Shiny-floor formats, sports content and news are the three key pillars of Lithuanian broadcaster LNK’s strategy to compete with the streamers, according to head of acquisitions Marijus Gradauskas.
Marijus Gradauskas
Although most of the major SVoD platforms have launched in Lithuania, they are not offering local content and nor are they in the Lithuanian language, allowing the linear broadcasters to continue dominating the market.
That said, the streamers still pose the biggest challenge to LNK, according to Marijus Gradauskas, head of acquisitions at the Lithuanian free-to-air commercial broadcaster. Linear viewing is decreasing in the country, as it is in most other territories around the world, he says.
“The time spent watching linear channels is shrinking a bit, and ratings-wise we’re also dropping. People are also watching YouTube, which is not very healthy for our market. So we feel that competition,” the exec says.
“Of course, there is Netflix and we have a strong local pan-Baltic SVoD service that is doing pretty well. But the market is very small, so it’s very hard to invest big money because the numbers of subscribers is very limited. Even Netflix is not localised, meaning only younger people who are fluent in English can watch it.
“We try to acquire things that are not shown on the platforms. On our main channel, there is a big focus on news. We have the local basketball league, which is doing very well on our male-skewing channel. And, of course, no platform can offer shiny floors like the local channels. That’s how we keep our own signature on the market, with shiny-floor shows, sports and news. Those drivers cannot be outperformed. Local content is the thing nobody else can offer.”
Formats such as The Masked Singer, The Voice and Your Face Sounds Familiar have performed well for LNK for “many years,” according to Gradauskas. On the scripted front, daily crime series Rimti Reikalai airs four days a week in the 21.00 slot, and the exec describes it as “very successful.”
LNK’s version of The Masked Singer
In terms of news and current affairs, Gradauskas says the broadcaster produces “a couple of talkshows” for primetime and has daily news editions at midday, 16.30, 18.30 and 21.30.
Elsewhere in Europe, many broadcasters are increasing their coproduction efforts with their counterparts in other European countries to compete with the streamers. But Gradauskas says LNK is not following this trend, as audiences and cultures are too different.
“When we talk to partners like the Americans or British, everybody assumes we could produce something pan-Baltic between Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. But we’ve never done any coproductions because the markets are different. Viewership is different, our languages are completely different and we do not know each other’s celebrities. So this means we should stick to our local market, which is less than three million viewers in total. We must fight for ourselves.”
Additionally, LNK doesn’t commission any content at all. This has meant, according to Gradauskas, that the broadcaster hasn’t felt much impact from the global economic slowdown.
“We are not commissioning at all; we are not participating in coproductions at all. The only thing we could feel [from the financial crisis] is less supply, but there’s so much on the shelf, particularly with things like reality ready-mades, for example. So, if there was less supply of American drama series, we could take long-running reality shows,” he says.
Daily crime series Rimti Reikalai
However, the exec adds that there is a weaker supply of feature films for acquisition.
LNK operates five linear channels and an AVoD service. In addition to news, sports and shiny-floor shows, films are also a popular feature of the broadcaster’s schedule and are in “huge demand” among viewers, Gradauskas says.
“Our schedules are specific and different from the other linear channels across the world. When we schedule [scripted] series, they are on our secondary channels. Our main channel is basically built of features, local content, some long-running series from Turkey and some reality shows,” he says.
“The demand for films on our linear channels is still very big and they’re doing pretty well. So we do schedule a lot of movies every week; it’s close to 30 titles a week. We buy more than 500 titles every year.”
In the scripted series space, Gradauskas looks for long-running shows that can air in daily slots.
“We do not buy eight-hour series like we used to, they have to be long-running shows. They could be Turkish, or we even air Indian series in the daytime on the smaller channels, and some American and French franchises that have more volume,” he says.
The Voice has performed well for LNK
“It’s hard for us to market new shows on a weekly basis because they finish too fast. Therefore, we implement long-running shows like CSI and Law & Order. They are well-known titles and people are used to watching them on linear.”
Crime procedurals are the priority, according to Gradauskas, while “strong dramas” are also popular, but regular soaps are not on the exec’s shopping list.
In the unscripted space, the broadcaster looks for ready-made reality series, such as cooking show My Kitchen Rules and yacht series Below Deck, for which LNK provides voiceovers.
“We are still buying. We are working with the same budget we had at the beginning of the year. We’re still buying a lot of films, a lot of series, a lot of ready-made reality shows, some animation and some factual. We are still on the same path,” Gradauskas says.
“When it comes to production, which is not my part of the business, we are producing the same volume of local productions and still do the big shows. But times are challenging. We must wait and see how we will end this fiscal year and what our income will be. It’s hard to predict a rise in the acquisition budget, but we have no plans to cut it.”
