilliant drama, and they get full completion money going forward.”
Representation and diversity also have an audience despite a recent pushback in the U.S. “It is in the challenges that the opportunities lie,” shared Abudu, adding the importance of on-screen representation for Black audiences and other underrepresented communities. “It’s time to tell our stories,” she said, recalling how she felt represented when watching Fame.
Optionality and a variety of approaches are needed in this day and age, execs argued. Turton said that finding funding models for projects that allow producers to take risks is a key challenge these days, for example. And Jones highlighted that players are nowadays using a variety of funding and distribution models appropriate for each project.
Thorn on Tuesday also mentioned Fox’s Hazbin Hotel series on Amazon as a surprise success story. “I know it’s an outlier, but it started with someone who had a voice,” he said, calling the show “an anti-Disney musical.” And the financial structure and a two-season order from Amazon made it work, he said. He also noted that creator Vivienne Medrano made the pilot herself and put it up on YouTube to get it attention.
Turton also shared that her team focuses on creating great, quality IP with great talent before considering the distribution strategy. For example, All3Media‘s hit show The Traitors gets a mass audience on the likes of the BBC, while other shows bring together a range of smaller audiences across various smaller platforms.
Now, what makes shows travel? Peaky Blinders is a gangster show set in 1920s Birmingham, so it has specificity and focus in its storytelling, but it works in various places around the world because of its focus and quality.
Added Jones about telling local true crime and local history stories: “The bit that I found extraordinary is the more local that little story about that particular local crime or that particular piece of history, the better it traveled. We weren’t aiming to do that.”