The key takeaways from this week in Miami included producers ceding control to creators, broadcasters ceding control to producers, everybody shifting production out of the US, and a reluctance to mention the ‘T’ word.

The nomadic RealScreen Summit, once the doyen of frozen Washington DC and since found living it up in a mixture of Austin and New Orleans, landed for 2025 in the warmer climes of Miami as it slams together with Natpe for a joint event.

While the cities were fun, the mood on the road has been bleak in unscripted over the past few years. As the first big factual event of the year, it rather sets the tone for the genre for the rest of the year. In Austin, where producers played ‘hunt the buyer’ for a week, and New Orleans, where everybody drank strong coffee and parroted ‘survive to ‘25’, that tone was very much Death From Above.

Whether it’s simply the warmer weather that’s put everybody in a better mood, or the necessity of adapting and changing the way we do business if we do indeed want to stay in that business, there’s been a much more, if not optimistic, then certainly forward-focused and practical vibe to this year’s event. Okay, the old models are broken, we get it, but we can’t just sit on stage saying “the industry’s fucked man”. What does the new content economy look like for unscripted execs?

Here are our five key takeaways from that brave new world.

Nick Uhas on the set of Blown Away

Ceding control (part one)
Legacy content companies have realised far too late that their audience and advertisers have bled away to YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and so on. Or at least, if they did realise, they haven’t acted in time. The audience, in fact, is now the talent, making their own content as influencers and coining it in without the need to jump through the hoops of the traditional producer-pitch-commissioner model.

One fairly heavy-handed solution to this might be to then drag that talent back across to your traditional network and hope that their audience travels with them. The extra money and exposure to a new audience might be tempting. If you had a dollar for every time MrBeast and his Amazon Prime Video series has been mentioned this week you wouldn’t need to worry about any of it, you could retire to South Beach tomorrow. The expert opinion on the ground here is MrBeast has succeeded because Prime largely handed over creative control and marketing to him to do as he pleases, and other examples where talent has been shoehorned into the traditional model has not, and will not ever, work.

Influencer Nick Uhas said: “What should producers do? The thing I would do now is produce an omni-production. We know what outlet it’s going to but we’re also carving out pieces for branded content knowing we’re already going to be doing a thing and we can film it for digital at no extra cost. It can be done on an iPhone. Really cheap. Cheaper than the coffee budget for the production, and it will get millions of digital views.

“It’s valuable as a brand deal. You can do a collab with the creator. There is a multiverse of ways you can milk a production way further than is being done now. Work towards an omni-production across all platforms not just the one you sold the show to.”

Mitch Federer, lawyer to the Instagramers, added: “When you have these creators and you plug them into a traditional network show hoping the audience migrates, that does not work. We saw this with some of the YouTube 1.0 creators who had shows on cable and linear networks, nobody watched and migrated over.

“MrBeast and The Sidemen are examples happening now where the networks are giving up creative control in a way they haven’t before, so the audience is migrating across in a way they didn’t before because it has authenticity.”

It could just be, though, that MrBeast has succeeded because it’s MrBeast. Beware grabbing at online talent to revive your flagging cablenet.

Jenny Daly

Ceding control (part two)
While the producers are being cajoled to give up some of their precious creative control to some pesky upstart with a GoPro, they in turn have been pleading with broadcasters for greater flexibility on rights and deal models. Nothing new there then, but the financial straits of the broadcasters are really putting this issue front and centre now. If you can’t afford the budget for the show, don’t expect to own it in perpetuity. The old models have gone, we get it, now the buyers need to get their heads around it too.

Critical Content president Jenny Daly says structuring deals for shows in case they don’t make it past season one is a key focus of hers now. “Let’s say it doesn’t get past first season, as an indie I will be much keener to reinvent that than the broadcaster. When putting these deals together I’m now saying ‘if it doesn’t make a second season let me take it back and we’ll be partners on it’ because I will hustle it across the world. It may do better in another territory and if it flourishes then let’s bring it back. Trying to give something a life outside of one season is something I’m trying to establish day one.”

That was backed by Brian Tannenbaum, head of originals at Roku. “The CW’s entire business model in The Arrow universe was they would linear premier, it would get a streaming window on Netflix and – boom – they would have a larger audience for season two. Peacock had Suits, it blew up on Netflix, next thing Suits LA premieres on NBC. How do we get past ourselves to allow freedom to allow success?”

Heather Olander

Make it somewhere else
Where producers and broadcasters have aligned this week is the increasingly pressing need to produce their content outside the US. And not necessarily in the economies-of-scale hub models either.

The CW’s Heather Olander was most blunt among them. “I don’t know what will happen down the road politically but for the foreseeable future it is what it is – much cheaper, unfortunately,” Olander said. “It stinks, we’re taking a lot of production work outside of LA, but we’ve found on our shows it is much cheaper to shoot abroad.

“The decisions are not ‘we love it, it’s perfect, the creative, I want to work with this producer…’ it’s ‘does it make financial sense?’. Everything that comes in the door is evaluated by, obviously, do we like the thing, but does it work for us and does it work for our business model?

“All of my colleagues at broadcast and cable with big formats are not shooting in the US, they’re finding economies elsewhere. It’s not even with a hub model in a lot of cases. You get incentives in other countries, it’s cheaper, you get a lot more bang for your buck in other places. It doesn’t have to be a hub model it’s just what you can do outside the US.”

JC Mills

Don’t mention the (trade) war
That trend comes just as everybody’s favourite US president Donald Trump gets his feet back under the Resolute Desk. RealScreen took place against the backdrop of a spiralling trade war with nearby Mexico and Canada, with threats of 25% tariffs being imposed on imports and retaliatory moves being made by the governments across the border.

Produce it in Canada, take advantage of the tax breaks, some of the cities even look like here, has been plan A, B and C for producers looking for a way out of the financial hole at home. Now here they are potentially threatened with punitive financial penalties for doing so. Awks.

It was an obvious hot topic for a week when there was literally an entire panel dedicated to the coproduction and filming opportunities north of the border. JC Mills at Cineflix Productions told the C21 Podcast he didn’t think it would affect TV as production is counted as services, not goods. Another Toronto-based exec wasn’t so sure, saying purchasing and shipping of cameras and equipment could soon ratchet up.

What is noticeable though, is just how scared people in ‘the land of the free’ are of venturing within a thousand miles of making any public comment about Trump. Whether that’s just the age of PR and media training, or the fear of what happens to your business/social media feed if you dare to criticise the dear leader, it was hard to get anybody to touch the topic on stage. The four panellists in the Oh, Canada session looked at each other, shrugged, and simply said “the fact is we don’t know how this will play out”. On The future of funding panel, when the issue was raised from the audience, the guests refused to answer it and asked to move on.

Fingers crossed this 30-day hiatus on the plans turns into permanent abandonment, eh? Happy thoughts, happy thoughts. 

‘May contain nuts’ – use AI to reinvigorate library content
Ben Field, founder and executive producer of AI-specialist Deep Fusion Films, had some eye-catching numbers from his recent podcast series fronted by an AI version of deceased chat show host Michael Parkinson. Field claims audience and PR reach of 74m, a YouTube channel that got 9.2m views across the archive of shows from a standing start, and by end of March he expects to have a revenue of £250k.

“AI is front and centre of the format, we’re not passing off, we’re not saying ‘this is Michael Parkinson’, and a lot of people buy into it. Mike Parkinson, his son, came to us saying he wanted to reinvigorate his late father’s archive. He had a show that ran until 2005 that wasn’t being monetised what can we do?,” Field says.

“When you are open and honest the audience will accept it. There’s always pushback and noise but once people understand it they just see it as very different. If you embed AI front and centre it’s a really interesting way to start monetising legacy content. You can build new content with legitimacy. It’s a new area that hasn’t been explored so it’s an exciting development – there are formats with will work with AI that are legal, ethical, responsible and don’t scrape the world’s data and screw over the creative sector.”

Daniel Oron, exec producer at Go Button Media, agreed the audience is open to AI driven formats like this where the proposition is clear from the start. “There should be a slate that says ‘may contain nuts’,” he said.

Jodi Flynn

Twirling, twirling, twirling towards victory
The effect of NBCU’s recent restructure, which will see key cable buyers such as USA Network, Oxygen, E! and Syfy spun off into a separate entity dubbed SpinCo, led by Mark Lazarus as CEO, was a key topic discussed on this week’s C21 Podcast which you can get in all good book stores.

Jodi Flynn, president and head of content at the rebranded Pantheon Media Co, said: “It remains to be seen. They are doing business, one of our companies has a show with them that just got renewed for 13 episodes, so for the foreseeable future it will be business as usual because they have obligations to be met and then over the next six-to-nine months they’ll figure out what that company looks like and what it’s mission is and we’ll see if that holds.”

Critical Content’s Daly, added: “I have had the same experience. We have a significant amount of business within the NBCU universe – Peacock, Oxygen and USA. All that is continuing. There hasn’t been a hiccup. They’re still buying. They’ll figure it out. For us it’s business as usual but they’re being conscientious about what they’re renewing. They’re looking at what’s in the pipeline, are they assets they want to continue? It hasn’t hurt us, whereas the Discovery-Warner Bros was difficult for everybody because they were stagnant and stopped doing things. They’re not stagnant which is good.”

JC Mills, Cineflix Productions president and head of content, said: “You’re not going to see too much of a change for the next six-to-12 months but eventually they will keep the hits they need, you’ll see those channels turn into a mixture of pre-sales, copros and acquisitions. That makes the maths work.”