Eight things we learned at Realscreen

At the beginning of the month, producers, commissioners and distributors from around the world gathered in New Orleans to discuss the current state of the factual market following a rocky year for TV in the UK, US and further afield.

Here are the some of the key themes Broadcast spotted across the four-day summit.

No unscripted uplift from LA strikes

Last year’s Hollywood shutdown fuelled fears of a scripted dearth causing commissioners to frantically consider how to fill their schedules.

Those in the unscripted world hoping for an uplift have been left sorely disappointed.

For one thing, as Rina Yano, senior vice-president for business and legal affairs at production company Westbrook Inc, pointed out in a session on dealmaking, the economic backdrop to the 2023 strikes has prevented commissioners from simply switching to unscripted content.

“Unfortunately, when we were dealing with the networks, people were just generally afraid to spend money,” she said. The solution for Westbrook, she added, has been to adapt the types of shows it was presenting to prospective buyers to fit the polarised economics becoming apparent – “really thinking about having a premium version of a show or a budget version”, she said.

Brie Miranda Bryant, senior vice-president of original programming at Lifetime, said the strikes really brought home the message “we are now competing against content everywhere, from every genre, at any period of time”, with streamers commanding well-stocked libraries.

Jason Sarlanis, president of TBS, TNT, truTV, ID and HLN, linear and streaming at Warner Bros Discovery, agreed: “When we look back at this strike with hindsight, we’ll be able to say this is the year when the power and the value of these content libraries really came to the forefront – look what happened to Suits for NBCUniversal, or the explosion of FAST networks, which are really library-based, and have a ton of unscripted programming [at their disposal].”

For that reason, he said, future commissions should be made with one eye on whether a show would “be additive to that tremendous vault of programming that we’re all sitting on top of, and not necessarily duplicative”.

The industry might have stalled, but FAST channels are getting into gear

Continuing their relentless rise in the global industry, free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) was mentioned in almost every session at Realscreen – not just their impact on viewing habits during the strikes but also as a way to super-serve audiences, combat streaming-induced decision fatigue and as a home for brand-funded content.

In the FAST session, chair Andrew Singer, chief executive of Andy Singer Media, reiterated projections that FAST will be a $12bn marketplace in 2027 and $18bn a year later.

“When we launched our first FAST channel [in 2014], everyone thought it was a joke – how could this ever be a viable business?” Katrina Kowalski, SVP, international content programming and acquisitions at Paramount’s Pluto TV, said. “Fast-forward to where we are today, and we have 425 content partners, we have 2,000 channels worldwide… it’s like we’ve been on a rocket ship.”

She pointed to the slew of competitors which have sprung up in the space in recent years, including FreeVee and Samsung.

“The ecosystem is just growing, because people can really see that the proof is now in the pudding,” she said. “It’s now a real business and there’s business to be done, partnerships to be made and deals to be struck. The possibilities are endless.”

Blue Ant, which launched its first FAST channel barely three years ago, grew its viewership 40% between 2022 and 2023.

“Last year, viewers were watching half a billion minutes per month,” Carlyn Staudt, general manager for Love Nature and head of commissioning for global media at Blue Ant Media said.

“There are niche audiences that are really hungry to go deep into a genre.”

But, Kowalski warned, getting exclusive content would become increasingly important as the market continued to grow. 

Nat Geo theme park rides? Chief talks up ancillary revenues to IP

This was a nugget let slip by Tom McDonald, executive vice-president for global factual and unscripted at Nat Geo, as he discussed the reach of Nat Geo brand.

“National Geographic is one of the biggest Instagram brands in the world – it’s only behind two Kardashians, if you add individuals – so that’s kind of impressive,” he said.

“The magazine still has huge amounts of readership both in print and in digital, and of course, we’re part of Disney.

“So one of the things that we’re giving a lot more time to when we’re looking at ideas… is how an idea might manifest itself not just as a streaming proposition on Disney+.

“I know this sounds outlandish, but when I started one of the things I said, half meant as a joke, was: ‘wouldn’t it be great if one of our shows became the theme park ride at Disney World?’”

While colleagues had not initially been receptive to the idea, “there are some really interesting conversations happening right now between us and the broader Disney ecosystem, with parks and beyond, about how we might bring some of our shows to life in the physical world and [with] interesting interactive experiences.”

He was quick to add that this idea wouldn’t apply to all Nat Geo shows, acknowledging that its investigative series about global black markets Trafficked and upcoming series about the Jonestown massacre and the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami clearly wouldn’t be appropriate. 

Americans are just discovering co-pros and that puts UK and Canada at an advantage

“Budgets at broadcasters are being tightly squeezed at the moment, but that doesn’t stop production budgets going up,” Channel 4’s head of acquisitions Polly Scates told the ‘Getting It Made, Getting Paid’.

And with everyone in a very similar boat scrabbling to find new ways to fund content, securing financing through co-production deals became of the recurring themes of the summit.

“There is a big international community who are all going out to find new partnerships and we’re working with people who we maybe wouldn’t have thought we’d be able to work with previously,” Scates added. “But everyone’s having to more open to conversations and getting creative dealmaking over the line.”

And from Scates’ session on the first day to the penultimate session ‘What’s the deal? How Dealmaking is Changing in the Streaming Era’, it was clear that for many US producers, the concept of international co-productions is still fairly novel.

And while British producers might have become well-versed in co-pros over the past few years, Kate Harrison, president of the Toronto-based Cream Productions, pointed out the concept has deep roots in Canada.

“Co-productions are the Canadian system,” she said. “This whole ‘someone’s going to pay the whole ticket in your country?’ – not in my experience, ever.”

Thus, Canadian producers command “a bit more leverage” in discussions with commissioners and distributors.

The SVP of acquisitions at one major distributor told Broadcast he agreed, but that British companies were also likely to be at a similar advantage because of their own familiarity with co-productions.

Anne Kennedy McGuire, partner at Loeb and Loeb LLP, a legal firm which supports production deals, advised any producers out to “know their budget and not have the network dictate their budget to them”. Then, they must focus on finding “the right partnership with a good international distribution partner, who has relationships in a lot of territories”.

In the US at least, politics is out

In 2024, 4bn people, or approximately 40% of the world’s population, will be eligible to vote in an election. The American presidential election is due to take place in early November. But, it seems, there is a hesitancy to directly explore politics in factual TV ahead of that vote – and perhaps a perception that it wouldn’t be well received.

In the ‘docbuster’ session, focusing on the rise of the documentary blockbuster, only one panellist, Erica Diaz-Grant, VP for development at Investigation Discovery, responded when asked if they foresaw any content in the political space this year.

“We tend to steer clear from being too political – our audience is mainly Middle America. They really just care for good stories, good crime stories, generally speaking,” she said.

“I understand and recognise that there is a lot of criminal activity within government – we will not be covering that…it’s unlikely.

“I’m sure that somewhere in Warner Bros Discovery, there exists a team that will go down that road… [but] we just tend to stay in our little lane.”

In the closing session on trends, Julie Chang, Blue Ant Media’s EVP for business strategy and co-productions, global media, took a similar line, noting the company would want to avoid “pigeon-holing ourselves with one view of what’s going on in the world”. Viewers tended to come to Blue Ant channels specifically “to escape from all of that”.

Marcie Hume, VP of programming at A&E, said the cabler would veer away from “on the nose” politics, with an exploration of the impact on people’s lives a more effective way of “acknowledging what’s going on in the world”.

“[We’d look at] how people are reacting, how people are behaving, how are they coping, how they’re interacting with each other, what other problems are coming about based on what’s happening politically,” she said. “Even how people are kind of coming to blows over things.

“That’s an exercise in figuring out what the effects are on our society, how that plays out in our day to day lives, and how we can develop around that.”

UK ponders certification scheme to guard against AI misuse

The TV and film industries could put a certification scheme in place – similar to the Albert scheme for sustainability – to prevent the inappropriate use of AI in production, according to Benjamin Field, executive producer at technology-focused Deep Fusion Films.

As the Albert scheme requires production companies to report on the environmental sustainability of a production, Field said “broadcasters and producers needed to have the ability to put markers in place to ensure users of AI worked within certain guidelines”. He noted that advancements in the tech could soon mean individuals are able to produce high-quality content from their bedrooms, featuring generated footage of existing people or invented ones.

“There is an interest to do that in some of the conversations we’re already having with BBC, ITV and C4,” Field said.

He also said the industry would need to be proactive to stay in touch with a rapidly evolving landscape:

“Legislation is very slow, so we need to be self-regulated rather than wait for government,” he added.

Murder shows aren’t as dead as you’d think

Over the past few years, a perception has permeated the industry that, while true crime is booming, appetites of buyers and audiences alike have moved away from the traditional fare of murders towards more ‘cerebral’ crimes, such as fraud, cons, and those involving cults.

This message continued to be carried at Realscreen as panellists discussed how these titles and the streamers that championed them have altered industry’s definition of ‘true crime’. Brittinee Royes, VP for unscripted lifestyle and docuseries at NBCUniversal, argued streaming had created “an opportunity to be flexible in the crime space” in terms of format, length and subject matter, while Erica Diaz-Grant, VP for development at ID, said true crime is no longer the “dirty little secret, hidden away on the schedules”.

“With all sensitivity to real victims, as content creators, we’re taking things that are really horrendous life stories and turning them into entertainment in some form so it’s really delightful when no one dies,” she added.

However, in the ‘docbuster’ session panellists conceded murder-orientated content was still a major pull for buyers.

Julie Meldal-Johnsen, SVP for global content at ITV Studios, said while the producer-distributor is seeing a lot of interest in environmental crime, “murders in a suitcase will always have a home”.

“It’s about taking new ways into it, a different creative lens but it’s also about access to witnesses, to survivors, to police forces,” she added.

And although non-homicide cases may have taken off on streaming, Royes acknowledged the linear landscape remains a fertile ground.

“As we expanded into streaming space, we’re seeing more opportunity to lean into characters, to lean into stories – it doesn’t necessarily have to be your traditional murder,” she said. “Whereas on cable, our audience likes murder.”

NBCU has experimented with “murder-adjacent” content on its linear channels, she said, “but by and large we’ve stuck true to murder – it really is not broke, our audience know what they like, what they want and how they’re coming to it”.

The lingering taste for murder was summed up far more bluntly at the opening of the conference by EVP for unscripted and alternative entertainment at Walt Disney Television, Rob Mills in his opening keynote interview when he observed that “one of the few good things about murder is that there’s plenty of it” for content purposes.

Access is everything

Commissions may be hard to come by and financing shows remain a jigsaw puzzle with the box lid missing, but there is one factor guaranteed to make factual commissioners sit up and pay attention: access.

“Access is number one – and good access,” Fozia Khan, head of unscripted UK at Amazon Prime Video said in the ‘docbuster’ panel. “We have really long development periods where we really nail the access and get people signed up exclusively.”

The ability to secure strong archive material could also tip the balance in a commission, she said.

Zane Friedkin, vice-president of development at Harry & Meghan outfit Story Syndicate, agreed that it “is definitely a prerequisite”, and access to a well-known figure is a deciding factor for buyers.

He also said he was aware of situations where multiple teams of filmmakers were chasing the same story and “streamers are waiting to see, hey, which of those projects is the best, who ends up locking down the best access – and then they’re going to make a call on which is the better one”.

As one producer told Broadcast at a networking event: “There is money out there for factual – if you’ve got the access.”