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CONTENT STRATEGIES

Are ones that never knock … What the world’s channels and platforms want and how to give it to them.

Buyers briefing: Three, SVT

LONDON SCREENINGS: C21 catches up with programming executives from broadcasters in New Zealand and Sweden to hear about their content requirements and the demand for UK programmes in their markets.

Matt Barthow
Head of programming, Three, New Zealand

What programming from the UK airs on Three?
We have bits and bobs of UK content. The Graham Norton Show really anchors our schedule on a Thursday night, we’ve had that for years and years now and it’s a solid performer for us. We just finished airing London Zoo: An Extraordinary Year from Entertainment One, which took a really cool look at the first time the zoo has shut in its history due to the pandemic.

What kinds of shows do you look for from the UK?
There are opportunities for lots of UK content but in primetime it’s generally, small-run, one-offs like Prince William: A Planet For Us All from Drive. For our channel, the royal family aren’t that big but we try to jump on key titles that have a lot of buzz around them. When that happens, the job of marketing and publicity is kind of done for you. Also, The Crown on Netflix has really amplified people’s interest in the royals, so we try to capitalise on things like that. Our audience is generally 25- to 54-year-olds who maybe have a couple of kids. Shows like The Masked Singer – which we’re airing our own version of later this year – hit that co-viewing experience, which is really important to families.

London Zoo: An Extraordinary Year looks at the impact of the pandemic on the zoo

There’s also an opportunity to use our on-demand service ThreeNow as a platform to try to do things a little bit differently. We did that recently with the Framing Britney Spears documentary from Red Arrow Studios International and saw huge success. We’re also keeping an eye on potential back-up content we can jump on in case of changes to our schedule due to the pandemic. We did this last year by acquiring the UK version of the gameshow Cannonball, which aired on ITV in 2017, from ITV Studios.

What’s your acquisition plan for the rest of 2021?

We’re now looking at Q4 2021 and I’m interested in finding an international, multi-night reality show and a couple of dramas. We’re always looking for factual, whether it’s at 20.30 or 21.30. The 20.30 stuff needs to be on the cusp of that ‘household shopper with kids’ audience and the 21.30 stuff can be a bit more gritty, like Cocaine: Living With the Cartels, which we took from Drive.

Stephen Mowbray
Head of acquisitions, SVT, Sweden

What are you looking for at the virtual London Screenings this year?
The old cliché is that we’re after quality, which we know we’ll get from the UK,” he says. “Last year we had a huge success with [BBC/Hulu drama] Normal People, so what we would really like is to find content which is aimed at maybe 20- to 40-year-olds. There is a lot of classic UK drama that skews older; [ITV crime drama] Vera, for example, works really well for us, but I’m sure it’s got an older audience, and Vera herself is around 73 years old. So when you have a show like Normal People where the [cast] are 22, we would like more of those.

Broadcast serves older audiences and online serves younger viewers, so finding more content specifically suited to online would be nice. There are not that many around and I’m sure everyone wants them. Last year I loved [BBC/HBO drama] I May Destroy You, which broke a lot of rules and was fresh, well made and well acted, so more of those kinds of things would be interesting to find. We’ve seen people watching shows together more than we did before, when there was a big trend where everyone watched singularly sitting on their iPads. We’re looking for shows that might work for families, where parents can watch with their kids instead of the children watching on a tablet and the parents watching something else.

BBC/Hulu’s Normal People was a hit for SVT

How important is UK content to SVT?
We probably have about four UK shows a week at any time on air, so we are consuming a lot [of UK content]. We just finished negotiating a deal with ITV Studios for a big, important package. The thing with ITV is that it has key returning shows as well as new shows, and you need both in your schedule because the public love coming back to favourites. So to get another season of [crime dramas] Shetland or Vera is very attractive.

What is your stance on coproducing with companies in the UK?
We don’t really coproduce, we pre-buy almost everything. The competition is so intense that if we wait, we lose it, so we have to react. When we were at the virtual edition of Mipcom last year, shows were being presented to us for delivery in Q2 2022; there were no cast and there were no scripts, but they had two offers already. The competition is brutal and really intense, so you can’t sit around. It also means there’s a lot more risk involved. I’m sure I’ve been talking about risk for years, but the risk has increased five-fold because of the competition.

Click here to check out the collated London Screenings coverage.


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