Lilla Hurst at Blue Ant Studios is looking to replicate her recent deal with Red Bull Studios by aligning with producers and channels in possession of IP and has a pot of money available to make it happen.

Snowboarding doc special Anna Gasser: The Spark Within

Canada’s Blue Ant Studios (BAS) recently expanded its third-party distribution business with the acquisition of a package of factual content from Red Bull Studios. The deal, announced at the London TV Screenings, saw BAS secure the exclusive worldwide distribution rights to several sports and adventure documentary titles.

Included in the package are Compton Magic (8×60’, Lightbox), about the most successful Amateur Athletic Union basketball team of all time; Anna Gasser: The Spark Within (1×60’, Red Bull Media House), featuring the female snowboarder; and free-climbing epic The Dawn Wall (1×120’, Sender Films).

Lilla Hurst

The agreement was brokered by Lilla Hurst, global head of acquisitions and content strategy at BAS, and bolsters the company’s 7,500-hour library of programming.

Speaking to C21 on the day the deal was announced, Hurst said: “That evolved as a result of us being increasingly interested in two areas: sport and premium docs. That library has successfully invested in and commissioned a brilliant array of premium sports docs that break outside of the traditional models of the Mo Farah biography to Climber and other titles.

“We noticed this growing demand among our buyers to have sport-adjacent content and felt quite strongly, if we were going to lean into that space, that Red Bull was a great place to start. It coincided with them coming to speak to us about building a relationship with a distributor on an ongoing basis. A lot of the producers who have worked on those docs with Red Bull, like Lightbox, are ones we’ve worked with previously. It was perfect timing.”

This is far from an opportunistic one-off, however. Hurst and BAS are keen to forge other such content partnerships with channels and producers who hold rights to catalogues, and she’s got money to spend in pursuit of that goal.

“We have a growing appetite to represent established brands, whether it’s production entities or channels,” Hurst said. “We’ve got a much more established reputation in the marketplace now than we did a few years ago. People understand what Blue Ant Distribution stands for and what our appetite is. We’ve got a good advantage at the moment in that we have the ability to invest at a meaningful level.

“We’re very keen to work with more channels that own their IP and perhaps want to build more relationships with distributors that are deeper and longer-term as well as other established brands.”

Having acquired the desired “sport-adjacent” content from Red Bull, Hurst “doesn’t believe we’ll do more of that at the moment. We want to put all our focus on the Red Bull catalogue initially in the sports world.” But she added she would never say never if the opportunity was right.

“If somebody came to me with something like the rumoured Andre Agassi documentary, I’d bite their hand off for it, but we’re also in the market for other genres that support what we’re doing,” Hurst said. “Premium doc stories, history, crime, natural history to a degree, although we’re obviously well served with our Love Nature brand, male-skewing science – those spaces are really interesting for us.”

Another area of interest is buying out the IP from producer libraries, striking deals for producers for established brands within their libraries or picking up swathes of a particular genre to which they own IP and buying it out wholesale. “We’re doing this increasingly and have a growing appetite for,” Hurst said.

“There’s a way to do it that still protects the producers should they have an ambition to sell in the future. There’s still a sufficient amount of them to make them attractive to buy, but it’s a very beneficial cheque for them to receive in leaner times.”

Currently, BAS is checking out English-speaking territories but that could broaden, she added.

The strategy could speak to BAS’s ambitions to make an IPO. Since this interview, C21 has exclusively revealed talks are taking place about an M&A deal with Canada’s Boat Rocker with that aim in mind, but also the state of the industry in general at the moment.

Climbing doc The Dawn Wall

“It’s a mutually serving arrangement,” said Hurst. “It’s serving a need that we have for a greater volume of IP and content to serve the distribution business and the channel business but it’s also helping producers through leaner times where perhaps their revenues been hit, their EBITDA has been hit and a cheque for a decent amount of money in what would otherwise be quite a fallow year really helps them to still hit the numbers. We’ve been able to value some content that they perhaps would regard as back-catalogue. It can be an unexpected bump for them.”

Hurst did express concern that in a world where the middle ground has been squeezed almost out of existence there will be a lot of fairly similar content produced, which will ultimately only exacerbate the loss of audiences to other platforms.

“No doubt there’s been an even greater eradication of the middle – it’s either premium premium or low-cost long-running returnable,” Hurst said. “There is a danger with that low-cost, long-running returning model, which, let’s face it, most producers are operating in, because that huge premium commission from Nat Geo is very difficult for most producers to get a win.

“I am concerned the model many have turned to in order to keep the lights on is generating a lot of the same content and we’ve got to come up with new ways to originate affordable but more dynamic content. Otherwise, it doesn’t lend itself to pre-sales and coproduction, it’s just nice to have and you won’t spend your highest licence fee on that. Then the model kills itself.”

Nevertheless, Hurst, an experienced exec in the coproducing and financing field before it became de rigueur for so many producers, does feel more optimism about the industry now a horrible 2024 has given way to 2025.

“There’s way more optimism and there’s way more constructive deal-making– or deal-making full stop – going on now than there was 12 months ago,” Hurst said. “Producers have weathered the storm. They’re bearing scars but they’ve reconfigured their businesses and found new ways to keep the business running and keep their staff on. Everybody has adapted, and the ones who haven’t are either not around any more of considering shutting up shop.

“I’m being brought new projects that have some finance attached to invest in and acquire on almost a daily basis. The US has reorientated through this crisis to our benefit. Having fought and failed to secure rights in the US for so long under work-for-hire, suddenly it’s a whole new world. We’re talking to a lot of fantastic US producers who really want to work with us, understand the international coproduction model and distribution investment model and have fantastic shows.

“It’s been a really tough time but by hook or by crook there is a lot of business getting done.”