LONDON SCREENINGS: ITV Studios’ MD of global distribution Ruth Berry discusses what the growing AVoD and FAST markets means for the TV business, and the new financing models emerging from the boom in premium factual.
Ruth Berry
ITV Studios (ITVS) has predicted that 2022 will be the year it fully recovers from the impact of the pandemic. According to its five-year plan for growth, the production and distribution outfit is forecasting that its total revenue will this year recover to the same levels seen in 2019, before coronavirus hit.
Beyond that, ITVS expects its total organic revenue to grow by at least 5% a year until 2026, while on the programming front, it predicts the number of hours of high-end scripted content it produces will double from 200 in 2021 to 400 in 2026. As for formats, the firm estimates the number of its properties produced in three or more countries will rise from 16 in 2021 to 20 five years on.
In addition to growing its revenue and production, ITVS is also expanding into new areas, namely the burgeoning AVoD and free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) channel markets. At the start of this year, for example, it teamed up with Samsung TV Plus to launch two FAST channels. Storylands is dedicated to non-English-language drama and will feature shows produced by labels under the ITVS umbrella, while the second is a much swearier affair, solely airing the US version of the Gordon Ramsay-fronted cooking show Hell’s Kitchen.
In the AVoD space, last year ITVS launched four unscripted YouTube channels – Our World, Our Life, Our Stories and Our Histories – which showcase nature documentaries and everyday life in the UK.
Ruth Berry, MD of global distribution at ITVS, says this year she wants ITVS to continue its push into the AVoD and FAST sectors, but does point out that sellers tend not to earn the same revenues as they would from traditional players.
“AVoD is one of the fastest growing spaces in the industry at the moment, but that doesn’t mean it’s generating the sort of licence fees that an SVoD platform or the traditional buyers would have. But it is certainly proving itself to be a part of an ecosystem of windowing content, licensing library catalogue or putting out single-brand channels, such as Hell’s Kitchen,” she says.
AVoD and FAST channels are just two examples of new developments in an ever-changing industry, which Berry describes as “an exciting and competitive place, more so than ever, and it has only ramped up over Covid.”
A Year on Planet Earth found funding around the world
One genre that has boomed during the pandemic is premium factual, which Berry says has been driven by deep-pocketed streamers commissioning programming. Premium factual, which more closely resembles high-end drama with its expensive talent and lavish cinematography, is also more costly to produce than other unscripted content.
Berry says funding a premium factual series like you would a drama is one solution to its sky-high production costs, predicting that more shows will be financed in this way. The exec adds that the Stephen Fry-narrated natural history series A Year on Planet Earth, produced by Plimsoll Productions in association with ITVS, was the first time in her career she financed an unscripted show like a drama.
“We put together financing around the world for A Year on Planet Earth,” she says. “And we found partners in Fox Nation in the US, Tencent in China, ARD in Germany, as well as, obviously, ITV in the UK. They’ve all come in as co-financing partners and then ITVS has also picked up some deficit to have that show made. And then we’ll have the rest of the world to sell into.”
As well as A Year on Planet Earth, highlights of the company’s London TV Screenings slate this week include psychological thriller The Suspect (World Productions for ITV), David Tennant-starring drama Litvinenko (Tiger Aspect Productions and Livedrop Media for ITV and Viaplay) and literary adaptation Tom Jones (Mammoth Screen for ITV and PBS/Masterpeice). All will be unveiled to buyers at an event today.
But as for scripted content, Berry says global production partnerships are becoming less desirable for buyers because commissioning strategies have changed.
“We’ve got lots of clients and there’s lots of hunger for content, and therefore the idea of taking just one bite of the show isn’t always attractive,” she explains. “Lots of streamers have also built their own original pipelines, so they coproduce less and their buying strategies are becoming more localised. They are buying specific dramas for the Scandi market or the southern European market or something similar.”
ITVS, however, is open to coproduction partners and has had success with partners based in Europe and the US, Berry says. “There are definitely territories that lean in more than others, and there’s some that are comfortable to take the risk sooner rather than later,” she says.
ITVS will unveil psychological thriller The Suspect at the London Screenings
“Some markets much prefer to read all the scripts before they look at making an investment decision, while others will make a decision on one script. The US is always a key coproduction market and will continue to be for us. We’ve also always had a level of success in Germany and France.”
Berry adds that ITVS will “work with anyone”, whether they’re a traditional broadcaster or a global streamer. “For example, public service broadcasters in Scandinavia have been partners with us for a very long time and are as important to us as streamers and vice versa,” she says.
“There isn’t a thought process around whether I would prefer to sell a show this way or the other; it is quite show-specific. Some shows lend themselves to a big global sale, with others we get a big US streaming deal and then we sell to the rest of the world separately. It’s a patchwork quilt and it comes down to whatever works best for the show.”
This means that selling to global streamers that want full ownership of rights is far from off-limits, according to Berry. “The pure original streaming deals, where ITVS is making a show that is effectively bought out by the streamer and the distribution rights don’t fall to us, are a huge area of growth for the studio and a really important one,” she explains. “I don’t see it as something being taken away from us. [Those deals] aren’t substituting our pipeline, they are incremental to it.”
Looking to the year ahead, Berry says British drama will continue to be sought by global commissioners, partly because more US studios are ring-fencing their content for their own streaming platforms.
“British drama is having a strong, competitive time at the moment because vertically integrated studios and their streaming platforms are keeping hold of all their content. As a result, there’s not a lot of US content actually in the market that’s free for people to buy and so buyers are turning to the next most premium content market: the UK.”
ITV Studios’ fact-based drama The Pembrokeshire Murders
As well as the activities of US studios, European content legislation is driving the boom for UK drama, Berry adds. The European Union’s Audiovisual Media Services Directive states that streamers must offer a 30% quota of European content to local subscribers, and while the UK is no longer part of the EU, the law still applies to UK content.
“As there are such strong European quotas required for streaming content, buyers at streamers are looking to see what the strongest performing content in Europe is, and that tends to be British drama or international drama,” Berry says.
Big hitters for ITVS in recent years include true crime drama The Pembrokeshire Murders, which was originally commissioned by ITV and was one of the commercial broadcaster’s most successful launches for well over a decade, according to Berry. It was also picked up internationally by broadcasters such as Canal+ in Poland and the BBC for BBC Player in Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia and Hong Kong.
Finally, Berry highlights Australia as the territory to watch due to the growing number of streamers setting up shop there. “In the last 12 months, Australia has been interesting because more SVoD platforms are launching there. BritBox is one example, while Stan is ramping up its programme offering, and the more traditional linear broadcasters are building out their streaming capabilities,” she says.
