Distribution in Focus: Keshet International’s Kelly Wright

With buyers flocking to London TV Screenings and Mip London this week, Broadcast International speaks to Keshet International’s Kelly Wright about second window rights and the double-edged sword of productions with numerous international partners. 

While the industry continues to feel risk-averse right now, I’d say it’s thawing out. Previously so much was frozen in terms of budgets and strategies. Now, there’s the feeling that things are opening up again. Shows that we pitched previously, to which people said it’s “a ‘no’ for now”, are now being acquired. Many of those choices are still buyers playing it safe, and that also means relying on tried-and-tested IP. We’re fortunate to have a robust catalogue of scripted and non-scripted formats, and have seen a flurry of options and licenses across that catalogue and across the world, from the UK to Mexico, particularly in the past nine months, since summer 2024. 

Collaboration is both our biggest opportunity and our biggest challenge. With shifting business models and rapidly inflating costs of production, it seems everyone is keen to work together to make shows happen. What we often see, though, is that having that “global” mindset from the get-go almost closes the distribution doors. The more international a project becomes, the less there is in the backend for all of its collaborators. That desire to collaborate has a cost, because everyone involved needs to win - the producers, commissioners, and distributors. There’s a lot of extra effort involved for what ends up being a smaller financial upside.

On the other hand, collaboration across the board brings all of us together to make amazing programs. We’re setting up more intra-company projects than ever before, like Keshet Germany’s Messiah and Keshet Studios’ Small Town Setup, which saw our KI production arm developing and selling Keshet formats Messiah and Dear Neighbors” to Joyn and Hallmark+ respectively in their local markets. We’re also working on co-developments with friends from around the world – some of it new, but a lot of it reworking exciting IP to get shows current with local broadcast trends. It’s exciting.

We’re definitely seeing a thaw across the board – with more clarity on strategies, which is leading to more greenlighting. There’s an openness – it’s almost a collective attitude that “we’re all in this together, we must find a way through and make it work.”  

For us, it’s our Keshet IP. We saw growing interest throughout 2024 in our scripted and entertainment format slates, and that trend looks set to continue into 2025. To give you a snapshot from the scripted side, we’ve got two different adaptations of both Prisoners of War and A Body that Works in development, local adaptations of The Baker and the Beauty and Messiah soon to premiere on TF1 in France and JOYN in Germany, with other versions already in the works, and a myriad of active options and licenses across the board, including shows in active development in the UK.

Our Greenlight: Factual and Formats commissioning initiative is going from strength to strength – we’ll be announcing our first raft of sales for Hitler’s Treasure Hunters and our true crime docuseries Catch Me If You Can very soon, alongside our first greenlit titles for 2025. Greenlight is a great example of our new acquisitions strategy, which sees us board projects at a much earlier stage and co-develop them alongside the producers, like we did with our Spring 2025 new releases, Seven Wonders of the Ancient World with SandStone Global and Bettany Hughes, and Dinner with Gavin Rossdale, a new celebrity food chat show hosted by the Bush frontman, with Roundtable Productions in the US. We’ll be screening both of these titles to buyers at the London TV Screenings. Both these celebrity-fronted shows are already generating buzz amongst buyers and we’re thrilled to have secured three pre-sales for Seven Wonders before launch.

They are an integral part of the ecosystem within which we operate. Their changing positions depend on the proposition you’re offering – it’s all negotiable. We co-produced Rough Diamonds with De Mensen for Netflix and VRT, and the show did incredibly well on the platform – top 10 in over 70 territories at the same, ranked number 3 in Netflix’s Non-English shows (23-30 Apr 2023). Eighteen months later and we’re now able to exploit this gripping eight-part crime drama elsewhere. For us it hasn’t really affected our pipeline, but rather offered additional opportunities to bring great IP to more viewers.