UK broadcasters urged to release domestic SVoD rights

UK free-to-air broadcasters have been urged to release domestic SVoD windows to unlock crucial financing for commissions, as the issue of rights reared its head at the Broadcast Summit this week. 

Broadcast revealed last month that another rights battle between the indie community and the PSBs could be set to break out if proposals to allow the latter to bundle primary and secondary rights into commissioning codes were given the go-ahead by Ofcom.  

Besides stymieing indies’ potential downstream revenues for distribution, producer body Pact argued the proposal “undercuts the producers’ bargaining power and their ability to raise deficit finance against the secondary market”. 

With static broadcaster tariffs, cost of production and the complexity of bringing on co-production partners hampering indies in piecing financing together for shows, the UK secondary window SVoD market is an important revenue stream for both tapping into financing or recouping deficits invested by distributors. 

“There needs to be a bit more flexibility with one or two of the free-TV commissioners in the UK to give second windows [to SVoD buyers]. That’s still a little bit missing,” Anke Stoll, senior vice-president of acquisitions and co-productions at Keshet International, told delegates.  

“In other European countries like Germany – and not all broadcasters in the country do this – they give reasonable second windows for Netflix [on their commissions]. That’s a really good financing option.” 

How VoD rights in the UK are exploited is a long-standing issue, and the ROI for helping financing shows was raised by chiefs of distribution majors at last year’s Edinburgh TV Festival. All3Media International chief Louise Pedersen called for “some conditions [for taking financial risk]” and “flexibility” to be given by partners on these projects – which Broadcast broadly understands refers to the secondary window exploitation. 

Speaking alongside Stoll, Pernel Media founder and chief exec Samuel Kissous queried why UK broadcasters don’t test a model being experimented by some French broadcasters, such as TF1 and France Télévisions where they “give first windows to the streamers” or launch programming at the same time. 

“If you look at some of the very big, expensive shows, it’s actually helping them [the broadcasters] through [not having to spend] the marketing money,” he added. “I know there’s strong resistance to this, but maybe it’s time to try some things.”