Distribution in Focus: SPT’s Mark Young

With buyers flocking to London TV Screenings and Mip London this week, Broadcast International speaks to Sony Pictures Television’s exec vice president of distribution & networks for EMEA Mark Young, who talks up the power of partnerships and why streamer Crunchyroll is a vital tool.

For Sony Pictures Television, as an independent studio, we win when our clients are winning, so it’s always great to see an invigorated and ambitious playing field. We’ve come through a tumultuous period and the industry is still navigating its path. We are optimistic, positive and focussed, and, looking forward – there are a lot of opportunities to be optimistic about.

For our clients, who are navigating dynamics at play, they are, to an understandable extent, somewhat risk averse at the moment. People are increasingly very focussed on things that they know that they can do, that they can be confident will work. In order to get our clients to invest their money into our product, to convince them that our product will deliver for them and their audiences, we are leaning in even more to being a great partner by sharing more research and information on our creative and on our production, and working in an even more aligned way in partnership together.

Opportunity is going to come through having a broad, diverse content mix. For us, being an independent studio, overall we are producing in multiple categories and strands – from feature films, to television, soap, formats, scripted and unscripted. The newest opportunity for us is our anime business, with Crunchyroll as part of Sony Pictures Television. Crunchyroll is building a thriving direct-to-consumer business and subscriber base. The opportunity this offers us as a distribution group is that we are distributing anime to our partners now alongside our wider offering. That has become a really important business strand to us, which has the added benefit, in turn, of helping increase the Crunchyroll subscriber base.

It does come down to navigating the increasing risk-averse nature of the industry and how we now work together in the most nimble and dynamic manner. Rights and utility continue to be topics that are discussed heavily in all of our dealings.

With the breadth of product that we’ve got, we are seeing growth in a lot of different areas. One fascinating area of note is that SVOD platforms are increasingly including advertising and new tiers/approaches. So we working with streamers who are trying to appeal to add new subscribers, while simultaneously needing to appeal to advertisers as well. It adds a new revenue stream for our partners and is another element to the rights they are seeking and how we work with them.

The model of rights being sold to a streamer for a very long period, which at one point felt like the industry norm, especially for scripted series, is definitely changing. There are conversations now where we get rights back sooner, and then we have the opportunity to monetise the title onwards with other platforms or partners. As ever, we will adapt to these market trends and look for opportunity so we can continue to work with partners to bring our content to audiences the world over.