Programming Profile

Bea Hegedus, executive MD of distribution at Vice Media Group, outlines the company’s new titles for distribution and talks us through her other main priorities for 2023, including major moves into FAST channels.

Vice Media Group has come a long way since the 1994 launch of the magazine that would later evolve into a multimedia company spanning digital content, TV and film production and a news agency, to name just a few of the firm’s lines of business.

In 2023, Vice creates over 2,400 pieces of content a week in 25 languages from multiple production hubs around the world, ranging from shortform videos on social media to premium documentaries. Vice is featuring five docuseries in its Digital Screenings playlist this week, all of which cater to the youth audience.

“Everything we do is with a lens through which young people would like to watch all these shows. It’s unbiased. We don’t take sides. We go deep into stories. We unpack stories truthfully,” says Bea Hegedus, Vice’s executive MD of distribution.

“We have a breadth of experience within the company making ‘deep-dive’ documentaries in the news space, in the entertainment space and on interesting subjects that some companies probably don’t want to deal with. We are unapologetically there and we deal with topics that excite the younger audiences, even if they are sometimes a bit more daring.”

Headlining Vice’s playlist is The Dangerous Rise of Andrew Tate, a 1×60’ doc that enters the world of Andrew Tate’s ‘War Room’ to investigate his growing empire and gives voice to the women who were allegedly abused by the American-British social media personality and former professional kickboxer.

The film takes viewers inside Tate’s compound in Romania, where he was recently arrested at the end of last year and also delves into the so-called ‘loverboy method’ that was sold by Tate to thousands of young men as a tool for gaining influence over women and which Romanian authorities now allege he used to recruit and manipulate vulnerable women to perform pornographic content.

According to Vice, the doc has been years in the making, with filming starting long before Tate’s recent arrest. “This is a great documentary that I think everybody around the world will want to buy,” Hegedus says, adding that Vice Distribution has already sold it to an as-yet unnamed UK buyer with four other territories joining swiftly within a week of its launch in the US.

The second programme is season one of Overlooked (3×30’), which promises to “document the urgent, underreported stories within communities routinely erased or ignored.” Each episode follows an individual through a typical day, giving viewers a look inside the challenges they face as a result of the systems that are failing them in their day-to-day lives.

Tapping into the true crime genre, Overlooked examines cases where certain crimes, such as murder, haven’t been investigated properly due to factors like racial bias.

Also on Vice’s playlist is season four of Most Expensivest (10×60’), a highly popular and outrageous lifestyle series, in which American rapper 2 Chainz travels the US to find the most expensive goodies money can buy, from a US$5,000 cowboy hat to a US$100m retirement home. One of Vice’s flagship entertainment series, Hegedus says the show is also one of its most in-demand programmes and has sold “really well around the world.”

Next up is Sex Before the Internet (8×60’), a docuseries made for Vice TV that takes viewers back to pre-internet times when pornography was only available through X-rated magazines and VHS tapes.

The final show on Vice’s playlist is Tales of the Territories (10×60’), which is exec produced by Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson and sees the wrestler-turned-actor reunite legends from wrestling’s most famous promotions to relive their most outrageous, jaw-dropping and unbelievable stories.

According to Hegedus, the most in-demand genres and subjects at the moment are crime; topical issues, such as the war in Ukraine; food; and the investigation of misinformation.

Since last year, Vice has increased its focus on premium docs and is expanding away from digital platforms to include linear broadcasters and cable networks too.

“We are now in every window. We are on linear and we are on cable, which you couldn’t say about Vice just five years ago,” Hegedus says. “We obviously still have our digital offerings – we are very prolific on platforms like TikTok and have news coverage on Twitch – but our premium television offering is getting bigger and better. We are making a lot more than before.”

In line with its evolution, Vice is also making big moves into the free, ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) space, which Hegedus describes as “the new cable.”

“We are thinking about how FAST is going to shape the company in the future. We launched our main entertainment channel on Roku in 2021 and have recently launched a news offering our Vice News channel,” the exec says.

“What I am thinking now is how we service that part of our business better, rather than just putting a lot of library on there. Therefore, we’ve started experimenting with programming these channels and looking at how we make sure that we grow our audience in an increasingly competitive marketplace because our brand has really high discoverability on FAST. Who else could be the Vice FAST viewer?

“We are trying to make sure that we are windowing correctly too. Our windows are getting shorter and shorter on all other platforms and our windowing strategy is very much our focus when I’m making deals. I always try to have our shows back in the catalogue at least for our own use very quickly as much as possible.”

Hegedus isn’t concerned about potential buyers being put off by content that is already attached to one of Vice’s FAST channels, particularly in the US, where she says the channels pose little competition.

“The US is a very mature market and giving, for example, Hulu the same show as on my FAST channel doesn’t bother Hulu at all. It’s a different audience, so this non-exclusive environment in the US works really well for us at the moment. Our FAST channels are not real competition to Hulu or Discovery or any of these big streamers yet and it will be a long time before we get there,” she says.

“Internationally, it’s a different space because it’s an all-exclusive environment, so we haven’t launched internationally yet for that reason. The rights piece is very complicated. With FAST, it’s all about scale; I can’t just launch a FAST channel and put it on just one platform. We need to be everywhere in the country once we launch and how we do that with our partners is something we are continuously working through.

“A lot of our partners, like Channel 4 in the UK, who I currently have an All 4 deal with, share our DNA. So that’s what I’m trying to find in every country – partners that share our DNA, we solve problems for them and they see Vice as a complementary offering to them. We are on YouTube and drive audiences to All 4 by running promos directing them to All 4. So there is a space where we can cross-promote each other and live very well together.”

We have some tentpole documentaries being produced that will not be going on to Vice’s FAST channels, that will be sold to third parties in an exclusive environment, but currently that’s a smaller portion of the company’s library.

“The larger bit of our library usually sits with partners and comes back to us very quickly. The viewer is always in my mind when I’m doing these deals and I’m constantly solving a problem for these partners – if they want young people to come to their platform, we can do it together. We are a very powerful marketing machine.”

Vice is also looking at creating original productions for FAST, although Hegedus says that while “it is coming,” it won’t happen in 2023 as the FAST business still needs to mature somewhat. When original productions for FAST are on the horizon, Vice News will likely be the first port of call.

Meanwhile, Vice is in production on 100 Days to Indy, a behind-the-scenes docuseries for The CW about IndyCar racing in the US, which Hegedus is also actively pre-selling. “It’s huge for us because Vice has never made an entertainment series for a US broadcast network before,” the exec notes.

In addition to its FAST expansion, Vice’s other priorities for 2023 include increasing its focus on presales and coproductions as it establishes partnerships with new and bigger partners.

“I’m focusing on working on originals for various platforms, expanding beyond sales,” Hegedus says. “I’m also taking on third-party distribution for other producers, growing the catalogue. My three main focuses for 2023 are: FAST, originals with our old and new partners and third-party representation.”