World Screen MIPTV 2015 by World Screen

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THE MAGAZINE OF INTERNATIONAL MEDIA • APRIL 2015

www.worldscreen.com

MIPTV Edition

Anniversary Edition THOMAS RABE Bertelsmann JEREMY DARROCH Sky ROBERTO IRINEU MARINHO Globo DAVID ZASLAV Discovery RICHARD FREUDENSTEIN Foxtel HERNAN LOPEZ FOX International Channels

PLUS:

OUR TOP 10

DRAMAS

Viola

DAVIS BEN KINGSLEY MARISKA HARGITAY DAVID ATTENBOROUGH GINA RODRIGUEZ

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CONTENTS

APRIL 2015/MIPTV EDITION DEPARTMENTS PUBLISHER’S NOTE

Publisher Ricardo Seguin Guise

By Ricardo Guise.

Editor Anna Carugati

WORLD VIEW

Executive Editor Mansha Daswani

A note from the editor.

Managing Editor Kristin Brzoznowski

GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE

Associate Editor Joanna Padovano

By Bruce Paisner.

UPFRONTS

Editor, Spanish-Language Publications Elizabeth Bowen-Tombari

What’s new for MIPTV.

MILESTONES

Richard Freudenstein and Ross Crowley on 20 years of Foxtel.

VIOLA DAVIS

96 BEN KINGSLEY

100 MARISKA HARGITAY

SPECIAL REPORTS GLOBAL NETS

FOX International Channels’ Hernan Lopez.

BEHIND THE SCENES

102

Jane the Virgin’s Gina Rodriguez.

LATIN BEAT

108 WHAT’S NEXT? This special report on the future of the content business includes interviews with Bertelsmann’s Thomas Rabe, Sky’s Jeremy Darroch, Discovery’s David Zaslav, Amazon Studios’ Roy Price, Youku Tudou’s Victor Koo, Maker Studios’ Ynon Kreiz, FremantleMedia’s Cecile Frot-Coutaz, AwesomenessTV’s Brian Robbins, filmmaker David Attenborough and futurist Jason Silva. —Elizabeth Guider, Anna Carugati & Mansha Daswani

139 WORLD SCREEN @ 30

ADVERTISERS’ INDEX

543

WORLD’S END

546

In the stars.

This celebration of World Screen’s 30th anniversary includes our Top 10 dramas, featuring excerpts from our treasure trove of interviews with executives, showrunners and on-screen talent. —Anna Carugati

179 TAKING OFF Exploring the latest trends in the inflight entertainment market. —Kristin Brzoznowski

ONE-ON-ONE

207 BERTELSMANN’S THOMAS RABE As chairman and CEO, Rabe heads up a conglomerate that includes RTL Group, Penguin Random House, BMG and more. —Anna Carugati

ON THE RECORD

Contributing Editor Elizabeth Guider

Production & Design Director Victor L. Cuevas Online Director Simon Weaver Art Director Phyllis Q. Busell Sales & Marketing Manager Faustyna Hariasz Sales & Marketing Coordinator Dana Mattison Sales & Marketing Assistant Erika Santana Business Affairs Manager Terry Acunzo Senior Editor Kate Norris Contributing Writers Steve Clarke Andy Fry Juliana Koranteng Jane Marlow Joanna Stephens Jay Stuart David Wood Copy Editors Maddy Kloss Kathleen Payne Daniel Ellis-Ferris

295 SKY’S JEREMY DARROCH

Ricardo Seguin Guise President

The chief executive of the pan-European pay-TV giant discusses innovation and growth. —Anna Carugati

Anna Carugati Executive VP & Group Editorial Director

IN CONVERSATION WORLD SCREEN is published ten times per year: January, February, March, April, May, June/July, September, October, November and December. Annual subscription price: Inside the U.S.: $90.00 Outside the U.S.: $160.00 Send checks, company information and address corrections to: WSN INC. 1123 Broadway, Suite 1207 New York, NY 10010, U.S.A. For a free subscription to our newsletters, please visit www.subscriptions.ws.

Assistant Editor Joel Marino

Special Projects Editor Bob Jenkins

104

Televisa’s José Antonio Bastón.

Associate Editor, Spanish-Language Publications Jessica Rodríguez

351 GLOBO’S ROBERTO IRINEU MARINHO

Mansha Daswani Associate Publisher & VP of Strategic Development

EXECUTIVE BRIEFING

WORLD SCREEN is a registered trademark of WSN INC. 1123 Broadway, Suite 1207 New York, NY 10010, U.S.A. Phone: (212) 924-7620 Fax: (212) 924-6940 Website: www.worldscreen.com

Discovery’s president and CEO shares the gains made by the company’s portfolio of services, in the U.S. and around the world. —Anna Carugati

The chairman and CEO of Brazil’s dominant media group weighs in on navigating the company through a fast-changing economy. —Anna Carugati

395 DISCOVERY’S DAVID ZASLAV

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CONTENTS

APRIL 2015/MIPTV EDITION THESE TARGETED MAGAZINES APPEAR BOTH INSIDE WORLD SCREEN AND AS SEPARATE PUBLICATIONS:

BUYERS STEP UP FREMANTLEMEDIA’S CECILE FROT-COUTAZ ITV STUDIOS’ KEVIN LYGO SPANISH STYLE

188 194 196 198

LEARNING TO SHARE DEMANDING KIDS BACK IN STYLE SUPER RTL @ 20: CLAUDE SCHMIT LAGARDÈRE ACTIVE’S CAROLINE COCHAUX DISNEY JUNIOR’S NANCY KANTER

244 254 266 274 282 292

TALKING BACK HOT! NBC’S PAUL TELEGDY JANE THE VIRGIN ’S GINA RODRIGUEZ & JENNIE SNYDER URMAN CASE STUDY: GOT TALENT

322 330 338

440 448 450 452

344 348

PAST PERFECT MAD MEN ’S MATTHEW WEINER CRIME PAYS: LAW & ORDER: SVU COLD WAR, HOT DRAMA: THE AMERICANS

376 384 388 390

SCIENCE MATTERS THE GOOD LIFE DAVID ATTENBOROUGH BBC NHU’S WENDY DARKE BRAIN GAMES ’ JASON SILVA

412 418 424 426 428

CHANNEL HOPPING YOUKU TUDOU’S VICTOR KOO TURNER’S RICKY OW HOOQ’S PETER BITHOS

ICFLIX’S CARLOS TIBI SOUTH AFRICA

462 464

SPANISH CONQUEST AZTECA’S MARIO SAN ROMÁN

482 488

LISTINGS FOR 130 DISTRIBUTORS ATTENDING MIPTV 503

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PUBLISHER’S NOTE

BY RICARDO SEGUIN GUISE

In Vino Veritas I love wine, and so do many of my friends in this industry. During the past 30 years, I’ve been lucky to have many wonderful dinners with interesting people, most of which were accompanied by superlative bottles of wine. But one of my business experiences involving wine nearly went disastrously wrong. Anna and I had recently married, and when she became editor, we decided to raise the bar even higher on the level of executives we would interview for the magazine. Who could we interview that would showcase our editorial might and create an amazing amount of buzz? It was January 2001 and, at that time, there was one person whose fast rise and larger-than-life personality fit the bill perfectly: Jean-Marie Messier. He took the reins of the sleepy French water-utility company Vivendi and quickly transformed it into a media behemoth by acquiring CANAL+. He then bought Seagram, the large distiller of alcoholic beverages, which also owned Universal Studios. He referred to himself in his autobiography as J6M (Jean-Marie Messier: MoiMême Maître du Monde), which translates to JeanMarie Messier: Myself Master of the World. I’ve met a lot of egomaniacs in this business, but nothing prepared me for that! Anna and I were thrilled when we were told that Messier had accepted our request and that we would be interviewing him at the Seagram Building on Park Avenue. One year earlier, Time magazine had named the Seagram Building, built by Mies van der Rohe, the most important architectural achievement of the past millennium. (That’s right, 1,000 years!) To prepare for the interview, Anna read Messier’s book and told me that he mentioned in it that his favorite wine was Château Ducru-Beaucaillou, a second-growth Bordeaux. I had a couple of bottles from the 1990 vintage and decided I should give him one after the interview. On the day of the interview I was a bit nervous. It’s not every day that you meet a cosmic ruler in his magnificent palace. We arrived at the Seagram Building and took the elevator to the floor where the conference room was located. When the elevator doors opened, we encountered a huge wall filled with wine bottles. I began reading the labels: Château Latour 1945; Château Lafite 1953; Château Margaux 1928…there were hundreds of bottles of the most historic vintages from the most prestigious châteaux. I later learned that, besides being one of the largest distillers in the world, Seagram also represented the first growths of Bordeaux in North America. I was suddenly very embarrassed of the little bottle I had brought with me in a plastic bag. I was trying to find a place to dispose of it when the conference-room doors

I’ve met a lot of

egomaniacs in this

business, but nothing prepared me for that!

20 World Screen 4/15

opened and we were ushered in. I placed the bag next to my chair and, a few minutes after the interview started, I accidently hit it with my foot, causing the bottle to fall. I was terrified that the bottle had broken and the spilled wine was now moving toward Messier’s expensive shoes, but I did not dare look under the table. It ended up that the bottle was intact and the interview went well. As we were leaving I mustered the courage to give him my present, which he graciously accepted. The Seagram Building also houses the famous Four Seasons Restaurant, which hosts the finest wine-tasting events in New York City. At one of its Brunello tastings I had the good fortune to meet Richard Parsons, then the CEO of Time Warner, and, unbeknownst to me, the owner of a vineyard in Tuscany. His wine was one of those selected for the tasting, and we had a very enjoyable evening aided by delicious Italian wine. The next day, I wrote him a letter requesting an interview, and he promptly accepted it. I am not sure if the memories of that evening had anything to do with it, but Dick Parsons was the only head of a major media company who came to the reception area to greet us in person and bring us to his office. It was a very nice touch and we will never forget it. During the span of my career I’ve met several people who decided to become winemakers. It is undoubtedly cool to tell your guests that you own a vineyard and that they are drinking your wine. But such romantic thoughts aside, most of these recently converted winemakers quickly learn that a successful wine business is inordinately time consuming and capital intensive. It is relatively easy to be an ordinary winemaker; it is exceedingly difficult and expensive to be a serious and awe-inspiring winemaker. The same is true of publishing. It’s not easy to publish a great magazine, like the one you are holding. It takes a lot of effort from an ambitious team relentlessly in pursuit of perfection. As I reflect on our company’s history, sipping a glass of Burgundy, I must confess (in vino veritas) that we do encounter brief moments of weakness, when we feel that putting together such a massive edition (in addition to the three daily and nine weekly online newsletters) is just too overwhelming. Sometimes we have our flashes of doubt and wonder if all the long hours and the personal sacrifice are really worth it. But when it is all over, the satisfaction of having once again created a truly memorable edition is extremely rewarding. So please open a good bottle of wine and join me for a toast as we celebrate 30 years of publishing excellence.

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WORLD VIEW

BY ANNA CARUGATI

Change Is in the Air Since the beginning of time, young adults have been distancing themselves from their parents’ tastes and values. Baby Boomers changed attitudes toward race and gender; permanently altered fashion, music and pop culture; and impacted the economy and politics. Millennials are showing signs of leaving just as big a mark— their entertainment choices are already influencing the media business. A number of recent studies have shown that Millennials, roughly defined as individuals born between the late 1980s and the early 2000s, prefer to watch content on YouTube rather than shows on linear channels. In one survey, when teenagers were asked who their favorite stars were, YouTube personalities outranked movie, TV and music performers. Comedy duos, like Smosh and TheFineBros, and the videogamer PewDiePie came in ahead of Jennifer Lawrence, Katy Perry and the late actor Paul Walker. YouTube stars have struck a chord with Millennials with their videos of comedy sketches, videogames, pranks, fashion tips, assembling and playing with toys, and even imitations of how animals eat. OK, you’re probably thinking kids will be kids, always have been, always will be; this generation has just armed itself with smartphones and cameras and posted their antics on YouTube. Well, a lot of money is circulating around this short-form content. The Walt Disney Company bought Maker Studios, and Otter Media, a joint venture between AT&T and The Chernin Group, acquired a majority stake in Fullscreen. Maker and Fullscreen are MCNs— multichannel networks—companies that aggregate YouTube channels and represent their top stars, or creators, with the goal of maximizing revenues. Clearly, major companies like Disney, AT&T and The Chernin Group are placing their bets on short-form content and the viewing habits of Millennials. The average length of these YouTube videos is three to eight minutes, but on another website, Vine, videos are six seconds long. Yes, really. They’re just six seconds of kids skateboarding, tossing a ball or jumping into a pool. And Vine is hugely popular. Some of its stars package a bunch of six-second videos and then post them on YouTube to expose them to an even bigger audience, because the name of the game here is scale—scale can translate into greater ad revenues. More importantly, YouTube has become a highly democratic incubator of talent; young creators can post videos and, if enough people like them, they go viral and fairly quickly amass huge audiences. But, here’s the catch. This alternate world of short-form content is looking for a wormhole into the galaxies of traditional media. Maker Studios has been packaging the best of its videos and selling them to pay- and free-TV outlets. Fullscreen and AwesomenessTV are looking for additional ways to distribute their content and are even considering

The only constant in the media business

is change.

22 World Screen 4/15

charging for premium offerings and setting up paywalls. Smosh is making a feature film, and so are other YouTube stars. Isn’t this all quite similar to what happens in “traditional” media? Yes, the entertainment industry is moving toward bite-size snacks of storytelling, but it is not forsaking the all-you-can-eat offerings of online streaming services, live TV events and must-tweet shows on linear channels. We live in a world with a smorgasbord of programming that encompasses all lengths and genres. This issue marks the 30th anniversary of World Screen. In the five years since we celebrated our 25th anniversary, the media industry has arguably changed more than it did in the previous 50. Think of all the developments. Auteur television is now continually raising the bar for drama, as writers and showrunners are given free rein to follow their visions. The small screen is inhabited by a wide array of complex, multi-layered characters. Over-the-top services have become forces to be reckoned with. Viewing online has become so popular that even major media companies like HBO, Showtime, CBS and Nickelodeon are rolling out their own streaming services. In response to the increase in on-demand viewing, channels around the world have upped their programming games, investing in world-class dramas, lavish entertainment shows and favorite sports events—all in an effort to draw viewers to live broadcasts. If we look at the success of Empire, Broadchurch, The Walking Dead, The Voice, the FIFA World Cup, the Super Bowl, Champions League and countless other programs, it is fitting to paraphrase Mark Twain and say, “reports of linear television’s death have been greatly exaggerated.” In our main feature, we explore what’s next in our industry, and while no one has a crystal ball, a common theme we heard in our interviews is that quality will continue to be the key differentiating factor, regardless of the genre or length of content. Viewers have been exposed to so much that they are now extremely discerning. In every section of the magazine, we look at what’s trending in various genres: period dramas, interactive formats, science documentaries and classic children’s properties. In our indepth interviews, we speak to media industry leaders from all parts of the globe, including Bertelsmann’s Thomas Rabe, Discovery’s David Zaslav, Sky’s Jeremy Darroch and Globo’s Roberto Irineu Marinho. All of them are keeping a watchful eye on Millennials’ viewing habits and on technology. There’s no question that the only constant in the media business is change, but the innovations that stick are rooted in quality and convenience.

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GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE

BY BRUCE L. PAISNER

Burn This Letter There was once a promising American presidential candidate, James G. Blaine, who almost became President of the U.S. in the late 19th century. What stopped him was a letter he wrote to someone he unwisely trusted, admitting to the fact of a bribery scheme and putting in big letters at the bottom, “Burn This Letter.” So when Blaine finally ran for President, people all over the country chanted, “Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, the continental liar from the state of Maine—burn this letter.” Mr. Blaine was toast. Which brings us to the internet and recent scandals caused by leaked, hacked and otherwise uncovered emails. Fresh in our minds, of course, is the Sony/North Korea disaster which dumped an entire company’s private correspondence into the public discourse. And not too long ago, Edward Snowden ended up in Moscow with a highly embarrassing collection of NSA and other government emails. Several years ago, at the dawn of the internet age, a friend gave me some sage advice: “Don’t put it in an email today if you are not prepared to see it on the front page of The New York Times tomorrow.” He suggested to me, as I have suggested to people ever since, that I make the sentence into a little sign and put it right next to my computer. The advice gets at a fundamental and obvious, yet somehow readily forgotten, fact about emails. Unlike conversations, emails create an essentially permanent and thus undeniable record of what was written. An email is much harder to explain away or modify than a conversation. The sad fact is, as recent incidents have made clear, that many people just don’t remember this fundamental reality or follow my friend’s advice. Email has become not just a substitute for the written word, but also the spoken one. People put things in emails that are poorly considered and almost sure to cause them trouble. Big companies, of course, have all sorts of firewalls, protective screens, password expiration cycles and regular deletion policies. This column isn’t about them, partly because even all these measures sometimes don’t work. Nor is it about SnapChat. You are your own best protective device at the moment you write an email. So here are some thoughts, in what is still the beginning of the information revolution, about ways to preserve confidence, trust and reputation in this new area of communication:

Don’t put it in an email

today if you are not prepared to see it on the front page of The New

York Times tomorrow.

24 World Screen 4/15

1) Treat your email as a dangerous, if necessary, tool, and put in emails only what you absolutely have to—no jokes, few personal references, and certainly nothing you are not prepared to read in a public forum. The first question should always be: Do I even need to write this email? 2) Use the phone. Telephones are often an excellent and quicker way to communicate. An email chain that goes on for many exchanges could often have been resolved with a single telephone call. And the telephone is much safer when the content of the message is sensitive. 3) Particularly in the workplace, pay a visit. A brief in-person discussion will usually convey the information and enables you to know who else was listening to the conversation. 4) Before you push the “send” button, always reread the email and think about to whom the recipient might forward it. Often the problem is not the recipient himself, but the people who get it on subsequent rounds. Remember that “Drafts” has a purpose. Often it’s best to put the text in Drafts and let it sit there for a while. Sometimes, removing a single word or phrase can make the text much less incendiary. 5) Break the trail. In a long exchange, email dangers can pile up. Often it’s better to start a new round. 6) Write a letter. My guess is people hardly do this anymore, and more’s the pity. Because letters have more impact now and require much more effort to forward than pushing a button. Of course, as Mr. Blaine proves, you can’t put something incendiary in them either. Email, like texts and tweets, is a comparatively new technology and much has yet to be developed and discovered about how to maximize its value while minimizing its risks. It is so easy to use that we often forget the flip side: It is easy to discover, distort and disclose—or just use in ways the sender never intended. We will get better at it, both as to etiquette of content and the protection of privacy, but that will be too late for people sitting down today to write an email. Your fate is often in your own hands. And although the unfortunate tale of Mr. Blaine may seem like a curious anachronism today, recent events demonstrate that its lessons remain as relevant as ever. Bruce L. Paisner is the president and CEO of the International Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

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UPFRONTS

A+E Networks UnREAL / The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe / Gangland Undercover Buyers will get a glimpse of footage from the new Lifetime miniseries The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe for the first time at MIPTV, thanks to A+E Networks. Joel Denton, the company’s managing director of international content sales and partnerships, highlights how the title provides a deeply personal look into the life of the film icon and “tells a story that maybe not everyone knows.” Also from Lifetime, UnREAL is a dark comedy set against the backdrop of the production of a dating-competition program. From HISTORY, A+E Networks is promoting Sons of Liberty, a scripted miniseries about the founding of America, and Gangland Undercover, a fact-based drama that goes inside the world of biker gangs.

“Our job is to give [buyers] the ammunition and hooks that they need to market these shows on their own networks to make them big successes.” —Joel Denton The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

AFL Productions Gags Network / Curse of the Diamonds / Recipes for All! A leading provider of dialogue-free, hidden-camera and home-video shows, AFL Productions has made more than 6,000 clips available as part of its new Gags Network. This includes segments from Naked & Funny, Crazy TV Pranks, Painfully Funny and other AFL shows. The company also has Recipes for All!, a set of non-dialogue shorts designed to showcase the best international recipes. The original miniseries Curse of the Diamonds, meanwhile, takes place at the tail end of World War II. “Drama, action, intrigue and love are all intertwined with the politics of Russia, Great Britain and America in this exciting, beautifully produced series,” says Yuri Volodarsky, the head of development and distribution at AFL.

“AFL is constantly reviewing and acquiring new content in order to give our partners the best international programming.” —Yuri Volodarsky Curse of the Diamonds

Alfred Haber Distribution 2016 58th Annual Grammy Awards / You Can’t Lick Your Elbow / Top 20 Funniest Each year, the Grammy Awards pulls out all the stops to showcase and honor the latest and greatest from the music industry. The 58th annual event in 2016 is sure to be no exception, and Alfred Haber Distribution is offering international broadcasters a chance to bring the music spectacular to their local schedules. The distributor also has series to present to global buyers, including You Can’t Lick Your Elbow and Top 20 Funniest. Alfred Haber, the company’s president, calls You Can’t Lick Your Elbow an “unexpected pop-science hit in the making.” He says that the international success of Nash Entertainment’s Top 20 Funniest helped to score the series a season-three commission in the U.S. on truTV.

“Music’s universal appeal is limitless, and the Grammy Awards—billed as ‘Music’s Biggest Night’—is, and continues to be, the world’s most popular televised musical event.” —Alfred Haber Grammy Awards 28 World Screen 4/15

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all3media international Indian Summers / Safe House / Kew on a Plate There are two major drama launches for all3media international at MIPTV, Indian Summers and Safe House, “both of which we are very excited about, as they represent the highest standard of U.K. drama production,” says Liza Thompson, the company’s senior VP of program sales. Indian Summers tells the story of the fall of the British Empire and the birth of modern India. Safe House, a returnable miniseries, is a contemporary drama in the investigative-crime genre. “In the realm of factual programming, we are launching a host of great history and observational titles, including a glorious love letter to vegetables with the horticulture-cum-cookery show Kew on a Plate,” Thompson adds.

“We’re on the lookout for the perfect partners to take our burgeoning drama slate out into the world, seeking the right home for our new slate of prestige programming.” —Liza Thompson Safe House

AMC Networks International AMC / Sundance Channel AMC Networks International began launching AMC for the first time outside of North America in the fourth quarter of last year, “and there has been some terrific momentum,” according to Bruce Tuchman, the president of AMC Global and Sundance Channel Global. “The channel is now widely seen across Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.” Sundance Channel also has experienced solid growth in the past few months, with first-time launches in Mexico and several Central American countries. “There is still quite a lot of room for growth for our global brands, AMC and Sundance Channel, as well as the portfolio of locally relevant channels across our portfolio,” says Tuchman.

“At MIPTV we’ll be meeting with platform operators to discuss the expansion of our linear and authenticated SVOD and TV Everywhere services around the world.” —Bruce Tuchman The Red Road on Sundance Channel

American Cinema International Love Finds You in Charm / Love Finds You in Valentine There are new installments in American Cinema International’s (ACI) Love Finds You franchise: Love Finds You in Charm and Love Finds You in Valentine. “These titles are appealing for the global market because they are femaledriven love stories that don’t have violence, sex or bad language,” says Chevonne O’Shaughnessy, the president of ACI. “These movies can easily fit in an afternoon slot on any channel.” Love Finds You in Charm will premiere on the UP channel in the U.S. on June 7. ACI is also going to be starting production on Love Finds You in Valentine, which will be ready to premiere on Valentine’s Day 2016. “Ultimately, we want to continue this trend of making romantic and familyfriendly movies,” O’Shaughnessy says.

“We are producers of content that the whole family can enjoy together.” —Chevonne O’Shaughnessy Love Finds You in Charm 30 World Screen 4/15

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Applicaster Cross-screen experiences / Interactive apps With technology advancements, mobile lifestyles and changing viewer habits, the demand for new entertainment experiences to accompany linear viewing is rising, and Applicaster is here to help. “Entertainment is now served cross-screen, not only as lean-back but also as leanforward—and audiences expect to be engaged and involved in new ways,” says Jonathan Laor, the CEO of Applicaster. “Second-screen advertising poses a new lucrative opportunity, which broadcasters recognize, too.” Applicaster offers a broadcast platform for cross-screen TV, second-screen activities and social TV experiences. “Whether [you’re looking] for a full solution or an interactive, unique module integrated into an existing app, we can help,” says Laor.

“The Applicaster platform is a powerful infrastructure for interactive TV, built by content visionaries.” —Jonathan Laor Applicaster TV apps

Artist View Entertainment Warsaw 44 / Jingle All the Way / Marry Me… Alberta This MIPTV, Artist View Entertainment is pleased to present Warsaw 44, the Polish WWII blockbuster success. “This beautifully shot film transcends all boundaries with its tightly crafted direction and story line,” says Scott Jones, the president of Artist View. “As we celebrate the 70th anniversary of the end of WWII, Warsaw 44 could not have a more timely release.” The company’s lead documentary is Marry Me… Alberta, the first installment in a series that seeks out the most interesting places in the world in which to have a destination wedding. There are also two new holiday specials in the Artist View catalogue, Jingle All the Way and Jingle and Bell’s Christmas Star, which originally premiered in the U.S. on the Hallmark Channel.

“The Marry Me… series is a great way to discover fun and beautiful destinations throughout the world, and there is no doubt that the idea of getting married somewhere unique is popular now more than ever.” —Scott Jones Marry Me... Alberta

ATRESMEDIA Down Below / Tell Me a Story / Hostile Grounds From scripted fare to factual titles, ATRESMEDIA is showcasing a range of content in Cannes. The comedy Down Below tracks the romance between a man from the northern part of Spain and the head nurse of a hospital in the south. Tell Me a Story, meanwhile, is a collection of TV movies based on classic children’s stories, but for an adult audience. “[The tales] are now psycho-thrillers set [in the present], where the Bad Wolf can be a boyfriend full of anger or the Beast a renowned actor severely deformed after an accident,” says Diana Borbón, the sales manager for ATRESMEDIA. The company also presents Hostile Grounds, a current-affairs documentary series following two journalists as they travel to international hot zones.

“Our main goal this MIPTV is to boost sales with a variety of content, explore new markets and strengthen the relationships with all our clients.” —Diana Borbón Down Below 32 World Screen 4/15

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ATV Stolen Life / Price of Love / Sila The Turkish drama Stolen Life, which is being presented at MIPTV by ATV, tells the story of Asiye, who comes from a ghetto in Istanbul and cannot escape her dark past even when she begins to live a glamorous new life. ATV is also showcasing the dramas Price of Love and Sila. Ziyad Varol, ATV’s head of sales, says, “Sila is on air in Chile, and we expect this title to attract attention from the region and spread to other Latin American countries.” Varol adds that ATV’s drama series tend to draw a female audience, a segment that buyers around the world are keen to appeal to. “As Turkey is the MIPCOM Country of Honour in 2015, we are looking ahead positively and excitedly,” he notes.

“ATV titles are known for their highquality production values and strong story lines.” —Ziyad Varol Sila

BBC Worldwide Wolf Hall / Banished / The Hunt Mark Rylance, Damian Lewis and Claire Foy star in the epic new BBC drama Wolf Hall. The six-part series is BBC Two’s highest rating drama in the last 13 years. Banished comes from award-winning writer/creator Jimmy McGovern, with Russell Tovey, MyAnna Buring, Julian Rhind-Tutt and David Wenham in the lead roles. “I think British creativity is at an all-time high and series such as Wolf Hall and Banished, with great writing and acting talent behind them, will enjoy huge success with global audiences,” says Paul Dempsey, the president of global markets at BBC Worldwide. Alastair Fothergill, known for such nature docs as The Blue Planet and Planet Earth, is behind the new seven-part landmark series The Hunt. The natural-history production explores the world of predation.

“There is always an appetite from audiences all over the world for great storytelling in the natural-history genre and The Hunt delivers that and more.” —Paul Dempsey The Hunt

Beyond Distribution Hockey Wives: Married to the Game / Game of Homes / Pati’s Mexican Table Beyond Distribution is highlighting three programs that have strong co-viewing potential, according to Munia Kanna-Konsek, the company’s head of sales. “Hockey Wives: Married to the Game is a series that will stand out in the market, as the characters are warm and independent, and there has been a shift toward more positive programming through all territories,” she says. In Game of Homes, four couples have just four weeks to transform dilapidated dumps into stunning show homes, competing for a chance to win their house and a plot of land to put it on. Pati’s Mexican Table introduces Pati Jinich, a former Latin American policy analyst turned chef, cooking teacher and food writer.

“Pati’s Mexican Table is bringing Mexican food to the masses.” —Munia Kanna-Konsek Pati’s Mexican Table 34 World Screen 4/15

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Blue Ant International The Big Feed / Nomads of the Serengeti / Lewa Diaries Having recently committed to producing 200 hours of 4K nature and wildlife content annually, Blue Ant Media is looking forward to presenting the first of those titles at MIPTV. They are The Big Feed, Nomads of the Serengeti and Lewa Diaries. The company’s sales arm, Blue Ant International, is also highlighting Paranormal Survivor, which features real-life encounters with the supernatural, and Cabin Truckers, following the exploits involved in hauling colossal cabins to remote, picturesque locations. “Our focus is on factual content that captures dedicated and loyal audiences across all platforms, and these new titles are a mix of both story- and character-driven series that address universal themes,” says Solange Attwood, the company’s senior VP of international.

“We are celebrating our first anniversary at MIPTV with the launch of an expanded catalogue of 1,500 hours of premium nonfiction content.” —Solange Attwood The Big Feed

BoPaul Media Worldwide The Big Big Show Tom Green, Andrew Dice Clay and Tara Reid are permanent guest stars in The Big Big Show, a brand-new addition to the BoPaul Media Worldwide catalogue. Tommy Habeeb, who is famed for executive producing and hosting the controversial series Cheaters, will front the program. This weekly show is already confirmed for a September 2015 launch on TV stations covering 70 percent of U.S. television households, including in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Sinclair Broadcast Group is a major supporter, with more than 20 stations participating. CBS, Tribune, Weigel and Media General have placed the show in their fall schedules. BoPaul Media’s CEO, Paul Rich, and Habeeb previously teamed up to produce and distribute the reality series Billionaires Car Club and Stag.

The Big Big Show

Canada Media Fund Financial support / Industry intelligence / Promotion At events like MIPTV, the Canada Media Fund (CMF) promotes the talent and business opportunities that exist in Canada. For the past four years, the CMF presented a showcase of convergent productions at MIPTV and engaged in conversations about the future of digital content. “This year, we will be taking part in the Innovation Seminar, which is part of the MIP Digital Fronts, where we will discuss and showcase innovative productions as the future of content creation,” says Valerie Creighton, the CMF’s president and CEO. “We will also play an active role in the International Drama Co-Production Summit. This summit is a valuable opportunity to share with top industry professionals from various countries and to keep our finger on the pulse of what is shaping the future.”

“MIPTV is an ideal event to promote the wealth of creative talent that exists in Canada.” —Valerie Creighton

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Canal Futura Going Back / Getting to Know the Presidents of Brazil / Decoding Brazilian National Anthem Combining entertainment and education, Brazil’s Canal Futura relies on a programming slate dedicated to promoting ethnic and racial equality, community spirit, entrepreneurship and cultural pluralism. “Our series function as history lessons, serving [to stimulate] the political consciousness of the audience,” says Lúcia Araújo, Canal Futura’s director. Among the titles featuring this theme is the human-rights documentary Going Back, which tracks four inmates arrested at different times who return home after being granted a few days of freedom. Other educational offerings include Getting to Know the Presidents of Brazil, chronicling the highs and lows of the country’s former presidents, and Decoding Brazilian National Anthem, which unravels the anthem’s meaning.

“Our programs seek to contribute to the day-to-day lives of ordinary people, offering entertainment and information that’s relevant and useful.” —Lúcia Araújo Decoding Brazilian National Anthem

Caracol TV Internacional Emeralds, The Color of Ambition / Beats of Love, Niche / TV Maniacs Caracol TV Internacional’s drama Emeralds, The Color of Ambition tracks a series of bloody conflicts in a small town where the emerald trade is booming. Stuck in the middle of these struggles is a family that arrives at the town after escaping the violence of a city. “We are thrilled to premiere this mega series,” says Estefania Arteaga, the international sales executive for Eastern Europe and Asia at Caracol TV Internacional. “With its high production values and amazing story line, it will certainly be a hit.” As for telenovelas, the company is introducing Beats of Love, Niche, while its format offerings include the quiz show TV Maniacs. Additionally, Caracol has partnered with Discovery Channel and other factual producers to present a documentary catalogue.

“We wanted to concentrate on offering a more diverse lineup this time around.” —Estefania Arteaga Emeralds, The Color of Ambition

CBS Studios International NCIS: New Orleans / Scorpion / Madam Secretary Two of the lead shows that CBS Studios International (CBSSI) is presenting are spin-offs of global hit franchises. CSI: Cyber, which stars Academy Award winner Patricia Arquette, is inspired by the work of a real-life cyber psychologist. NCIS: New Orleans, led by Scott Bakula, is set in a local field office that investigates criminal cases affecting military personnel in the Big Easy. CBSSI’s new launches also include Madam Secretary, starring Téa Leoni, and Scorpion. “With Scorpion, a highoctane drama about an eccentric genius and his team of brilliant misfits, we have an entertaining program that appeals to a broad audience,” says Barry Chamberlain, the president of sales at CBSSI.

“We remain committed to providing quality programming with worldwide appeal across multiple platforms, and we deliver on that commitment year in and year out.” —Barry Chamberlain Madam Secretary 38 World Screen 4/15

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Cisneros Media Distribution Secret Love / Candela / Criminal MasterMind Co-productions and format sales are high on the list of MIPTV priorities for Cisneros Media Distribution. The company’s many market offerings include the tele-series Criminal MasterMind, as well as the teen series Candela and the new telenovela Secret Love. Cisneros Media is also presenting a factual catalogue containing titles such as XRC, which is made up of action-filled news footage, and the travel/beauty series Latin Angels. “In addition to containing a great story, which is vital no matter what platform the program is viewed on, we are managing to produce content that seamlessly supports most devices,” says Marcello Coltro, the executive VP of content distribution at Cisneros Media. “These productions are intended to facilitate multiscreen use.”

“Not only can we provide ready-to-air content, we can also co-produce formats and develop stories with our incredible team of writers and producers.” —Marcello Coltro Candela

dick clark productions International Fail Army / World’s Funniest Fails / OK! TV Fail Army is the first program that dick clark productions (DCP) specifically tailored to the international market, and “it’s been an outstanding success,” says Bob Kennedy, the company’s senior VP of sales and acquisitions. The show, which features voice-over narration, showcases some 60 blooper clips per half hour, all in HD. “Broadcasters have summed it up best: Fail Army is the first true internet phenomenon that has successfully transitioned into a television series,” Kennedy says. Additional highlights from sales arm DCP International include World’s Funniest Fails, a family show, and OK! TV, focused on pop culture, gossip and celebrity lifestyle. “OK! TV is the place to get up close and personal with your favorite stars,” says Kennedy.

“We are extremely proud of what we have accomplished in our first year and look forward to working with broadcasters around the world.” —Bob Kennedy World’s Funniest Fails

Dori Media Group My Lovely Hope / The Selfie Challenge / Date Blind My Lovely Hope (Esperanza Mía) is a romantic comedy about the forbidden love between a priest and a woman who is passing off as a convent apprentice in her quest to avenge her mother’s death. The title is a highlight for Dori Media Group, which is also representing the romantic comedy Date Blind (Ciega a Citas), the Spanish remake of an Argentine program. Additionally, the company is presenting the reality game show The Selfie Challenge, a five-round competition in which groups must replicate selfies they receive. “Our catalogue is comprised of internationally proven, successful content,” says Revital Basel, the VP of sales at Dori Media Group. “The ideas, concepts, story lines and even the look of the casts in our dramas are suitable [for broadcast] all over the world.”

“The content we are bringing to this market is innovative, fresh and travels well around the world.” —Revital Basel Date Blind 40 World Screen 4/15

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Electus International The Raft / Mission Survive / Food Fighters Among the series that Electus International is showcasing for buyers are The Raft, Mission Survive and Food Fighters. “In a constantly evolving world where there are broadcasters in every territory that are just as eager to do local versions of titles as they are to acquire the finished episodes, it’s important for us to have programs such as The Raft, Mission Survive and Food Fighters that are versatile enough that they can be tailored specifically to each broadcaster or territory’s needs,” says John Pollak, the president of Electus International. “Each of these series was created to have strong, compelling format beats that allow them to be easily adapted, and with relatable themes such as cooking, survival and adventure, they are formats that will resonate with viewers in every country in the world.”

“As it has been from day one at Electus International, keeping our independent and entrepreneurial spirit must remain at the core of everything we do.” —John Pollak Mission Survive

Entertainment One David Attenborough’s Great Barrier Reef / The Making of the Mob: New York / The Enfield Haunting A recent agreement signed by Entertainment One (eOne) with Atlantic Productions brings to its catalogue the landmark series David Attenborough’s Great Barrier Reef. The company also recently expanded its deal with AMC to launch the new event miniseries The Making of the Mob: New York, which chronicles the historical roots of the original five families behind the formation of the modern American Mafia. Through its firstlook deal with U.K. indie Eleven Film, eOne is introducing the horror series The Enfield Haunting. MIPTV will also see eOne unveiling VH1’s new critically acclaimed dramedy series, Hindsight. “The series taps into universal themes of love, friendship and second chances,” says Stuart Baxter, the president of eOne Television International.

“Entertainment One continues to invest in high-end, big-budget projects in order to deliver compelling and globally appealing programming.” —Stuart Baxter The Enfield Haunting

Escapade Media Status: Vacant / Walking with the Great Apes / Wimp 2 Warrior This MIPTV sees the official launch of Escapade Media’s first factual series co-production with Showrunner Productions, Status: Vacant, shot in 4K. “The choice to film Status: Vacant in 4K was to both future-proof the program and to attract the interest of those who have already taken the steps with 4K content,” says Hamish Lewis, a sales and development executive at Escapade. Further highlights include Walking with the Great Apes and Wimp 2 Warrior. “Walking with the Great Apes offers a unique and rare insight into these amazing mammals, also brought to life through a 3D feature,” says Lewis. Wimp 2 Warrior pushes contestants to their absolute maximum to see if they have what it takes to be an MMA fighter.

“Escapade wants to bring content to the market that not only entertains but inspires.” —Hamish Lewis Walking with the Great Apes 42 World Screen 4/15

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Federation Entertainment The Bureau / Hostages: The Original Series / Replacements Since its formation about a year ago, Federation Entertainment has quickly amassed a roster of four new series ready for the marketplace, with several more coming up. This includes The Bureau, a CANAL+ original spy series. CANAL+ and Israel’s Channel 10 are partnering with Federation and Yetsira Ivrit for the second season of Hostages: The Original Series. Also a highlight, Replacements is a sci-fi/medical procedural. “Each of our prime-time series has a unique perspective: a spy drama with layers of secrets and high stakes; a twisted, fast-paced thriller; and a clone story with love, life and the fight to survive at its core,” says Jean-Michel Ciszewski, Federation’s head of global distribution. “However, the common denominators are high-profile showrunners and passionate storytellers.”

“Federation is committed to complex characters with compelling stories.” —Jean-Michel Ciszewski The Bureau

FOX International Channels Content Sales Killing Jesus The latest edition in the Killing... franchise produced by Scott Free Productions, Killing Jesus, is available for global buyers from FOX International Channels Content Sales. The three-part epic miniseries made for National Geographic brings to light the political collusion that put an end to the life of Jesus. “There are 2.2 billion people around the globe who focus on and follow the teachings of Jesus,” says Prentiss Fraser, the company’s senior VP, global head of content sales. “Scott Free has a first-class method of storytelling with a cinematic feel. Killing Jesus is sure to have broad appeal.” For the first time ever, FOX International Channels Content Sales will be presenting a slate of Turkish dramas, including Love Again (Ask Yeniden), Cherry Season and That Life is Mine (O Hayat Benim).

“FOX International Channels Content Sales provides a global strategy, as well as a local approach to content offerings; our catalogue is a reflection of these.” —Prentiss Fraser Killing Jesus

Foxtel Deadline Gallipoli / The Kettering Incident / The Real Housewives of Melbourne This year marks the milestone 20th anniversary of Foxtel, which has made several new developments recently. “In November, we reframed our entire product pricing and packaging, to a very positive market response,” says Ross Crowley, the director of programming and channels. “February saw the launch of the Foxtel Hub, a specially designed broadband solution for Australian multimedia homes. [We also] relaunched the Presto SVOD service with our partner Seven Network, which now includes premium television. And in March, we launched our digital set-top box, the iQ3, with a redesigned intuitive interface.” Foxtel has also kept its eye on delivering original programming, including Deadline Gallipoli, The Kettering Incident and The Real Housewives of Melbourne.

“As Foxtel continues its 20th year delivering premium entertainment to the Australian public, we are as passionate as ever about original Australian productions and our collaborations with international partners on global productions.” —Ross Crowley Deadline Gallipoli 44 World Screen 4/15

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Foxx New Media 15 Min. Cook / Shocking Eastern European Stories While Foxx New Media is a fresh entrant to the market, the company’s CEO, Martina Liskova, has 15 years of experience working in international media. “Unique in our ability to deliver a fully bespoke and personal service, Foxx New Media believes in listening to the programming needs of its clients and sourcing quality product accordingly,” says Liskova. “As acquisitions and programming experts, we can match quality product with quality buyers. Besides our own development and production departments, we collaborate on various TV and film projects with leading production studios. We have recently launched a distribution division to introduce our producers to international buyers.” For MIPTV, the company is offering 15 Min. Cook, as well as the factual series Shocking Eastern European Stories.

“We are excited to match our outstanding producers with international buyers at MIPTV and to introduce a brand-new way of working to the distribution industry.” —Martina Liskova 15 Min. Cook

The Fremantle Corporation Real Houses / Mission Blue / Reunion of Giants For Canada’s The Fremantle Corporation, MIPTV is an opportunity to further its international collaborations. Given Canada’s appealing production incentives, “content creators understand the need for market access,” says Brad Pelman, the company’s CEO. “However, as business models change and demands are put on ‘traditional’ broadcasters to think differently about how to order, produce and exhibit content, we are looking to capitalize on our international client reach and pair opportunities with producers. If we can backdoor projects into Canada as a result, fantastic.” At MIPTV, The Fremantle Corporation will also be focused on sales for the lifestyle show Real Houses, the blue-chip feature Mission Blue and the aviation-centric Reunion of Giants.

“As a Canadabased company, we recognize the need for producers and broadcasters to work in a collaborative environment.” —Brad Pelman Mission Blue

FremantleMedia International No Offence / Deutschland 83 / The Seventies From high-end dramas to thought-provoking documentaries, FremantleMedia International is presenting a wide variety of programming to buyers at MIPTV. Among the company’s highlights is No Offence, a procedural penned by Paul Abbott that focuses on a team of police officers working in Manchester. “No Offence is a fast-paced cop show like nothing I’ve seen before,” says CEO Jens Richter. “The series takes the viewer on a roller coaster of a journey—one minute there’s humor, next there’s a gritty crime scene, next a display of a character’s fragile nature, and then a massive high-speed, high-impact car chase.” There is also Deutschland 83, a drama set in Germany during the 1980s, and The Seventies, a production that follows up on the hit CNN miniseries The Sixties.

“The coming months will see us further expand our ever-growing scripted catalogue and work with some of the world’s best non-scripted producers to fill our pipeline.” —Jens Richter The Seventies 46 World Screen 4/15

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Global Screen Naked Among Wolves / Arman’s Secret / The Teacher The Holocaust drama Naked Among Wolves is directed by Philipp Kadelbach, who is also the director of the International Emmy Award-winning miniseries Generation War. “Set in late March 1945, it tells the story of a group of political prisoners who try to hide a 3-year-old Jewish boy from the Nazis inside the Buchenwald concentration camp,” explains Marlene Fritz, the head of TV sales at Global Screen. “The effort to keep him alive becomes a metaphor for the struggle to preserve their humanity among the other inmates.” Global Screen is also presenting at the market Arman’s Secret, a fantasy-adventure series aimed at a family audience, and The Teacher, about an unconventional high school teacher who stands up for his students.

“The Teacher is becoming a prime-time smash hit on Germany’s biggest private TV channel, and we are pleased to present this top-rated show to our clients at MIPTV.” —Marlene Fritz The Teacher

Globo Precious Pearl / Empire / Helena’s Shadow Precious Pearl, winner of the 2014 International Emmy Award for best telenovela, follows the love story between a workingclass girl and a millionaire in Brazil during the 1930s and 1940s. It also tells the story of Pearl, who was born out of their union and will be responsible for smoothing out the conflicts that get in the couple’s way. Globo’s highlights also include the novelas Empire and Helena’s Shadow. Written by Aguinaldo Silva, Empire chronicles a humble young man’s rise to become a power-hungry jewelry businessman. Helena’s Shadow is about a man who becomes involved with the daughter of an old flame. “[Our telenovelas] are unique productions, with impeccable footage and modern narratives,” says Raphael Corrêa Netto, Globo’s executive director of international business.

“We’re taking to MIPTV telenovelas that have high production values, with scenes shot in Brazil and abroad.” —Raphael Corrêa Netto Helena’s Shadow

GMA Worldwide My Holy Bro / Another Chance / Once Upon a Kiss GMA Worldwide believes that its MIPTV titles will appeal to all sorts of international broadcasters and audiences “because of the growing exposure and appreciation of quality Filipino programming,” according to VP Roxanne Barcelona. “Our dramas highlight compelling story lines and imaginative themes, and feature our country’s most talented artists.” Barcelona says that My Holy Bro, Another Chance and Once Upon a Kiss embody these qualities faithfully. “Their subject matters revolve around common real-life conditions, from young love (Once Upon a Kiss) to lost loves and second opportunities (Another Chance) to personal sacrifice (My Holy Bro). GMA’s wide assortment of titles impart sincere ideas, which is why our diverse clientele is able to identify with and enjoy our shows.”

“We know the value of top-quality after-sales service and always aim to provide a great overall client experience for each transaction, no matter how large or small.” —Roxanne Barcelona Once Upon a Kiss 48 World Screen 4/15

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Grand Prix Media Second Time / Mika’s Diary / Besouro The newly launched Grand Prix Media is working to position itself as the leading independent distributor of Brazilian content to the international market, and is using MIPTV as an opportunity to do so. “As such, we are proud to be representing a selection of the best content available in our country,” says Gabriel Rohonyi, the managing partner of Grand Prix. “We have a wide range of genres.” The series Second Time centers on a middle-aged journalist who, after losing his wife and job, becomes a pimp. Mika’s Diary is an animation featuring a 4-year-old girl who discovers the world through the lens of her tablet. The action movie Besouro features a young Afro-Brazilian fighter who uses his skills to fight oppression.

“Although young, the company can already pride itself on being considered a leading specialist in Brazilian independent content while having the vision to become Latin America’s leading independent distributor.” —Gabriel Rohonyi Besouro

GRB Entertainment Eat Your Words / Deion’s Family Playbook / Bad Night While GRB Entertainment is well known for its unscripted programming, both as a distributor and producer, MIPTV will see the company launching its first originally produced scripted feature: Bad Night. “We are excited to add this film in with our slate of scripted series, including Mohawk Girls, Tyler Perry’s drama The Haves and the Have Nots and the comedy Love Thy Neighbor, and we look forward to developing, producing and distributing more scripted content in the coming year,” says Mike Lolato, the senior VP of international distribution for GRB Entertainment. Factual offerings from the company include Eat Your Words, a cooking competition that incorporates social media, and Deion’s Family Playbook, which follows the family life of athlete Deion Sanders.

“Each of these titles brings something incredibly unique to the international marketplace.” —Mike Lolato Eat Your Words

Incendo Forget and Forgive / Trigger Point / Kept Woman Incendo has been at the forefront of producing TV movies in North America since 2001. At MIPTV, the company is featuring Forget and Forgive, starring Elisabeth Röhm; Trigger Point, led by Jordan Hinson; Kept Woman, which stars Courtney Ford; and Two Wrongs, with Gillian Zinser. “At the moment, we are co-producing the series Versailles with Capa Drama and Zodiak Media Group, and developing Ice, represented by United Artists in the U.S. marketplace,” says Gavin Reardon, the head of international sales and co-productions at Incendo. “We’re taking all our expertise and talent and applying it once again to series production. 2015 is set to be a huge year for Incendo.”

“Incendo consistently delivers quality films that are recognized around the world as the best television movies being produced today.” —Gavin Reardon Forget and Forgive 50 World Screen 4/15

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ITV Studios Global Entertainment Texas Rising / Good Witch / 10,000 BC The big drama launch for ITV Studios Global Entertainment (ITVS GE) this year is Texas Rising, an epic series about the rise of the Texas Rangers. “It boasts a world-class cast, including Ray Liotta, Bill Paxton and Olivier Martinez,” says Dan Gopal, the company’s executive VP for EMEA distribution and global digital partners. “The series is cinematic in its scale and visual style and we’re hugely excited to be hosting the World Premiere Screening at MIPTV.” ITVS GE is also offering up Good Witch, a drama based on a Hallmark Channel movie that Gopal says “is a charming tale of a magical mother and daughter duo, and it makes perfect family viewing.” There is also 10,000 BC, a social experiment that explores what life was like during the Stone Age.

“We’re looking forward to bringing the incredible talent behind Texas Rising to Cannes to join us in launching the title with the World Premiere Screening.” —Dan Gopal Texas Rising

Kanal D Matter of Respect / War of the Roses / For My Son The Turkish drama Matter of Respect is one of the newer titles that Kanal D has to offer the international market. “We’re really proud to have produced it,” says Ozlem Ozsumbul, the head of sales and acquisitions at Kanal D. “We did a really good remake of the wonderful Italian drama L’onore e il Rispetto.” Ozsumbul calls War of the Roses a “simple, attractive drama,” and says that viewers will be drawn to its “romance, story and dynamism. It is one of our most successful titles in prime time.” Kanal D began airing For My Son earlier this year, and the series has already garnered large audience shares. “It has a really good combination of romance, comedy and action,” says Ozsumbul.

“Our stories feature Turkey’s most talented young actors and actresses.” —Ozlem Ozsumbul War of the Roses

Keshet International Trade Up / Imported / Dig The game show Trade Up gives groups of friends and families the once-in-a-lifetime chance to own a car they could never have dreamed of buying. “Commercial broadcasters the world over are in search of formats that appeal to the whole household, ones that are really fun and create a buzz—Trade Up is perfect for this,” says Keren Shahar, the managing director of distribution at Keshet International. The company also has some scripted highlights, including the comedy Imported. “Imported is set in the world of professional football, which is something that has a following everywhere,” says Shahar. Keshet International is also showcasing the archaeological thriller event series Dig, originally produced for USA Network.

“Set in Jerusalem, Dig has all the hallmarks of a premium international drama.” —Keren Shahar Dig 52 World Screen 4/15

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Lightning Entertainment Bravetown / Girlhouse / Preggoland The movies that Lightning Entertainment is promoting for MIPTV come with star talent attached. “They are films with star value, such as Josh Duhamel, Maria Bello and Lucas Till in Bravetown or James Caan in Preggoland,” says Ken DuBow, the executive VP and general manager of Lightning Entertainment. “They also have strong genre value. Girlhouse is a classic horror film, while Bravetown and Preggoland’s themes of forgiveness and family are universal in their audience appeal.” Girlhouse gives a nod to classic slasher flicks, but with a fresh take for the digital generation. Bravetown is about a musical talent who is heading back to his hometown, while Preggoland centers on a thirtysomething party girl who lies about becoming pregnant.

“We listen to buyers’ needs and try to match them with our programming lineup.” —Ken DuBow Bravetown

Lionsgate Entertainment The Royals / Manhattan / Deadbeat Renewed for a second season ahead of its recent U.S. launch, The Royals stars Elizabeth Hurley as the manipulative matriarch of a fictional British royal family. “With a stellar British cast and a lineup of young, emerging talent, The Royals exemplifies the kind of distinctive and daring programming that defines and drives our TV brand at Lionsgate,” says Peter Iacono, the president of international television and digital distribution at Lionsgate Entertainment. The company is also promoting Manhattan, a drama created by Sam Shaw and directed by Tommy Schlamme; the Hulu original comedy Deadbeat, which now has a second season; and Chasing Life, an ABC Family drama.

“The episodic comedy Deadbeat delivers both an engaging cast and an original premise, giving the series wide appeal.” —Peter Iacono Deadbeat

Looking Glass International The Fashion Hero / Restaurant Australia / Lionheart The modeling format The Fashion Hero follows contestants as they compete to front the campaign for a fashion or beauty brand for one year. “What sets this series apart is the completely unique and immersive multiplatform, social-media component, which will garner massive exposure for the participating network and brands, building excitement and an audience prior to the series going on air,” says Nha-Uyen Chau, the founder and CEO of Looking Glass International. Restaurant Australia features three of the country’s best chefs as they cook for 150 critics selected from around the globe. “This is a visually stunning series that will appeal to broadcasters on the lookout for high-end travel and cooking programs,” Chau says. Lionheart is a blue-chip wildlife title.

“From groundbreaking formats to groundbreaking wildlife, our catalogue spans all factual genres.” —Nha-Uyen Chau Lionheart 54 World Screen 4/15

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MarVista Entertainment Pants on Fire / An En Vogue Christmas / Meet My Valentine The holiday-themed Lifetime movie An En Vogue Christmas is one of 12 new film propositions that MarVista Entertainment is presenting. “It’s a feel-good movie about learning to forgive, and it features music you will want to dance to,” says Vanessa Shapiro, MarVista’s executive VP of distribution. Also part of that movie mix is Pants on Fire, which premiered on Disney XD, and the bittersweet love story Meet My Valentine. “In 2014, we launched MarVista Digital Entertainment, which has really got off to a great start, as we have secured deals with major U.S. platforms, as well as significant on-demand placement with cable and satellite providers,” Shapiro says. “We’ll also be actively looking for titles at MIPTV for our U.S. digital-distribution needs.”

“We’ve become very well known in our industry for delivering strong movie titles from all genres featuring renowned casts and interesting story lines that deliver for our partners.” —Vanessa Shapiro An En Vogue Christmas

Miramax Miramax library / Revolution Studios library / From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series Miramax now represents the Revolution Studios library internationally, including the Morgan Creek International library, as well as the Samuel Goldwyn library and its own acclaimed titles. “The Miramax and Revolution libraries are filled with titles that have a strong global appeal, with films in every genre, a who’s who of international stars, and beloved stories,” says Joe Patrick, the executive VP of worldwide television at Miramax. Additionally, in the past year, Miramax has been involved in various new projects, from The 9th Life of Louis Drax, starring Jamie Dornan, to acquiring the U.S. rights for Bill Condon’s Mr. Holmes, starring Sir Ian McKellen. The company is also expanding its role in the production of From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series, which is now shooting season two.

“We offer a unique and diverse range of content for buyers, and our portfolio continues to expand, both with new content and a growing roster of libraries that we represent.” —Joe Patrick From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series

Multicom Entertainment Group Drake’s Homecoming: The Lost Footage / Blood Is Blood / The Art and Crimes of David Choe The material in the music documentary Drake’s Homecoming: The Lost Footage, a highlight from Multicom Entertainment Group, shows the Grammy Award-winning recording artist Drake at a breakthrough moment in his career. The live, soldout concert was filmed at Toronto’s Sound Academy in 2009, just prior to Drake signing with Lil Wayne’s Young Money. Irv Holender, the chairman of Multicom, believes that Drake’s global notoriety will help drive sales for the documentary in numerous international markets. Holender also has high hopes for the thriller Blood Is Blood, about a young girl who is out for revenge, and The Art and Crimes of David Choe, a documentary about the eponymous artist who traded his $60,000 painting fee for Facebook stock now worth over $250 million.

“We are looking for additional content to grow our catalogue and aim to affiliate ourselves with clients in longterm relationships.” —Irv Holender Drake’s Homecoming: The Lost Footage 56 World Screen 4/15

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Muse Distribution International Tut / Mystery Movie Wheels / Lost Letter Mysteries The epic TV event Tut, produced by Muse Entertainment for Spike TV in the U.S., delves into the backstory of Tutankhamun. “A television event like Tut is attractive globally and across all platforms due to its high production values and riveting subject matter,” says Shawn Rosengarten, the VP of distribution at Muse Distribution International. “With a production budget of over $5 million per hour, Tut delivers broadcasters a production equal in scope to a feature film as well as the opportunity to create event programming.” Rosengarten also highlights the company’s Mystery Movie Wheels films for the Hallmark Movies & Mysteries channel, including the Aurora Teagarden titles, and Lost Letter Mysteries, a collection of lighthearted mystery movies created by Martha Williamson.

“Muse Distribution International’s diverse catalogue includes over 400 hours of top-quality programming, offering prime-time event miniseries, mystery movies, dramas, comedies and youth series, as well as thoughtprovoking documentaries.” —Shawn Rosengarten Aurora Teagarden movie series

Nippon Television Network Breaking Ordinary / _______ Wife / My Love Story!!

In Nippon Television Network’s entertainment format Breaking Ordinary, engineers and craftspeople are challenged to redevelop their own inventions on a more extreme level. Alongside this new format, the company is highlighting the drama _______ Wife and the animated series My Love Story!! “Our drama series _______ Wife, a universal story for every husband and wife going through the extremes of pursuing true love, guarantees an exciting and relatable viewing experience,” says Yukiko Kimishima, the divisional president of international business development at Nippon. “My Love Story!!, a very successful [romantic] comedy, is set for a remake as an animated series, with high expectations for comic fans around the globe.”

_______ Wife

“Representing the best in Japanese television, we believe the most captivating shows will transcend cultural boundaries.” —Yukiko Kimishima

ORF-Enterprise Suburbia: Women on the Edge / Vanishing Kings: Lions of the Namib / The Grey and the Red: Secrets of Squirrels Following on its success in Austria, Suburbia: Women on the Edge is already set for a second season. Marion CamusOberdorfer, the head of ORF-Enterprise—Content Sales International, calls the show “funky and entertaining,” and says it appeals to both male and female viewers. From the UNIVERSUM strand comes the documentaries Vanishing Kings: Lions of the Namib and The Grey and the Red: Secrets of Squirrels, with the latter of these two shot in 4K. Camus-Oberdorfer says that one of the company’s main focus areas is the ongoing production of Ultra HD 4K programs. Additionally, last year, ORF-Enterprise and another subsidiary of ORF collaborated on a VOD platform called Flimmit, which was just relaunched.

“By keeping our technical standards high and [in line with] our customers’ interests, there will be an ongoing production line of Ultra HD 4K programs.” —Marion Camus-Oberdorfer The Grey and the Red: Secrets of Squirrels 58 World Screen 4/15

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Palatin Media Incarnate / Phenomena / Bruno, Chef de Police The hour-long series Incarnate comes from one of the biggest names in the supernatural-thriller and horror genres, Clive Barker. “Incarnate is a new series that pushes limits in all directions, with compelling characters, shocking story lines and unprecedented cinematic visuals,” says Bernd Schlötterer, the CEO of Palatin Media. “Barker describes it as X-Men meets The Exorcist in a modern-day drama series about a force of evil living in our midst and three unlikely heroes who must work together to stop it.” Palatin Media is representing the title in the international marketplace, alongside the fantasy series Phenomena. The first two crime features from the Bruno, Chef de Police collection are available from Palatin as well: Black Diamonds and Dark Vineyard.

“These titles are core to Palatin Media’s strategy of being a producer and distributor of first-class TV events.” —Bernd Schlötterer Bruno, Chef de Police: Black Diamonds

Passion Distribution Idiotest / Make You Laugh Out Loud / Animal Storm Squad The quiz show Idiotest, which Passion Distribution is selling as a finished series and a format, sees two pairs of contestants face off in several rounds of deceptively simple tests to prove who is the true “idiot.” Elin Thomas, the global head of sales at Passion Distribution, says, “Not only does this fun and funny series provide buyers with a volume of episodes, as a format it is also something that is relatable and suitable for many markets.” The series Make You Laugh Out Loud features usergenerated content focused on the humorous antics of cats, dogs and other animals, while Animal Storm Squad follows a group of veteran storm chasers who have assembled the ultimate first-responder team for the rescue of trapped and injured family pets.

“Passion Distribution is very much a relationship-driven business.” —Elin Thomas Make You Laugh Out Loud

Peace Point Rights Ice Racer Showdown / Escape or Die! / Bake with Anna Olson MIPTV marks the launch of two new series for Peace Point Rights, Ice Racer Showdown and Escape or Die!, as well as a second season of one of its returning hits, Bake with Anna Olson. Ice Racer Showdown features five everyday people who believe they have what it takes to drive while braving cold and icy road conditions and navigating through treacherous courses. “It has wish fulfillment, adrenaline, competition and fun,” says Les Tomlin, the company’s president and CEO. Escape or Die! watches escape artist Dean Gunnarson perform a death-defying stunt in a different exotic locale each episode. Bake with Anna Olson, meanwhile, returns with a new season. “The first season was a worldwide hit,” says Tomlin.

“International trends in reality programming continue to focus on big characters in unique worlds, and these new series showcase a diverse cast of characters.” —Les Tomlin Escape or Die! 60 World Screen 4/15

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Power The Kalahari Meerkats / Beyond Justice / The Fixer Power’s wildlife catalogue continues to grow, with an additional season of the heartwarming series The Kalahari Meerkats on offer for MIPTV. “Full of danger, jeopardy and even some romance, this visually stunning series brings the audience a never-before-seen look at these lovable creatures,” says Susan Waddell, the company’s CEO. Power has added to its scripted catalogue the action thriller Beyond Justice, about a human-trafficking ring, and is also showcasing the miniseries The Fixer, which features former Grey’s Anatomy star Eric Dane. “We have some fantastic scripted content in development, and [MIPTV] is the perfect time to start discussing some of the projects with the international community,” says Waddell.

“We will be using MIPTV not only to pitch our new shows, but also to talk to buyers and broadcasters about potential international co-production partnerships.” —Susan Waddell The Kalahari Meerkats

Red Arrow International Bosch / 100 Code / The Big Surprise The first completed seasons of Bosch and 100 Code are now available to the international market for the first time, thanks to Red Arrow International. Bosch is based on Michael Connelly’s best-selling books about LAPD Detective Harry Bosch. “With millions of books sold worldwide, there is already a huge fan base for the series,” says Henrik Pabst, the managing director of Red Arrow International. “Since its launch on Amazon, the series has enjoyed some spectacular audience and press acclaim.” 100 Code blends elements of Scandinavian crime dramas and U.S. thrillers. The series comes from Academy Award-winning creator Bobby Moresco (Crash). In formats, Red Arrow International’s slate includes The Big Surprise, a prank show originally produced for ProSieben in Germany.

“Combining the best writers, producers and directors from both Scandinavia and the U.S., 100 Code is shaping up to be a significant international hit.” —Henrik Pabst 100 Code

Rive Gauche Television Am I a Boy or a Girl / Where Cool Came From / Back to Basics Each episode of Rive Gauche Television’s Am I a Boy or a Girl takes viewers on a journey inside the world of people who feel that they were born the wrong gender. “Delving into real, captivating stories of people going through this very unique and fascinating experience, this show gives audiences a firsthand look at an often very misunderstood world,” says Jon Kramer, the CEO of Rive Gauche Television. The series Where Cool Came From takes a look at current design, architecture, fashion and fads from the influences of yesteryear through today. In Back to Basics, Irish chef and TV personality Kevin Dundon demonstrates and explains core cooking techniques, providing plenty of hints, tips and insider secrets along the way.

“We know that our extensive catalogue of recent shows and evergreen titles will continue to provide a very robust and diverse pool of programming that performs well for our clients globally.” —Jon Kramer

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Screenz Original formats / Co-development / Digital partnerships A leader in the area of interactive television, Screenz has developed a slew of second-screen products and cross-media formats with broadcasters and production companies around the globe. “Here at Screenz we believe the future of the entertainment industry will be an interdisciplinary one between technologists and entertainment professionals; therefore, we have structured our company in the same way,” says Eldar Rapaport, Screenz’s chief creative director. “So, whether we are pitching our original interactive 360-degree formats to broadcasters, working with production companies to co-develop these next-generation formats, or just coming on board as a digital partner needed to execute cutting-edge ideas, Screenz is looking forward to collaborating with [new clients].”

“Our aim is to build 360degree formats that leverage the second screen as a complement to the first screen.” —Eldar Rapaport Screenz apps

SOMOS Distribution Kacak / Gumus / Old Story Highlighting its slate of Turkish dramas is a priority for SOMOS Distribution at MIPTV. The company is presenting Kacak, about characters who are trying to escape their pasts; Gumus, a drama about love and social status; and the revenge tale Old Story. “The telenovela is an extremely attractive and flexible format worldwide, and when you add the production values of the Turkish drama, you have winners that expand beyond your traditional audience,” says Francisco Villanueva, SOMOS Distribution’s VP and COO. Several of the company’s titles have already sold worldwide, with many making their way into Latin America, the executive explains. “[Having sold] Turkish telenovelas in Latin America…[is] proof of our capacity to penetrate markets with [our] innovative products,” says Villanueva.

“The Turkish telenovela is attractive because it is good television. In our case, we have the best selection from this country’s most recognized producers.” —Francisco Villanueva Gumus

Sonar Entertainment South of Hell / The Shannara Chronicles / The Fixer Production has now wrapped on the eight-hour supernatural thriller South of Hell, which Sonar Entertainment will be speaking to buyers about at MIPTV. “This electrifying series blends strong story lines, powerful characters, gripping suspense and top-of-the-line special effects,” says Marielle Zuccarelli, Sonar’s executive VP of international distribution. The company is currently in production in New Zealand on The Shannara Chronicles for MTV, based on the international best-selling fantasy novels. “The scale and scope of the series, set against stunning landscapes and vistas, go beyond a level that is typical for television,” Zuccarelli says. In addition, Sonar is offering the newly completed action-adventure series The Fixer.

“We are making substantial investments in high-end drama series, bringing three of the most coveted genres internationally: supernatural thriller, fantasy and actionadventure.” —Marielle Zuccarelli South of Hell 64 World Screen 4/15

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Starz Worldwide Distribution Flesh and Bone / Ash vs Evil Dead / Power On the Monday of MIPTV, Starz Worldwide Distribution will be hosting an exclusive market screening for buyers of the new original limited series Flesh and Bone. The company is also officially launching Ash vs Evil Dead, a half-hour series that is currently in production and will be premiering on Starz later this year. Ash vs Evil Dead will be produced by Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert, both of whom were executive producers on Spartacus. There are also returning seasons of Black Sails and Power. “Since Starz Worldwide Distribution is one of the only companies in the marketplace that is handling content that we both own and that is specifically produced for channels in the U.S., we are highly focused on building the global brands of our series,” says Gene George, the company’s executive VP.

“With its cinematic style, high production values and globally appealing genres, our content is in high demand and has brought much success to our partners.” —Gene George Flesh and Bone

STUDIOCANAL Spotless / The Five / Crossing Lines STUDIOCANAL has streamlined the distribution and marketing of all film and TV content under a single banner. “We’re very excited to be headed to MIPTV with our new, consolidated sales-and-marketing team operating under the STUDIOCANAL banner,” says Rodolphe Buet, the president of international marketing and distribution at STUDIOCANAL. “STUDIOCANAL has further reinforced its status as a European leader in content, offering high-quality TV programming alongside our current film productions and catalogue.” STUDIOCANAL titles include Spotless, a one-hour drama that features dark humor; The Five, a new thriller series by Harlan Coben; and Crossing Lines season three, with Goran Visnjic and Elizabeth Mitchell joining an all-star cast led by Donald Sutherland.

“Our new STUDIOCANAL distribution and marketing business unit optimizes and strengthens distribution for in-house production labels, including Tandem Productions, RED Production and SAM, as well as for third-party partners.” —Rodolphe Buet Spotless

Sullivan Entertainment Sleeping Dogs Lie / The Piano Man’s Daughter / Love on the Land This MIPTV, Sullivan Entertainment is promoting a collection of newly restored period dramas in HD. Athena Malamas, the company’s manager of sales and acquisitions, lists among the highlights Sleeping Dogs Lie, which features an explosive tabloid true story set in the opulence of 1920s prohibition. The Piano Man’s Daughter, set in the 1930s, stars Stockard Channing as a haunted, mentally unstable visionary who maintains a stormy relationship with her musician son in order to force him to accept years of familial madness and her obsession with fire. Another title that Malamas believes will be a solid proposition for MIPTV buyers is Love on the Land, a family drama set during the American Civil War.

“We’re showcasing our unique library of lavishly produced, newly restored HD movies with powerful subject matter.” —Athena Malamas Love on the Land 66 World Screen 4/15

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SVT Sales The Intern Chef / A Dangerous Idea / Hello Dakar! In SVT Sales’ The Intern Chef, Michelin-starred cook Niklas Ekstedt works as an intern in top-tier restaurants all over the world. In just five days, he is supposed to prepare a meal that could fit the restaurant’s menu. A Dangerous Idea is about the growing peace movement in the IsraeliPalestinian conflict. Hello Dakar! is about a Swedish company opening a call center in Senegal, looking for employees. The applicants have only seven months to learn fluent Swedish, and getting a position would mean a whole new future for them and their families. “[These titles] all tell truly universal stories about people striving to improve and do the very best they can,” says Paulette Rosas Hott, the head of SVT Sales.

“We are very proud to present a variety of documentaries at this MIPTV, ranging from lifestyle and human interest to political and current affairs.” —Paulette Rosas Hott A Dangerous Idea

Telemundo Internacional Land of Honor / The Lord of the Skies / Masters of Paradise Along with Telemundo Internacional’s newest classic telenovelas, including Land of Honor, the company will be presenting Telemundo’s Super Series time slot, a programming block that features action-packed shorter series. One such series, The Lord of the Skies, was recently awarded an International Emmy. Masters of Paradise is Telemundo’s newest Super Series, launching at MIPTV. “These titles, which feature higher production budgets and greater numbers of exterior scenes, are setting records for Telemundo at 10 p.m. in the United States,” says Melissa Pillow, the company’s VP of sales for Europe. In addition to its Super Series offer and Land of Honor, which is a remake of Hidden Passion, the company is placing special emphasis on its scripted formats for MIPTV buyers.

“The Super Series offer is especially appealing as an alternative for broadcasters that need programming of shorter duration than a telenovela, targeted at a younger, commercial audience.” —Melissa Pillow Masters of Paradise

Televisa Internacional Stand Up for Your Country / Shadows of the Past / Ask God for Forgiveness… Not Me Stand Up for Your Country, Televisa Internacional’s latest format, is an entertainment series in which duos made up of parents and kids perform in front of a studio audience with one goal in mind: get the audience to deliver a standing ovation so they can move to the next round. “There is something emotional about watching a mother sing with her son or a father sing with his daughter, and that is the most important thing that this show captures,” says Ricardo Ehrsam, the general director of Televisa entertainment formats. According to Ehrsam, the format has been optioned in 20 countries, with a version already airing in Spain. As for telenovelas, the company is showcasing Shadows of the Past and Ask God for Forgiveness… Not Me.

“It’s not very difficult to produce [Stand Up for Your Country] anywhere around the world, since the emotional reactions are the same everywhere.” —Ricardo Ehrsam Stand Up for Your Country 68 World Screen 4/15

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Tricon Films & Television Real Rob! / Rock Icons / Custom Built Famed funnyman Rob Schneider is behind the new comedy Real Rob!, which Tricon Films & Television is debuting at MIPTV. The series is created, written and fully financed by Schneider himself. “The series is a great example of how the traditional television model of production and distribution is ever-evolving—it has a more organic approach and can be placed anywhere,” says Jon Rutherford, Tricon’s executive VP of distribution and business development. “It’s not restricted to a studio, a network or digital platforms; it will work for audiences across all mediums.” Tricon is also touting the new documentary music series Rock Icons, showcasing the greats from the rock ‘n’ roll world, and the home-renovation show Custom Built, featuring host Paul Lafrance.

“We are excited to be launching our new comedy Real Rob!, created and written by, and starring, the brilliant Rob Schneider.” —Jon Rutherford Real Rob!

Twentieth Century Fox Television Distribution Empire / Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll / The Comedians From Academy Award nominee Lee Daniels and Emmy Award winner Danny Strong comes Empire, a drama about the head of a music empire whose three sons and ex-wife all battle for his domain. It stars such A-list actors as Terrence Howard and Taraji P. Henson. Following on its massive U.S. success, Empire is sure to be a top draw for buyers meeting with Twentieth Century Fox Television Distribution at MIPTV, where the company will also be showcasing the comedies Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll and The Comedians. Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll stars Denis Leary as a middle-aged rock ‘n’ roller who desperately wanted to be rich and famous. The Comedians features comedy legend Billy Crystal and up-and-comer Josh Gad.

The Comedians

Empire

Vision Films The Quiet Hour / Containment / Fear Clinic Vision Films has amassed a catalogue of more than 800 feature films and TV movies, animated productions, documentaries and profiles of popular music artists. The company recently picked up the worldwide rights for the sci-fi thriller The Quiet Hour, which takes place in post-apocalyptic England. Vision Films is also introducing the pandemic film Containment and the horror/thriller Fear Clinic. In the documentary space, there are Breath of Life, shot in 4K, and Fifty Shades: Uncovered, about the literary phenomenon. “We are releasing four to six films a month; therefore, we are now at MIPTV to acquire for our domestic DVD and VOD label, as well as sell our films worldwide,” says Lise Romanoff, Vision’s managing director and CEO of worldwide distribution.

“We have watched the market ebb and flow and are lucky that we are nimble and flexible enough to change with the tides.” —Lise Romanoff Fear Clinic 70 World Screen 4/15

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MILESTONES

20 YEARS OF

RICHARD FREUDENSTEIN

By Anna Carugati

When it launched in 1995, Foxtel, the leading pay-TV service in Australia, shook up the television landscape by introducing variety to viewers who previously only had a handful of broadcasters to choose from—mainly Seven Network, Nine Network and Network Ten, plus the public broadcasters ABC and SBS. Founded as a 50-50 joint venture between telecommunications company Telstra and News Corporation, Foxtel continued to upend the television status quo by partnering with the best international channel groups and carrying their top brands; vying for the rights to the most coveted shows and sports events; and offering a constant string of new technologies that made the viewing experience more convenient and enjoyable. Foxtel shared DNA with another growing and successful pay-TV platform, BSkyB in the U.K. Both services had News Corporation as a shareholder and both continue to demonstrate a penchant for innovation. Furthermore, Foxtel’s current CEO, Richard Freudenstein, spent several years at BSkyB in various roles, most recently as COO. After leaving Sky he returned to 72 World Screen 4/15

his native Australia, and at the end of 2011 was tapped to take the helm at Foxtel. He has since overseen the launch of a string of products, including Foxtel Go, which offers live and catch-up TV on tablets and other portable devices; Foxtel Play, an internet TV service; and updated versions of the iQ set-top box. In addition, Freudenstein supervised the merger between Foxtel and competing pay-TV platform Austar in 2012, and more recently oversaw the joint venture between Foxtel and Seven West Media, parent company of Seven Network, to launch Presto TV, an SVOD service created in response to viewers’ growing desire to watch programming online. Foxtel’s 2.5 million subscribers have much content to choose from, as Foxtel owns and programs more than 20 channels and carries a broad range of international and local services, including Australia’s largest bouquet of HD channels. Freudenstein talks to World Screen about Foxtel’s first 20 years, its upcoming products and the company’s ongoing commitment to investing in programming.

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Foxtel Go allows customers to watch some 70 live channels and access content on demand on their mobile devices.

WS: In its 20 years, how has Foxtel improved and contributed to the Australian television market? FREUDENSTEIN: Foxtel has made a huge contribution to Australian society, culture and media. Foxtel has been a driver of choice, quality programming and innovation. Before Foxtel, there were five TV networks showing a limited and predictable range of shows according to a fixed schedule. Foxtel launched an explosion of content and, with its technical innovations, radically changed the way people consume content by putting the power in the hands of the viewer. Foxtel has completely reimagined the way Australians can view and enjoy television across a range of genres. Sports is a great example—not only have we created the most comprehensive offering in the market, but we’ve innovated with exciting onground and in-studio technology that takes the viewer closer to the action than ever before. We broadcast all sports in HD and allow the play to proceed uninterrupted by advertising. Foxtel’s 2012 Olympics coverage, with its amazing companion app, was judged to be world leading by the IOC [International Olympic Committee]. In genres such as drama and lifestyle, we have offered both breadth and depth that have cultivated passionate and highly engaged audiences.

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The iQ set-top box has led the way in time-shifting and catch-up viewing. Other networks and media organizations have followed in our wake. WS: What benefits did Foxtel derive from the merger with Austar in 2012? FREUDENSTEIN: There have been many benefits, mainly due to the fact that for the first time we had a national service with consistent branding, pricing and packaging and technology platforms. We managed to achieve savings through synergies, which we have been able to reinvest in the business. WS: Foxtel has always been committed to innovation. What products have you provided to subscribers to allow them to watch programming whenever they want and on whatever screen they want? FREUDENSTEIN: There have been an extraordinary array of technological innovations over the last 20 years. These range from simple things like the Foxtel Guide app, which lets you record shows from your mobile phone, through to Foxtel Go, which lets customers watch Foxtel wherever they are on their mobile devices. The technological backbone of Foxtel has been our digital iQ set-top boxes with functionality such as series link [a function that enables subscribers to schedule and record every episode of a particular series]; the ability

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jump back to the beginning. The iQ3 will provide a platform for further technological innovation in the future. At the same time we have launched the Foxtel Broadband service, which enables us to bundle broadband and telephony with our television service. Foxtel Broadband is optimized for delivery of video content and will work seamlessly with the iQ3 using a Wi-Fi connection. WS: What original programming, sports rights or channel partnerships has Foxtel invested in over the last year or so? FREUDENSTEIN: Foxtel has been very active in developing its content offering, both through its owned channels and through channel partnerships, and also through both commissioned and acquired programming. We have deepened our relationships with international powerhouses such as HBO, the BBC and Disney, resulting in new and strengthened channels for our platform. We have invested heavily in original content for the channels that Foxtel owns and operates itself. These have included highly successful lifestyle and reality programs, documentaries and marquee drama productions. Recent successful productions include the dramas Wentworth and Devil’s Playground, documentaries such as Coast Australia and The Memorial, lifestyle programs such as Selling Houses Australia and Paddock to Plate and the great fun of Australia’s Next Top Model and The Real Housewives of Melbourne. A very strong slate of programming that is completed, in production or in development will roll out over the coming months and years. Foxtel, with our partner FOX Sports, has invested heavily in both sports rights and the broadcasting of sporting events. Foxtel has the most comprehensive range of sports across major football codes, cricket, motorsports and much more.

FOX Sports, which holds the rights to the ICC Cricket World Cup, is part of Foxtel’s ninechannel sports pack.

to record and watch at the same time; red button interactivity; and access to content on demand, stored on the box or [pulled] from a huge library via an IP connection. The iQHD also delivers amazing high-definition signals.

WS: Tell us about Presto. Why is this an important initiative? What will it offer subscribers? FREUDENSTEIN: Presto is a key complementary offering to Foxtel’s main service. Experience in other markets suggests that many consumers want an SVOD librarystyle service like Presto in addition to their main subscription [packages]. In addition, there will always be a segment of the community who do not wish to have the full Foxtel offering, but do wish to augment their entertainment options with an SVOD service. [The online streaming market] will be very competitive, and it is important that Foxtel is an active participant.

WS: What new products is Foxtel planning on rolling out? FREUDENSTEIN: The next big thing is the iQ3, which will greatly increase the iQ’s storage capacity, plus grant viewers the ability to record three programs while watching a fourth. It will have a more sophisticated EPG [Electronic Programming Guide] with cover-flow presentation that enables us to feature key content. It will include sophisticated search and recommendation functionality and innovations such as the ability to start over a show if you come in partway through and want to

WS: In what areas do you see future growth for Foxtel? FREUDENSTEIN: We see potential for growth across all of our products and services. Recent changes to our pricing structure, which significantly reduced our entry-level price, have already delivered strong sales growth. We also see opportunities for our IP-delivered products Foxtel Play and Presto. We know that we will be able to continue to grow the business if we stay focused on delivering the best possible content and customer experience.

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FOXTEL’S ROSS CROWLEY WS: Tell us about the Express from the U.S. offering, which aims to close the gap between the U.S. premiere date of a show and its launch in Australia. CROWLEY: We launched Express from the U.S. about three years ago. We decided we were going to deliver an episode of a show as it [arrived via satellite], and people could either watch it right away or wait until that evening when we would run it on one of our channels. What we’ve established is that people record it immediately straight off the satellite and watch it as soon as they can. It might arrive at 1 p.m. and they’ll watch it at 4:30 p.m. or 5 p.m. instead of waiting until later. We’ve given customers an enormous amount of flexibility, and up to half of the shows are viewed on that as-soonas-possible basis. Like the rest of us, I record the shows I want as they arrive and watch them when I get home. Even though we have great commercial partners, we are a subscription business and part of that means delivering what our subscribers want. WS: What innovations is Foxtel offering its subscribers? CROWLEY: Foxtel Go, which is available online, on tablets and on mobile phones, is up and running, and we are in the process of making it available to the new game platforms. The iQ3, which is our third-generation digital box, has features like live trending—you can literally see what is hot in the nation at any given moment. And the trends change over the course of the day, so in the middle of the afternoon you’ll see that certain children’s programs are hot. Or, if there is a major news event, suddenly news shows will pop to the forefront. You get a real sense of the zeitgeist of what Australians are watching at that point. You can actually see shows move up in popularity, which, in a ratings sense—even though we’re primarily about delivering content and secondarily about commercials—is really interesting.

By Anna Carugati

As Foxtel’s director of programming and channels, Ross Crowley oversees a bouquet of owned-and-operated networks that run the gamut from movies, drama and factual to lifestyle and reality programming. He is responsible for both linear and on-demand services. During his career, Crowley has accumulated experience in free TV and pay TV. He was at Nine Network and then at Foxtel at its start in the mid-’90s. He moved to the pan-Asian pay-TV service STAR before returning to Foxtel. He consequently has developed a keen understanding of viewer tastes and behaviors. He explains the increasingly competitive Australian pay-TV landscape and Foxtel’s proposition of delivering to its customers the best-possible offering of content. 80 World Screen 4/15

WS: Because of the language and cultural similarities, you offer a lot of U.S. and U.K. shows. Are any particularly hot this season? CROWLEY: The simple tradition is that Australians have probably watched more drama from the U.S., although we have a deep historic passion for British drama. Then we flip around and watch a lot of lifestyle shows and documentaries from the U.K. and secondarily those from the U.S. I suspect that this has more to do with colonial heritage. We have a fantastic relationship with the HBO team and the Showtime team, and we have a great slate of AMC shows, but when it comes to programs about lifestyle and more hands-on renovation, we watch more U.K. shows. The homes that we have in Australia match British homes from 100 years ago, which are being renovated as well. We have the same issues with dodgy old plumbing and hundred-year-old brickwork and all that sort of stuff. So we tend to watch [British lifestyle and renovation shows] maybe more than the expansive American ones. WS: You also carry international channels alongside your own.

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original dramas are just stellar at the moment. Devil’s Playground was our drama about the Catholic church from last year. It won the AACTA [Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts] Award this year for best miniseries, and the award is rightly deserved. We’ve seen the first episodes of The Kettering Incident, which is coming soon, and Deadline Gallipoli, which looks just spectacular. In 2015, Australia marks the 100th anniversary of a World War I episode that defined the nation, Gallipoli. A number of people have done variations on the subject and we’re incredibly proud of our version, which is from the journalists who told the story of the war. The Kettering Incident is a step away from traditional Australian relationship drama. It’s a really beautiful piece of television by Vincent Sheehan, who traditionally [produces and writes for] film. WS: It’s an amazing time for television. There is so much wonderful work everywhere. CROWLEY: I can’t remember a time that delivered such variety and supported such creativity across the board. Whether it’s big, shiny floor shows and competitions, comedy, observational reality, documentary—with the advances in technology allowing people to tell documentary stories—or just simply the growth in the industry, which has nurtured a generation of writers who can now really step away from the mainstream and start to explore the edges of the mind, it’s a spectacular time in television. WS: Tell us about the online service Presto. CROWLEY: As every market is experiencing, there is a transition from linear and appointment viewing to ondemand viewing. Although, I have to say, I believe appointment viewing attaches itself to a very strong emotional and communal experience, and I don’t think it will ever entirely disappear. But, obviously people are moving to on-demand viewing. We launched Presto last year with a movie product, with a fairly complete offering with most of the movies available in the Australian territory. A few months ago, we added television to the mix, so it has a combination of features and a really carefully curated mix of quality television.

Exclusively available on Foxtel, BBC First is home to top-notch British drama like Wolf Hall.

CROWLEY: We’ve had great longstanding relationships with all of the big channel groups: Discovery, National Geographic and FOX International Channels and the Viacom group of channels. We are especially thrilled with the BBC First channel [that offers the best British comedy and drama]. [BBC Worldwide is] rolling out BBC First as a first-run brand around the world, and their first launch was in Australia. It’s going amazingly well. It’s not a complete transplant of any one of the BBC channels, but it’s a fantastic brand and a great initiative. WS: Foxtel has also been investing in its own original productions, which are doing very well. CROWLEY: Ironically, one of our challenges when talking to producers is that if we are looking for new shows, we have to move an existing show off to the side. It’s difficult to tell producers that if the show is still doing quite well. We love the big formats. We’ve done River Cottage Australia, which did particularly well. Anything to do with property and real estate in Australia is huge, like Selling Houses Australia and Location, Location, Location. Our

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WS: I have read that a lot of different players are stepping into the pay-TV business in Australia, whether linear or online. Is that one of the major issues impacting the market right now? CROWLEY: The market in Australia is in the process of a major transformation, as one might expect. Australia is a very outward-looking culture. It voraciously consumes culture from everywhere: food, entertainment, music, everything. Internet and IP-delivered entertainment is coming to the territory. We have formed a joint venture with Seven, a particularly strong local partner. Nine Network has formed a venture with Fairfax. Netflix [has launched here]. Amazon has opened up an Australian portal for e-books, and I don’t know what that means for other content. Google Play is in Australia. iTunes has been here for ten years. Very clearly, Australia is in a period of transformation. The advertising market will tell you that advertising is drifting away from, or at least exploring boundaries away from, old-fashioned linear advertising—which still, to be fair, commands an enormous

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audience, and does demand appointment viewing— toward other modes such as digital advertising. That, in turn, drives other business models. WS: With all these homegrown streaming platforms available, is Australia a little less leery of Netflix than, say, Germany or France have been? CROWLEY: If you were to talk to distributors, they’d say that Australia is a particularly competitive market, possibly because we were for the longest time restrained by regulation to only three [commercial] broadcasters. It was a pretty vehemently fought and well-funded battle and it teaches certain habits of behavior. We welcome the transformation, but it’s not going to be a walkover of the local culture, that’s for sure. WS: Given the fact that Foxtel has been around for 20 years, is a brand that is well known to its customers and is a good partner for programming suppliers, I would think it’s in a solid position in this new competitive landscape. CROWLEY: I would like to say we are. For all of the transformations in technology, infrastructure and delivery, the real story is about unique, original content and creating events and moments. I believe that one of the reasons people seek entertainment is to share the experience of it. One of the challenges when you watch TV by yourself on demand is that you can’t really talk about it a lot until you know that everybody else has caught up to you. So, I think there will be a segment of society that will just want to burrow

Local productions like Australia’s Next Top Model, based on a format from CBS Studios International, are an integral part of the Foxtel content mix.

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through and catch some shows and move on, and there are others who actually want to share the experience. We launched a local version of GoggleBox [an observational documentary that shows people in front of television sets watching shows and talking about them]. It really illuminated that shared experience of watching TV. People actually quite enjoy the ephemeral social aspect of enjoying laughter or tears together. Sitting alone by yourself and watching a show is not quite the same experience. WS: Sports is also an appointment-viewing genre. CROWLEY: Absolutely. FOX Sports in Australia is owned and operated by a different company. It’s a wholly owned division of [News Corp Australia]. The head of FOX Sports is Patrick Delany. They give us a package of seven channels, not unlike other independent channels, like Sky News or a BBC channel. WS: Certainly sports are important to the pay-TV business. CROWLEY: They’re huge, and we co-invest with FOX Sports. We’ve just taken on a spectacular new coverage package for the V8 Supercars, which is similar to NASCAR in America. It’s always been covered in Australia, but this year we are covering the trials and the festival that goes with it, which you can afford to do when you have a number of channels and the space to do it. Ultimately it all culminates in a big race, but we’ve decided to take the entire package behind the scenes, and we expect a lot of passionate fans to buy into it.

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1995

Australis Media launches Galaxy on Australia Day with eight subscription TV channels. News Corporation and Telstra announce the creation of Foxtel. Foxtel buys 50 percent of XYZ Entertainment. Construction of Foxtel’s headquarters at Wharf 8 Pyrmont begins in June, featuring two studios, ten edit suites and one audio suite. Australis approaches Foxtel with a merger proposal. AUSTAR commences services. Foxtel launches its cable service on October 23, offering 20 channels for a monthly fee of A$39.95.

1996 Foxtel launches the five-channel Entertainment Plus Tier. UKTV and Hallmark launch on Foxtel. Foxtel for Business premises launch.

1997 The Multi Channel Network (MCN), a joint venture between Foxtel, Australis and its franchisees and channels, is established to sell advertising. National Geographic and Discovery Channel join Foxtel’s documentary lineup. The Lifestyle Channel from XYZ launches on Foxtel.

1998 AUSTAR raises its stake in XYZ Entertainment to 50 percent, with the other 50 percent owned by Foxtel. PBL buys 25 percent of Foxtel from News, leaving News with 25 percent and Telstra with 50 percent. News sells 50 percent of FOX Sports to PBL.

1999 Foxtel expands its reach with the launch of a satellite service; Foxtel becomes available to 70 percent of Australian homes. Foxtel broadcasts the opening of Fox Studios.

2000 Foxtel introduces Showtime 2, screening Showtime on a two-hour delay and giving viewers more options for when they want to watch the big movies.

2001Foxtel commissions its first long-format Australian drama series, Crash Palace. The Lifestyle Channel Home and Food services launch. Disney Channel joins Foxtel.

2002

Foxtel launches the Fox Footy Channel, dedicated to the AFL. The Foxtel-Optus content supply agreement is announced and cleared by the ACCC. Foxtel acquires 100-percent ownership of The Comedy Channel. Foxtel commits to a A$600-million-plus digital upgrade of its cable and satellite services with an open access regime for content suppliers. ESPN joins Foxtel. Telstra bundles Foxtel with telephony services.

@ 20

2003 Subscription TV’s share of viewing in 2010 Foxtel launches its iPhone app. Covsubscription TV homes peaks at a record high of 57 percent.

2004

Foxtel increases the number of channels in basic cable from 25 to 66 channels. In March, Foxtel Digital launches with 130 channels. The start of closed captioning on Foxtel Digital gives more than 2 million hearingimpaired Australians access to a wide range of subscription-TV programming for the first time. Foxtel and AUSTAR join forces with domestic airline Virgin Blue to introduce “live” satellite TV inflight entertainment. Foxtel connects its 500,000th Australian home to Foxtel Digital.

2005 Foxtel launches the Crime & Investigation network. Foxtel unveils the iQ Personal Digital Recorder. Foxtel and Optus announce an agreement for Optus to commence selling the Foxtel Digital service. Foxtel reaches 1 million digital direct subscribers. Foxtel launches its digital service for commercial premises.

erage of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games airs 24/7 on four television channels. Foxtel broadcasts Socceroos vs. New Zealand live in 3D—the first 3D broadcast of its kind in Australia. Foxtel and Microsoft sign a groundbreaking agreement to transmit 30 channels of Foxtel via XBox Live over the internet. Coverage of the Delhi 2010 XIX Commonwealth Games begins on six dedicated HD and SD channels. Foxtel launches internet TV service Foxtel On Demand, which delivers TV and movies directly to the HD iQ2 set-top box via the internet.

2011

Subscription TV is made more accessible with Telstra’s T-Box. Foxtel and AUSTAR are to deliver every AFL game of every round live for the first time in Australian broadcasting history, and launch a dedicated FOX Sports AFL channel. Foxtel announces a proposal to acquire AUSTAR. Richard Freudenstein is appointed as the new Foxtel CEO.

2006 Foxtel announces its first full-year operat- 2012 Foxtel launches the A&E channel. Foxing profit after a decade of losses. Prime Minister John Howard opens Foxtel’s new Digital Campus in North Ryde. Foxtel and FOX Sports broadcast Melbourne’s Commonwealth Games with live multichannel viewing on seven screens. Telstra Mobile Foxtel launches.

2007Foxtel wins rights to the 2010 and 2012 Winter and Summer Olympic Games.

2008 Foxtel wins rights to the 2010 XIX Delhi Commonwealth Games. Foxtel launches its HD service with five 24-hour HD channels. Foxtel launches three new channels: CBeebies, BBC Knowledge and Channel 111. Foxtel launches the iQ2. Foxtel’s online guide expands to a 14-day advance view.

2009 Foxtel launches its first remote control specifically designed for kids, the MiniMote. Foxtel announces that iQ and iQ2 subscribers can order Foxtel Box Office Movies via phone and online. Foxtel Next Generation launches, with 30 new channel choices, 12 new channel brands, 10 new HD channels, a new movie service, new search functionality with iSuggest, new recording functions, new Sky News Local active screens and movies on demand.

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tel unveils broadcast plans for the London 2012 Summer Olympic Games and launches the LONDON 2012 tablet app. Foxtel and AUSTAR unite to deliver a new national television service. Foxtel Go launches on iPad.

2013 Foxtel launches Foxtel Movies, combining all the content previously offered by Showtime and The Movie Network. Analog signal is shut down. BBC Worldwide launches a premium drama channel, BBC First. Foxtel introduces Foxtel Play.

2014

Foxtel launches the movie-streaming service Presto. Presto subsequently launches on Chromecast. Foxtel announces a value revolution for subscription TV, with new pricing and packaging. Foxtel strengthens its HD offer. Foxtel launches the BoxSets channel. Foxtel and Network Ten co-commission Gogglebox. Seven and Foxtel sign a production deal for A Place to Call Home.

2015 Foxtel and Seven West Media add Presto TV to the Presto movie offer. Foxtel launches broadband and home-phone bundles. Foxtel turns 20.

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GLOBAL NETS

HERNAN LOPEZ FOX INTERNATIONAL CHANNELS WS: What led to the global rebrand of FOX? LOPEZ: There is an opportunity here to create the biggest quality entertainment brand in the world. I know that sounds like a big statement, but let me back it up. FOX has always been a broad entertainment brand associated with quality in consumers’ minds. There are other entertainment brands that have parts of that positioning. For instance, Disney is very big, is associated with high quality and entertainment, but it’s targeted to children. There’s HBO, which is also a big, quality brand, but because it’s premium, the reach is narrow. Then you have newcomers such as YouTube, which has a big reach, but is not necessarily associated with quality in consumers’ minds. So, we looked at the landscape and we realized that there was an opportunity to create the biggest quality entertainment brand in the world—comparable to what Nike did in the world of sports—to be the leader [not just] across the category, but also in the high-quality segments of the category.

By Kristin Brzoznowski

FOX International Channels (FIC) recently consolidated all of its 126 FOX channels outside of the U.S. under a single unified brand positioning and network package. The move underscores the importance of branding in today’s increasingly fragmented media environment. Indeed, one of FIC’s major focuses as of late has been on strengthening the awareness of its channels in the global marketplace. Part of this strategy includes promoting massive day-and-date global launch events, which it has done for the megahit The Walking Dead and will do for the highly anticipated psychological thriller Wayward Pines. Hernan Lopez, the president and CEO of FIC, tells World Screen about his company’s strategy for being viewers’ first destination for the best content. 88 World Screen 4/15

WS: What’s the strategy for building brand awareness across the FIC portfolio? LOPEZ: The whole strategy was born out of our desire to position the FOX brands in the minds of consumers as the place where they [could see] the best shows first, before anywhere else, and to do this with as many consumers as possible. Over the last three or four years, we have been combining different entertainment [services] into the FOX brand and rebranding them so that now FOX has the widest reach of any international channel group in entertainment. We needed to come with a single brand positioning to address some of what we saw in [recent] brand surveys. First, consumers are very aware of the FOX brand, and they associate it with the qualities that we want. We found that we could still make progress in the association between the FOX brand name and the individual shows, and that’s true of all the channel brands, not just FOX. We also needed to get more people to think of FOX as the place where they would get the best shows first. We’ve done three surveys already, and in the most recent, we were number one in brand awareness, we were number one in combined brand strength, and we were number one in the “would switch” factor, which answers the very telling question, How many of you would change platforms in order to have the FOX brand? The number around the world was 35 percent, and it was 70 percent in Mexico. There were also big numbers in many other countries. This [brand awareness] effort is starting with FOX, and we have already been doing something similar with National Geographic Channel. It’s all about creating the positioning of “The Best First,” with “Best” meaning loud, groundbreaking, unique [programming] and “First” meaning that you saw it [on FOX] before

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FIC is taking the event thriller Wayward Pines to 120-plus markets this May, and is distributing the show through its new FIC Content Sales arm.

you saw it anywhere else. That’s very important because shows such as The Walking Dead, for instance, a year from now will end up on Netflix or Amazon [or another platform], depending on where we license it, or on broadcast television somewhere else. But we want consumers to always remember that they saw it on FOX first and that they saw it anywhere in the world only 24 hours after it [originally premiered]. WS: How has FIC’s day-and-date strategy reinforced this message? LOPEZ: It is a huge part of our positioning. It’s not something we can do for every single show, because it takes a lot of work and content creators are not always keen on having multiple versions of their shows available to dubbing houses around the world ahead of the release in the U.S. One of the most difficult things to get today in the television landscape is a sense of urgency. With so many options, so many things to watch, to convince people to watch a show now [is difficult]. When you look at the visual language of FOX, you find two things: first, a very close integration between the FOX logo and the key art of the show. The second thing you’ll find is the language of live events; you’ll find LED lights, big stages, things that make you feel like you’re watching a live concert. This helps to create a [cinematic experience]. WS: What role have original productions played in bolstering awareness for the FIC brands? LOPEZ: A very important one. Today, we are producing original scripted drama in Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Turkish and English. That’s a big part of what we like to do. It’s expensive to do, because they have to look good next to shows like The Walking Dead or network series that cost $4 million or $5 million per episode. WS: In what markets are you looking to grow channel penetration? LOPEZ: We’re well distributed, but there are still places [left to enter]. There’s only one big market where we’re not [present], and I don’t know if we’re going to be in it in the near future, and that’s France. Other than that, we are in every market where we would like

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to be, with [the exception of] a few markets. Indonesia, for example, is a huge market, and we only have 10 percent penetration. WS: How is FIC complementing its linear channels with new digital services? LOPEZ: FOX Play is the key brand that we use for our authenticated services. The goal is to keep the FOX brand as relevant, if not more relevant, in the ondemand space as it is in the linear space. FOX+ is our premium service [on digital]. We have FOX Play+ in Latin America, which is an authenticated service of FOX+. It includes the entertainment shows, factual shows and sports all in one. The FOX+ service has been in the market only for a few months. In two months, net sales were higher than at any point in our history. The usage of this application has gone up four times since we introduced FOX. WS: How important is sports for FIC in the overall portfolio? LOPEZ: It’s hugely important. It is still considered the must-see, must-have content by many platforms. Also, as it is watched live, it brings the urgency that’s really hard to get with other types of content. Sports also rounds out our portfolio very nicely. In the places where we have a strong sports offering, such as Latin America, Asia and the Netherlands, we have found that we have a better relationship with the affiliates and advertisers. WS: What has been fueling the success of FIC? LOPEZ: I think it comes down to our focus on the consumer, making our brands and content relevant to the consumer and putting them in a position where viewers really appreciate it. That appreciation drives subscriptions for our partners and clients. That passion is also translating into viewership for our advertisers. WS: What areas of the business are you focusing on for the year ahead? LOPEZ: Scripted original drama is one particular area of focus. Our series Outcast was picked up by Cinemax. It looks great. Robert Kirkman [who created the show] is extraordinary. We’re really excited about it.

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VIOLA DAVIS The story of Viola Davis’s life is as compelling as that of any of the characters she has played in her distinguished career. She grew up dirt-poor in Rhode Island but found solace and escape watching movies. Her love of acting led her to the prestigious Juilliard School. She got noticed in the Manhattan theater community and was soon performing on Broadway, where she won two Tonys. Then came several feature films, including Doubt and The Help, both of which earned her Academy Award nominations. Last year she was cast as the brilliant, complex defense attorney Annalise Keating, the lead in ABC’s hit series How to Get Away with Murder, executive produced by Shonda Rhimes. Davis shares with World Screen her passion for multifaceted characters that reflect people we see in real life. WS: How did you learn about the role of Annalise Keating? DAVIS: My manager and agents said it was the kind of role that they wanted for me and they didn’t think it would be on TV but there it was. I said, let me judge for myself. So I read it and I was floored, only because I don’t get offered roles like this, ever. A wholly explored [character with all] her sexuality, her vulnerability, her strength, her messiness. So I jumped at the chance—I really did. I jumped at it, and with Shonda [Rhimes] being involved in it I said, OK, there’s my blessing! WS: Annalise is strong and sexy, but also very vulnerable. Those are a lot of notes to play as an actor. How do you calibrate all of that? DAVIS: Well, you know what? I’ve had a couple of “Aha!” moments while shooting the role. And how I calibrate it is by not calibrating it. I’m not trying to leash it and tame it and put a structure on it. I try not to do that only because I just don’t think that she is that kind of role. She is messy and impetuous. I don’t think that she has boundaries, and if I gave her structure I would be editing her too much. I didn’t want that to happen, because my “Aha!” moment came when I watched the pilot and I saw myself with a wig on and with lashes on. I saw myself as a woman of a certain age, and I said either I can try to fit the image of the sexualized woman that we have seen time and time again on TV and film into a box, and lose weight, and get the high-end wardrobe, and have the whole look going on, or I can deal with what I have and really play a woman that you would see in life who is that messy. I erred on the side of being that woman you see in life who has bad relationships, who is attracted to people who are damaged, and who herself is damaged, but who also has that outward mask or public persona of being very strong, very on top of it, very assured, while her personal life is a mess. I don’t want to put a lid on it. It’s like the difference between Nora [Helmer] in A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler. Nora is very structured; Hedda is not. That’s what I decided to work with. If I am indeed a woman that you very seldom see on TV, then I really need to be the woman you seldom see on TV.

WS: Do you think that is one component of the show’s success? DAVIS: I hope that’s one component, and so is the fact that the show is salacious and that there is a homosexual relationship, which will be explored even more in coming episodes. In all of Shonda’s shows, as fantastical and fictional as they are, people see themselves. So many times we have defined women in fiction in a way that attracts men, so the women become archetypes. Someone like Tony Soprano—who whacks people and cheats on his wife and has a big stomach and a bald head—there is still something within all of that mess that we can relate to. [Think of] Hannibal Lecter, Dexter, the list goes on. We don’t preen men. We don’t wind them down to make them palatable, and I don’t think we should do it with women. If someone has a story that can be told, they should be able to tell it. Annalise has a story. WS: Do you have a process you go through to prepare for a role, or does it depend on the character? DAVIS: Both. I do have a certain process. I always start with a bio: What is the person’s stream of consciousness? Who is she? It’s a puzzle you put together. Who is this human being? We are in the business of creating human beings, not being popular, not making you want to sleep with us, but creating human beings. So I always try to start with someone that I know. Whenever I read a script—and I think people do that anyway when they read a book—there is someone in there, some point in the narrative, that makes you think of a certain moment in your life, or yourself, or someone you know. If it is someone that I know, then I start to go down that road. With Annalise, I started with the teachers I knew that were abusive. WS: Did you go to Catholic schools, too? DAVIS: No, I went to acting school, which is just as bad, let me tell you! [Laughs] The teachers are trying to get into your psyche, and they have to in order to unleash the work. So I started with all the abusive teachers I knew because that’s what [the role of Annalise] stirred in me. I also started with all the successful women I know in life.

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By Anna Carugati

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Viola Davis earned a SAG Award for her work on ABC’s How to Get Away with Murder, one of the biggest drama hits of the 2014–15 season.

I’m not going to say all of them, but a huge number of them are damaged but they don’t want you to see that part of themselves. It’s the new 21st-century woman: she doesn’t let you see behind her public persona. She can multitask; you can give her any goal and she can accomplish it. But in her life she may have come from sexual abuse—that’s a huge thing with women. She probably had a bad marriage or two, horrible relationships that may have been abusive, a sexual life that she probably doesn’t want anyone to know about, but as soon as she walks out the door she puts on the mask. So I started with the teachers I knew and then I thought of friends, real women—not [just] size 2 women, but 0 to 24—and I started to explore those women, including myself. That’s how I created Annalise, her world, her secrets and her narrative. I didn’t start with the prototypes that I see on TV, and I think that’s important because Annalise doesn’t necessarily exist on TV, but she does exist in life. Even though she is put in a situation that is pretty fantastical, the murder mystery, I wanted her to be rooted in some type of truth. So I started with people I know and I pulled it together from there. WS: What’s the atmosphere on the set like? During intense scenes, do you all remain in the moment or is there levity? DAVIS: There is so much levity. I work with a lot of young people who are very humble and do not take themselves seriously, but who take their work seriously. But we have to have some laughs; even in the most horrific moments there are a lot of laughs. I think we can laugh because everybody has already done their work. There is a sense of focusing and concentrating, but there are a lot of laughs, because everybody loves each other. The best atmosphere is an atmosphere of support when [your colleagues] give 100 percent to you and you give 100 percent to them. What happens a lot, especially in TV and film, is that [in a given scene] some people see the choice you make but—I don’t know if they get scared or intimidated, or if they question themselves—they don’t dive in there with you. They don’t go along on the ride with you. So, when it comes to your close-up, they’re not giving you anything. What makes a great set is when everybody comes to give their best, not just for them-

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selves but for you. Meryl Streep is like that. It doesn’t matter what the shoot is, she would come up to you and say, Is there anything you need me to do? Anything I can do to help you out? And that’s what the actors on this set do. They don’t judge you, they ask, What do you need? Do you need me to stand somewhere else? Do you want me to do something else to help you? That’s the best atmosphere. WS: This is the first time you are in a lead role. What challenges and responsibilities come with being the lead? DAVIS: The hardest part is the hours, the stamina and the focus. The other part that is not so hard for me is that the number one on the call sheet sets the tone. If the number one is egomaniacal and moody and everybody is just [skulking] around the set, that’s going to be a miserable set. Every actor has a story about number ones on the call sheet who were like that, and they hated going to work because there were a lot of problems. I don’t want a set like that, so I set the tone. To me, working is a joy and I’m so aware that these are people—cast and crew—who have taken time away from their families and from things they really want to do. They probably want to be at their kid’s concert or driving their kids to school, so who am I to come to the set in a bad mood? I’m very aware of setting the tone, and it’s a lot of work, it’s a lot of hours. WS: How long is your average day? DAVIS: The courtroom scenes are about 16 hours, but I just imagine people like Ellen Pompeo [Meredith Grey in Grey’s Anatomy] and Kerry Washington [Olivia Pope in Scandal] working so much harder than me. They have a longer season; they have 22 episodes, and I have 15. In a courtroom scene, it’s easy to go 14 or 15 hours or more. That’s a lot of hours. At least I’m doing what I want to do. WS: What other projects do you have coming up? DAVIS: My husband and I have our own projects from our company JuVee Productions. We have a James Lapine script called Custody. We’re finalizing a miniseries about Harriet Tubman that Kirk Ellis is writing; he wrote John Adams. And we are finalizing a biopic of Barbara Jordan [the first African American woman elected to the Texas Senate], which Tony Kushner is writing.

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BEN KINGSLEY Ben Kingsley mesmerized audiences with his nuanced and powerful performance in Gandhi, which won him an Academy Award for best actor. Born in the U.K. and trained in the theater, Kingsley went on to earn Oscar nominations for performances in Bugsy, Sexy Beast and House of Sand and Fog, and has received countless other awards in his prolific career. He has starred in such diverse films as Schindler’s List, Hugo, Iron Man 3 and Exodus: Gods and Kings. Like other Hollywood A-List talent, he has crossed over to the small screen and recently finished filming the miniseries Tut, produced by Muse Entertainment. In it, he plays the calculating, cunning Ay, the Grand Vizier to the young Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun. Knighted in 2002, Sir Ben shares his insights into the character Ay and the craft of acting. WS: How did you get involved in Tut? KINGSLEY: It was simply the good old nuts and bolts of the business: my agent rang me. They had approached him and talked through the idea and the script structure, and explained that it would be six hours. They were going to shoot in Morocco and Montreal. But let me say that where we shoot, for the most part, [does not impact] my decision. I barely know the landscape I am working in— unless it’s something as remarkable as Morocco. It’s [usually just] a hotel room and a film set. But to film in Morocco was a delight because that landscape, I knew, would feed the actors, would feed the material. There’s something about the North African landscape that is very suited to the mindset that the actor needs to portray notions of eternity, dynasty, gods, superstition. Anyway, my agents were approached and very quickly I read it and was delighted to be part of it. The director, David Von Ancken, came to my house. I liked him very much and liked his grasp of the material. We touched on certain other metaphors from literature [that could] act as tools to bring that extraordinary, almost inaccessible history alive and make it accessible. Then I met everyone else in Morocco. My wife also has a lovely role in Tut, which was delightful. It was great to work together. They saw her for the role of Herit, the cousin and lady-in-waiting to the queen who gets sacrificed as a kind of war memento in the middle of the battles between the two warring factions. That was a huge plus. It did not determine whether or not I did the job, but it made it very delightful to know that we could both be working together. So everything was very swiftly resolved and off we flew to Morocco. WS: Tell me about your character, Ay. KINGSLEY: He is ambitious. He is a social climber. He is an opportunist. He is a brilliant politician. It’s extremely difficult to know what the man is thinking. He will never express any emotion to allow the other to gauge where he is. So in that respect, it was a wonderful role to play because my performance had to be very deep within his ambitious psyche. The series could be easily called Ambition instead of Tut because everyone in our scenario, and I’m sure at the court at the time, was desperately plotting

to access the throne and therefore access eternity and a place with the gods. They believed they were born with gods and would live with them in eternity when they died. Very strange concepts, but the actors had to come to grips with the various things that we in the 21st century find rather odd, like the gods and how to annoy them and how to appease them, concepts of eternity and being born a god, being a god on earth. All these things Ay was highly attuned to, and he knew how to manipulate people and turn them against one another without it seeming so—so he was a wonderful character to play. WS: I remember your performance as Itzhak Stern in Schindler’s List, and part of the beauty was that there was a lot of non-verbal communication. Ay is such a manipulator and he holds back so much; did you find playing him to be somewhat similar? KINGSLEY: Well it is related, absolutely, because I hold stillness as an attribute of any performing artist. In other words, economy of motion and accuracy of motion in word or in physical gesture, whether you are an actor or a dancer. It sounds paradoxical, but those moments of stillness where the dancer seems to be hovering in midair are extraordinary, and all the movements are built around those moments of stillness. They make us catch our breath, as Dame Margot Fonteyn used to do. The stillness was applicable to Ay, yes, but I try to make it applicable to every character I play, where it’s appropriate. There are moments of poise and stillness where you don’t know when he’s going to strike next. With Itzhak Stern in Schindler’s List, in his moments of stillness you think, How is he going to survive this? And out of that stillness comes that act of survival, just as out of Ay’s stillness comes that act of manipulation and ambition, which maybe is a form of survival in his context. WS: I’m using the term “bad guy” very loosely, but for the sake of the question, how do you connect to a character when you are playing somebody whose moral compass is not pointing due north? KINGSLEY: I’m glad you put “bad guy” in quotation marks, because of course I don’t see Ay as a bad guy.

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By Anna Carugati

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Ben Kingsley headlines the cast of Muse’s new miniseries Tut, which tells the story of King Tutankhamun’s rise to power in ancient Egypt.

He is a survivor, the most intelligent person in the screenplay, pragmatic and all-seeing, and I must approach him as having his own righteousness and his own ethical compass. He does deliver the most wonderful speech to his son about entitlement and opportunity, which could be taken out of our script and used today as a guide for young people who feel that they are completely entitled. They feel that the world should come to them instead of seeking out opportunity and grasping it. So in that context, of course Ay becomes Pharaoh, because he is a magnificent survivor and hugely attuned to his surroundings. That is how I approach all my characters. I find their sense of righteousness—that pulse within them. I never judge my characters. WS: Was it a luxury to be able to spend six edited hours on a character as opposed to doing a film that is two hours? KINGSLEY: We still crammed in a huge amount of working hours into the day. We filmed six hours of film in not enough weeks. I think it was 10 or 11 weeks and we should have had 24, 25 for six hours of film. Good to live with Ay for that long, to explore him, yes, but I did six hours of filming in the time I would normally be given to do two. But sometimes compression is very good, because it forces you to make choices as an actor—it was almost the opposite luxury in that there was a lack of time and I had to make decisions very quickly based upon the performances of the others around me, the needs of the scene and the needs of the larger sweep. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it. Making something out of nothing is thrilling, which is basically what we do in our business. We start with print on a page. It’s a script. You can throw it on your desk or you can look at it on your laptop, and suddenly it’s six hours of extraordinary television set in ancient Egypt with magnificent, stunning sets and vistas and costumes and extras—it’s a miracle how it all comes together. WS: Was it just this particular project that appealed to you, or have you been looking at the panoply of great television thinking it’s something that might interest you? KINGSLEY: Both. I look at the panoply of great television, as you rightly say—let alone the osmosis between feature

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film and television—and see that it is providing so many actors with so much work. You look at the channels available now in the world, in Europe, Asia, America, Australia, everywhere, and the amount of outlets open to actors, writers and directors is suddenly thrilling. That opportunity to have a different platform, starting in the theater and then going into animation, television, commercials, voice-overs, feature films, is very exciting. One can stay absolutely faithful to the original craft and yet diversify to such a remarkable extent. In fact, we have six films on our slate as producers, my wife and I at Lavender Pictures—that’s our company. Only the other day we realized that a feature film that we had been very keen to get mounted would be perfect as a TV miniseries. We just made that decision so effortlessly in the context you just so rightly described. It’s a very exciting world, particularly for [projects that] involve history. All the great historical epics are now on television. Fewer and fewer are on the big screen; it’s very interesting. You can have six hours exploring a suite of history, as opposed to two hours, and people love to watch because it’s episodic, as history was and is. [Television] is a great broad canvas, and there’s huge potential there, huge potential. WS: Some people in Hollywood bemoan the fact that so few character-driven original movies are being made. Yet you have found a way to work in a variety of such films. KINGSLEY: The offers that come my way are tremendously stretching and exciting and varied. I’m very blessed. I think it’s because I am open to a very wide range of characterizations because of my first steps in the theater with Shakespeare, which gave me an enormous appetite for variety and for, as you say, narrative-driven, characterdriven work. Shakespeare is unbeaten in that as far as I can see. And yes, all the films that my wife and I are producing are exactly that: narrative- and character-driven films. I was a presenter at the Critics’ Choice Awards, and it was so beautiful to see so many wonderful narrativeand character-driven films being honored and applauded. There is still a great audience for them, and I am still determined to give them a great voice. We are determined to make them at our company.

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MARISKA

HARGITAY Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU), created by Dick Wolf, is part of one of the most successful franchises in the history of television. Now in its 16th season on NBC, SVU is the longest-running prime-time drama on the air in the U.S. It tells the stories of the detectives who investigate the most heinous of crimes—those that are sexually based. The heart and soul of the unit is Sergeant Olivia Benson, played by Mariska Hargitay. Benson combines street smarts and sleuthing skills with a special empathy for the victims. Last season was particularly challenging for Benson, with extreme highs and lows: she was kidnapped but was also named the guardian of a much-desired foster child. Hargitay talks about her character and her directing debut. WS: What do you like about Olivia Benson? HARGITAY: I love her because I am challenged by her. I never know what’s going to happen. She surprises me. This character has evolved, which is the most exciting part of it. In many ways I feel that it’s a new character because she has gone through so much that has truly transformed her and she sees things differently. She’s getting new opportunities with what happened last year. This dark thing that happened [the kidnapping] changed her, and now she’s been given this gift of light and love and possibility and something that fills her so deeply and yet scares her beyond fear. They say when you are a parent your heart goes from inside to outside. She is just trying to figure it out. I’ve got all these new notes to play. This show has a different tone now and it feels new. After last year, even though in many ways I felt like we kind of peaked, now I’m feeling like we haven’t and there is so much more story to tell. WS: Fans of the show have very faithfully followed Olivia’s personal journey over the last few years. HARGITAY: Olivia’s journey in so many ways is about hope and truth. As we grow, new doors open for us. Because she [went through so many challenges] it’s like the reward of the universe in a way. She went through the fire and then there was light at the end of the tunnel; there are new challenges, obviously, but it is exciting to be on a new journey. Because of that, the show feels so new and the character feels so new to me. There is nothing old about it; it’s all new issues, new challenges. Olivia has new relationships with each person because of what she has going on in her home life, having the baby that she never had. Even with her boyfriend, work was first. But with this life in front of her, nothing else is first and yet her instinct is

that work is first, her instinct is justice—do what we need to do to get it done. Now Olivia has new instincts that are like new shoes. It’s very unwieldy. WS: You directed for the first time last season. What was that like? HARGITAY: It was thrilling for me. It’s something I wanted to do for a long time and something that in some ways felt extremely familiar and was a completely natural fit. I was panting, Let me get in there! Let me get in there! And in other ways it was extremely challenging and I’d think, Oh, I didn’t know about this! It was invigorating and thrilling and part of it was that I’ve done this for so long, I wanted to try something else. Sometimes I get so invested in the acting and the story that I know, because I’ve been acting for so long, that I can help push it to a new level. There are things we know that we can do and then there are things we don’t know that we can do, but we try because we want to stretch ourselves. But it was thrilling. With Warren [Leight, SVU’s showrunner] I have to say it was our biggest partnership because of the writing and the way he tones the show—I have him in my head. I felt so safe because the show’s so good. It was this unbelievable creative experience because even though I was doing something new and was so scared, there I was, with my family [the cast and crew]; I had my safety net and him. It was the safest high-wire act ever. I was up really high, but I knew they had [the rope] pulled tight. So it was really great. My good friend Alec Baldwin came in and gave such a stunning performance. It was thrilling working with my co-stars and the team in a different capacity. Everyone was so supportive, and fortunately I was lucky enough to direct again this year.

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By Anna Carugati

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Gina

Rodriguez Jane the Virgin is one of the most critically acclaimed TV series this season. A benevolent caricature of a Latin American telenovela, inspired by the Venezuelan series Juana la virgen, the show tells the story of a young woman who is artificially inseminated by mistake and must deal with the chaotic and, given this is a comedy, hilarious consequences. But Jane the Virgin, repped by CBS Studios International, also weaves into its story lines important issues like immigration reform. The show’s star, Gina Rodriguez—who won a Golden Globe for best actress in a TV comedy—delivers an endearing and funny performance each week, but also takes being an actor and role model very seriously. WS: You’ve said that you chose this role because you feel you have a responsibility to your audience. RODRIGUEZ: I grew up on the northwest side of Chicago, in kind of a tough neighborhood. I didn’t have a lot of money growing up. I had two older sisters and I saw them create different worlds for themselves. They didn’t remain stuck in the neighborhood. They weren’t disturbed by outside influences because they were focused and driven. I saw my eldest sister—she’s ten years older than me—leave our home, go to New York and work at Salomon Brothers. At the age of 23 she was making more money than I could even have imagined existed. Then I saw my middle sister go to medical school and become a doctor. And now she’s a pediatrician in internal medicine and works in a clinic for low-income, no-health-insurance patients. I see these women do such marvelous work. I had very positive and motivating parents who said you can be anything you want to be and you have to go after it; you can, and you will. They literally said this to me so often when I was growing up that when I decided to go into the arts, my parents went, Whoa, hold on, you’re not going to be a lawyer? You’re not going to fill in the trifecta? And when I said no, I want to be an actor, I realized that the reason why that didn’t seem as frivolous to me as it did to my parents was because I didn’t want to be an actor just because people would recognize me and make me feel good about myself. I wanted to be an artist to change the process of growing up as a Latina. It took a long time to accept the fact that I wasn’t a size 2, and in this industry I had to make my own way. I did believe that I was a leading lady and I did believe that I was beautiful. And I didn’t need to be told time and time again that I wasn’t the right physical type. I’m not the right physical type for what? To tell a story? Bullshit. I can tell anybody’s story. It took me a long time to get to that place and then it took me a long time to accept that this dual

identity I grew up with—living in both American and Latin American cultures—was OK. We were doctors, lawyers and investment bankers. If I hadn’t seen my sisters accomplish what they did, I probably wouldn’t have believed that people like them existed, because I wasn’t seeing them on screen. On my favorite TV shows I wasn’t seeing successful handsome doctors that were Latinos. [So I decided to use acting] to spread the lessons I learned, and make sure that those stories that I didn’t see on TV when I was growing up exist now. If I don’t see them, I’ve got to do them—be the change you want to see in the world, right? Gandhi said it best! It’s not always that easy! WS: Are there now more Latino doctors, lawyers, investment bankers on screen? Are you starting to see the change? RODRIGUEZ: Oh my God, I see the change in droves! And the beautiful thing for me is that we can either look at all the obstacles that we still may have to face, or we can look at how many people are doing what they are doing. Because to celebrate [accomplishments] is only going to motivate people more, I believe. It’s very easy to say, Oh woe is me, I can’t do this because a man is bringing me down. Or, They don’t want me because I’m not white and handsome. No, no, no, I refuse to live in that world. And I refuse to condemn the industry for what’s been going on. It is my job to say yes or no to a project. It is my job to fight what’s bad in the industry. There is no growth in placing blame. Celebrating how well the networks are catching on to this wave of beautiful diversity is really the place I’m living in. I feel like there is a lot of wonderful work going on. It’s a great time to be an actor, period. There were so many different roles nominated for Oscars that weren’t Latino that I celebrate. They are human stories. For more from Gina Rodriguez, see page 344.

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By Anna Carugati

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LATIN BEAT

JOSÉ ANTONIO BASTÓN

TELEVISA

By Anna Carugati

With an astonishing output of more than 90,000 hours of content each year, Grupo Televisa is the leading producer of Spanish-language programming in the world. It feeds this content to its market-leading networks in Mexico, pay-TV channels in Latin America, and Univision, the number one broadcast network in the U.S. Hispanic market. In addition, Televisa sells finished telenovelas and series, as well as formats, around the world. As the company’s president of television and content, José Antonio Bastón is always looking for new outlets and ways to monetize Televisa’s treasure trove of TV programs. 104 World Screen 4/15

WS: Where do you see the best opportunities for growth? BASTÓN: I see amazing growth in Univision. The economic power of the Hispanic community in the U.S. is [very strong] and Univision is very well positioned. It’s been the market leader among Spanish-language networks for a very long time and its ratings have even been beating those of the U.S. English-language broadcast networks. The explosion of new technologies and new distribution platforms is a threat, but it also presents an amazing opportunity to keep growing. When you own your content, you have the possibility to expose it on any platform. The number of people in the U.S. consuming content on mobile and other digital platforms presents many opportunities when you have content. Pay TV is another opportunity. The penetration of pay TV, from Mexico all the way through Latin America, is about 50 percent, so just organically the potential is amazing. We have been producing for pay-TV networks for more than 20 years. We are very well positioned in Spanish-speaking countries, and we think that given the penetration, the organic growth and our ability to make more investments, there is important complementary revenue for Televisa there. We’re also growing in new areas of packaging pay TV. In 2014, we launched two premium networks, one of them with our partner UFC [Ultimate Fighting Championship] for UFC cage fighting. We also launched our first premium movie channel, called Golden Premier, to compete against HBO with lower prices but very high quality. Co-productions are an area of growth. We are producing two shows that are on the air. We’re in the third season of one of them, and in the second season of the other. These are formats created for Televisa, produced with excellent partners in the U.S., ABC and Sony. We are producing with SBT in Brazil, and with RTI and Caracol in Colombia, so we think that there is an upside in the coproduction arena. We see upside in Latin America because we have been in the syndication market for a very long time, but this new strategy allows us to enter new revenue lines, either through ancillary businesses that have to do with the formats, or through advertising in other countries. We have been investing in formats for a very long time. Two years ago, we only had four formats in the market. Today we have 22 formats in 40 markets. So we see a lot of growth there. We have been working on direct-to-consumer activities in the OTT area and in online shopping. We’re going to be launching our first online and pay-TV network based on online retail shopping. WS: What is Televisa’s relationship with Univision? BASTÓN: We have an important equity stake in Univision and are their main programming supplier. At Televisa, we now say Univision is Televisa and Televisa is Univision—it sounds very romantic, but it’s really true! Given the economic growth that we see in the U.S. Hispanic

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World Screen’s Anna Carugati interviewed Televisa’s José Antonio Bastón on stage at NATPE 2015.

market, Univision is definitely one of our most important assets to grow in the future and we have enough resources to compete with any platform. Today, Univision is part of Televisa’s main decision-making process. For example, for the first time in the history of our relationship, a telenovela is being aired first on Univision and then in Mexico. That has never happened before, and actually, the telenovela from the beginning was planned for the 10 p.m. slot of Univision instead of for one of the slots in Mexico. That was a game changer in terms of how we make decisions. We definitely see Univision as part of the Televisa operation. WS: How has Televisa been responding to the digital challenge? BASTÓN: When you’re in good shape in every genre of content, you’re going to be in good shape on any platform. The problem is how to monetize content. We started our efforts in digital about 14 years ago. We had our portal. It featured our big stars as well as pictures and all the content that we had in the Televisa library. The portal got a ton of traffic, but we were not making one cent. About four years ago, we got seriously into digital platforms. We changed the whole strategy of SVOD and we put all Televisa properties under televisa.com. This has been an area where we have learned a lot. We have been making a big effort, and the only thing we have seen that really makes business sense is the transmedia activity that we’re doing. When you have a big audience on broadcast television and you start transmedia activities, you start to see a lot of traffic [on digital]. You can then see profits by selling broadcast and digital as a package, but it doesn’t make any difference in the revenues of the company. We’re going to have to make a big effort to get into the real business of digital platforms. There is a lot of money in search engines, but we know we’re not going to compete there. We know that our real competitive asset is the content, and we’re just trying to plan that way. Definitely one digital business area will be OTT—selling our content on a subscription basis. But the advertising pie is still small in Mexico. That’s good news and bad: good because the potential is big, but bad because it doesn’t represent [a lot of money] and it does mean additional costs, so you have to be very careful not to invest more than what you’re going to get in return. Neverthe-

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less, every production at Televisa, starting with the first word written in a script, is thought of as a multiplatform activity. Even though we know this endeavor costs money and the returns are not there yet, we’re going to keep investing because sooner or later it’s going to happen. Advertisers are starting to buy more multiplatform packages. Brands that have to reach a mass audience have only one real option in Mexico, which is us. When you can offer broadcast, plus pay, plus digital, then you become a unique prospect to advertisers. So the digital world is a big threat to companies that are based in broadcast, but it’s an amazing opportunity for great production companies. WS: What’s next at Televisa? What are some of the most recent multiplatform projects? BASTÓN: We created a prime-time programming block from Monday to Friday called PM. It offers two hours of prime-time shows, and at the same time there are socialmedia activities. The show ends at 11 p.m., but the activities go on. The growth has been amazing. We are pulling in clients that have never bought advertising in broadcast television, because [with PM] they are not just buying into broadcast television, they now are buying into a service that includes broadcast television. We also have an offer called Tú Diriges that is also an app. Soccer is the most important sport in our country. When you’re watching a match, you have the possibility through this app to move 40 cameras the way you want, and that’s something that has been very attractive to clients. The World Cup was the first real digital World Cup in history. I tell you that because the growth in audience on digital during the World Cup was just unbelievable. It had a lot to do with the fact that some of the games were played during work hours. Some people were working while they were watching the games, so there was a lot of activity on mobile devices. But the amazing thing is that the growth of digital did not at all hurt the growth of the audience in broadcast and pay TV. That tells you that there was real multitasking going on. Also, the mobile devices helped to increase the importance of and interest in the games because of all the interactivity that was going on. That tells you that second-screen activities and multitasking activities do not necessarily diminish the audience of mass media.

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What’s

Elizabeth Guider explores what’s in store for distribution companies in a world of new windows and new screens. magine a room with a supersized curved screen on one wall, a couch against the far wall and a table laden with a console and wearable gear. With the stroke of a key, a viewercum-player, along with real-life or virtual friends, pays for the experience of the next few hours. Then he or she dons goggles and grasps a joystick for a multi-dimensional ride in which at least some of the twists and turns of the story’s plot are controlled by the viewer. Such a vision of how consumers will be interacting with entertainment content is hardly far-fetched or far off. Think Avatar on steroids. “In just a few years, we’re going to see a few productions that stand at the intersection of movies and gaming,” says Amy Reinhard, the president of worldwide television and home media acquisitions at Paramount Pictures. “They’ll represent an immersive experience unlike anything before.” Movies may be the first medium to be so enhanced, but TV series will likely soon follow suit, mimicking, even enhancing, the intensity of such creative breakthroughs. Reinhard believes that technological advances and the flowering of creativity, both for the large and small screen, will result in ever more hands-on media consumption. And storytelling will only get richer—more “360” in its ability to surround, as she puts it—as a result.

Companies, too, will presumably get richer if they find, (smartly!) fund and nurture the talent that it takes to put together such ambitious fare. When they succeed, such content will open up yet another potentially lucrative window for their owners to exploit. As never before, companies need to be at the ready, open to new arrangements—in program creation, production and distribution—if they want to profit in this exploding media milieu. Reinhard is not alone in her assessment of the challenges or opportunities around the bend. If there is, as she says, “caution” on the part of program buyers and sellers to commit to too much for too long, that’s because both sides want to stay flexible in terms of how, when and where they (or their competitors) exploit content. Sellers in particular, she and others suggest, no longer want to commit to the lock-downs of yore, as when the top U.S. suppliers would ink all-in five- to ten-year exclusive deals for programming with the likes of Germany’s Kirch Group. It was a simpler time, with less demand, less supply, fewer players and fewer options. But now, says Eric Schrier, a president of original programming at FX Networks and FX Productions (alongside Nick Grad), “everyone has raised their game,” and the game itself is much more complicated and unpredictable.

In less than ten years, for example, his company has gone from producing one successful cable series (The Shield) to fielding 20 (including The Americans and Tyrant) by, in his words, “thinking and playing outside the sandbox.”

CRYSTAL-BALL GAZING Top executives at both large and small companies, while hardly donning rose-colored glasses, generally envision a not-too-distant future of ever more diverse storytelling options, novel ways to develop and fund series and movies and, piracy notwithstanding, a wider range of ways to get viewers to pay for the consumption of entertainment product. “What’s next? Storytelling modes mushroom. Serialized drama and in-depth characters may remain foremost, but ever more eclectic stuff will find a home,” says Entertainment One Television’s CEO, John Morayniss. His company distributes the Revolutionary War spy drama Turn: Washington’s Spies as well as the period miniseries The Book of Negroes, among other fare. The challenge, Morayniss says, is not being misled by what’s all the rage during any given season. “As soon as you’ve spotted a program trend, it reverses or takes a left turn.” He notes that the variety of subject matter being explored is mirrored by the variety of ways in which shows are being developed. Outside of the

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pilot-dependent broadcast-network arena, more material will be greenlit direct to series. Tandem Productions’ CEO and partner, Rola Bauer, agrees. “Straight-to-series is an evolving trend in the U.S. that we have always been doing, as Tandem never produced pilots,” she says. “Spotless, our latest production, follows this model. Though networks in America are now ordering more shows direct to series, producers across the pond have to think much earlier on about how they can ensure they have enough financing in place. Whether via coproduction partners, presales, tax breaks or clever windowing strategies, producers need to be increasingly creative in funding big, ambitious projects.” There’ll also be more upfront packaging, not unlike the practice of the indie film biz, where product is auctioned on the open market. Shorter-run series à la Under the Dome and Wayward Pines will, adds Morayniss, more routinely claim a few prime slots, allowing nets to either cut their losses if they don’t pan out or stretch shows out if they do. Working with partners to piece together financing is another growing trend. “In the current market, the co-pro model makes the most sense, especially for many U.S. broadcasters that need fresh programming year-round and are no longer able to carry

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worldwide distribution at Legendary Television, points out that his indie bona fides allow for more of an “entrepreneurial” spirit and “a chance to build something.” It’s true that Sony, like the other Hollywood majors, boasts long-established outposts around the globe, but, Grindon maintains, “communications advances are making it easier to conduct business on a worldwide basis, even for smaller players.”

LEGENDS IN THE MAKING

A breakout hit for FOX this year, Empire became America’s most-tweeted-about show in March, averaging more than 450,000 tweets per episode. the full financial load,” explains Bauer. “There is no longer a summer rerun season.” For smaller, indie TV players, nimbleness is everything, eOne’s Morayniss believes.

PLAN OF ATTACK This is not to say that the media business will, in the future, be without pitfalls or pratfalls, executives admit. For the big studios, inordinate amounts of time and energy go into reducing overhead and managing disparate, sometimes out-of-sync units; small studios have to constantly scramble just to stay viable.

The costs of making and marketing both movies and TV shows keep spiraling upward, fragmentation is making for narrower audiences and the competition for viewers has never been fiercer. Failure, lest anyone forget, is endemic, with fewer than 20 percent of U.S. TV fiction performing well enough or for long enough to make money. (Movies face even tougher odds, because fewer but more expensive ones are being made by the major studios. Returnon-investment with these thinner slates can be difficult to achieve.) All that is unlikely to change, nor are the occasional local problems

abroad like currency fluctuations, advertising downturns or cuts to acquisition budgets by broadcasters. However, American-made hits are increasingly huge profitmakers, with Disney (think executive producer Shonda Rhimes’s Thursday-night lineup on ABC) and CBS (think NCIS and CSI, and their offspring) wowing not only audiences but Wall Street bankers. Formerly at Sony Pictures Television and now in the indie trenches at Thomas Tull’s Legendary, Michael Grindon has a multidimensional perspective on what it takes to thrive in this new entertainment age. Grindon, the president of

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Recognizing arguably the greater buzz and more consistent prospects for profits that the small screen promises, Legendary set up a TV division, which Grindon says will focus on high-end hour-long dramas and half-hour comedies for whatever outlet is interested: broadcast, cable or digital upstart. “Yes, windowing is more complex, but what’s increasingly true is that top series command greater license fees because you can now fashion deals across multiple platforms more effectively to get the most bang for your buck,” he says. Given all the new opportunities for varied content, Grindon senses a renaissance of indie TV players in Tinseltown, citing Alcon Entertainment, SkyDance Productions and Media Rights Capital as among those, like his own company, that are responding to the call for more creative voices. As for finding and banking on such original voices, cabler FX, which scored big time with Fargo last year, is arguably honing one of the more appealing approaches Stateside. “We act more like coaches than auteurs or impresarios,” explains Schrier. He mentions a half-dozen pod deals struck with talents ranging from Danny Boyle to Nina Jacobson, as well as a recent partnership with British producer DNA Films and a pick-up of a Ridley Scott-produced eight-parter for the BBC called Taboo. To attract top writers and producers, Schrier thinks his company is setting the pace for giving such talent “creative rein” and “backend profit participation.” Comedian Louis C.K., for one, is a prime example of a beneficiary of that approach.

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Time Warner siblings TNT, TBS and HBO, but also to Showtime, A&E and Hulu. Internationally, the company has snapped up production outfits in the U.K. and Holland, including, most recently, Eyeworks, which operates unscripted factories in a dozen European and South American territories.

A MATTER OF SCALE

HBO NOW will be available through Apple TV for $14.99 a month, enabling non-pay-TV customers to access the premium channel’s content. “Keeping up with what the audience wants to see is the biggest challenge going forward,” Schrier stresses, adding that the intensity of what it takes to get the best results on screen never lets up. He is not alone in not having enough hours in his day. “I do sleep less,” admits MarVista Entertainment CEO Fernando Szew, “not because I’m worried, but because there’s so much now to keep up with, on both the creative and financial fronts.” Szew, whose outfit focuses on TV movies, foresees an ever greater influx of new talent, as stars from both the film world and YouTube converge on the mainstream TV biz. He points to “a lot of dollars that for the last five years have been sitting on the sidelines,” but which are now primed to flow into programming ventures. To take advantage of the evolving taste of younger consumers for small-bite content, MarVista recently set up a direct-to-digital unit, which is experimenting with shorter-form storytelling. Short-form content on the internet is the new Wild West in storytelling. If you think that the Swedish videogamer PewDiePie, who has the most-watched channel on YouTube (and earns a reported $4 million a year), or the adolescent Nash and Cam, who make six-second videos on Vine, aren’t making a dent in the content business, think again. Major media companies have taken note of

MCNs—multichannel networks— like Maker Studios and Fullscreen, which aggregate YouTube channels and represent short-form creators. The Walt Disney Company acquired Maker, and Otter Media, a joint venture of AT&T and The Chernin Group, bought a majority stake in Fullscreen. Stay attuned to the short-form space. It is an incubator of talent and a favorite format of Millennials, whose tastes and viewing habits will soon be shaping the entertainment business. In the meantime, the biggest and more traditional players continue to mine opportunities in this evolving media landscape—even if, given

their size and complexity, they can’t always turn on a dime. What they can vaunt are their economies of scale and their global connections, through which they can take advantage of exploding viewer demand overseas and the plethora of platforms popping up to satisfy it. Look at Warner Bros., which boasts one of the largest rosters of TV series worldwide. Productionwise, the company continues a long-running streak as the biggest supplier to the U.S. broadcast networks. But, it is now goosing yearround development to funnel more disparate product to cable and digital platforms—not only to

Jeffrey Schlesinger, the president of worldwide TV distribution at Warner Bros., believes that “bigness” will have outsize advantages going forward, and that investments like these also give the studio both a leg up in localism and another supply base for crossborder product and formats. He points to a Belgian scripted format called Cordon that his company is reversioning for The CW in the U.S. “There’ll be more such crossborder deals as we proceed,” he says. On the distribution side of the equation, those so-called “digital pennies” that many were dismissing a few years ago are quickly morphing into larger denominations. “[There are] more platforms, in more homes, with greater demand for content,” says Schlesinger. “They are ravenous.” RBC Capital Markets, an investment firm, projects that Netflix, Amazon and Hulu will shell out a whopping $6.8 billion for content

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In a significant deal announced last September, Netflix grabbed the exclusive SVOD rights to Warner Bros.’ Gotham for the U.S. and its international network of platforms. this year. In some cases, these disruptive digerati are buying out the first window for shows, as Netflix did for Warner Bros.’ Gotham or Amazon did for CBS’s Extant. “The value of our library as well as of our current series continues to expand,” Schlesinger says.

SLIDING WINDOWS As for windowing outside of the U.S., Schlesinger thinks it’s shifting more for TV product than for movies, with a number of European players, as well as their U.S. counterparts stepping up aggressively in the food chain. For instance, his division licensed the first window of its freshman series Constantine to Amazon in the U.K. rather than to a terrestrial broadcaster. Increasingly, too, he notes, European cable or SVOD players will “step up” for shows that fit their brand. Similarly, over at Twentieth Century Fox, the windowing of series abroad is becoming a much more all-involving and strategic part of the business operation. “There’s an enormous amount of negotiation, strategizing and collaboration going on within our company to determine what’s best for our content—and for a particular market,” says Gina Brogi, executive VP of worldwide pay TV and SVOD at the studio.

In the U.K. in particular, Brogi points out, new types of deals are coming at a rapid pace. Sit-downs to figure out the potential for each content asset with her colleagues are routine, Brogi explains. “In each case, for each show or movie, we have to figure how our decisions will impact the future of the market. With so many more outlets and so much going on, you can’t run a distribution outlet without constant collaboration.” In this constantly shifting landscape, a few firm signposts are becoming clear. Windows will continue to move and even collapse. OTTs will keep producing original television series. Like Netflix, Amazon Studios is attracting A-list talent to its original productions, like Ridley Scott and Woody Allen. Netflix revealed it wants to premiere 20 originals a year—one every two-and-half weeks—leaving others to wonder how quality and effective marketing can be maintained with that kind of volume. Digitally originated content will continue to flourish through MCNs like Maker Studios and Fullscreen; YouTube makes it easier for ambitious creators to reach an audience than it would be if they pitched their ideas to traditional linear channels, where network executives decide if content is good or

not. These young producers post their videos online and viewers decide their fates, making for a much more democratized process.

STAR MAKERS “Most creators start out as fans of somebody else,” says George Strompolos, CEO and founder of Fullscreen. “Then, some magic happens when a little light goes off in someone’s head that says, ‘I can do this too.’ That’s a beautiful thing, but it takes serious commitment to become a successful creator. It takes a while to find an audience and a ton of work to keep them engaged. At Fullscreen, we help creators of all sizes and on all platforms develop their voices, build an audience, produce better content and connect with advertisers. Empowering creators is in our DNA.” The major stars on YouTube are already migrating to linear channels, and there will be more coming. Lionsgate has picked up the distribution rights to AwesomenessTV’s The SMOSH Movie. HBO has ordered a pilot from YouTube star Issa Rae. Maker is packaging the best of its short-form content and selling it to pay-TV and free-TV outlets. Netflix, Amazon Studios and Fullscreen have all announced that they will be producing feature

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films and premiering them online, in some instances before the traditional theatrical release. These digital platforms also have plans to start charging for content. “We view the production of original premium content as a continuation of our mission to empower creators,” says Strompolos. “We recently announced the Fullscreen Films banner, which includes features like Rooster Teeth’s Lazer Team; The Outfield, starring Nash Grier and Cameron Dallas; and #O2LForever, featuring the Our Second Life crew, which was a beloved vlogging super-group.” But will the Millennials, to whom this content is directed, pay for anything online? That’s a big unknown. What is known for sure is that the tastes and viewing habits of Millennials will significantly impact the media industry. A number of surveys have already established that they prefer YouTube to television by a long shot and that their favorite entertainers are all YouTubers, not Hollywood stars. Millennials adore roleplaying video games, in which they can interact with stories. That super-sized curved screen, the wearable gear, the viewer-cumplayer—they’re not as far off as one might think.

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THOMAS RABE Bertelsmann distribution costs are greatly reduced. The same holds true for barriers to entering new markets. And at the same time, digital also helps us to establish direct-to-consumer relationships. People are spending more time with media than ever before. This is very good news for content companies. I’m not going to deny that there are some significant challenges. First, the unbundling of media content, which is very visible in music but increasingly also in other media. Second, piracy. And finally, the strong market positions of e-tailers who distribute content around the world. But overall we have every reason to be optimistic, as can be seen from looking at our various businesses.

Bertelsmann is one of the world’s leading media companies and the largest outside the U.S. Among its holdings are RTL Group and FremantleMedia, the publishing company Penguin Random House and the music rights-holder BMG. A key priority for Chairman and CEO Thomas Rabe has been making sure that the company’s many television, print and music assets make a smooth transition to the digital world. WS: Despite the challenges, what opportunities does digitization offer Bertelsmann? RABE: As I see it, the biggest opportunity resulting from digital is that the characteristics of digital media are often superior to the features of analog media. Consider the concept of availability—anywhere, anytime—consider mobility, consider social, consider interactivity. The second important thing is that digital drives media consumption. We see that the value of professionally produced content has never been higher than today, and that usergenerated content is a fantastic opportunity for us as a professional media company to discover new content, new talent, new songwriters in all of the areas we operate in. There are some pretty prominent examples, i.e. the success of Fifty Shades of Grey, which actually did not get its start at one of the large publishers. Overall, the media landscape has never been so comprehensive, varied and interesting as it is today. What also becomes increasingly visible as digitization progresses is that production and

WS: Would you give some examples of how Bertelsmann’s books, print media, music, television and programming assets have entered the digital space?

project with VICE Media. And we have significantly invested in multichannel networks like BroadbandTV and StyleHaul, as well as in an online video platform named SpotXchange. In the book market, the e-book has already become established as a very robust and highly profitable business model for the digital age. In 2013, Bertelsmann and Pearson formed the world’s largest trade book publisher, Penguin Random House. Penguin Random House not only sells 700 million books and publishes 15,000 new titles per year, it is also well resourced to lead the industry’s digital transformation. Overall, our imprints earn approximately one in every four dollars with e-books. A major reason why the transition from physical to electronic books has been relatively smooth is that there was an efficient ecosystem right from the beginning. As soon as e-books were launched at scale, our readers could choose from a variety of titles, a number of e-tailers, and

With its roots in print media, Bertelsmann has emerged as a digitally savvy behemoth across its broadcast, music and publishing operations. RABE: The development varies from one media genre to the next. In the TV business, RTL Group’s families of channels have been quite resilient to fragmentation so far, establishing complementary families of channels. The use of linear TV is still very high, so television will remain an indispensible vehicle for large-scale ad campaigns in the foreseeable future. In addition, as television goes HD, RTL Group has successfully established a second revenue stream by getting paid for the signal it provides to platform operators. But of course the various types of online video are becoming increasingly important. RTL Group’s video [offerings] across all channels already register 5.3 billion views a month. These are the kind of usage figures that, apart from RTL Group, only the biggest American players generate. We have built a strong presence in nonlinear TV in a number of ways: Our channels have expanded their online catchup TV services. Our production company FremantleMedia produces web originals for online platforms such as Munchies, a joint

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various reading devices. This resulted in a high willingness to pay, in contrast to magazines and music, that is, where formats and ecosystems have only emerged in recent years to properly structure the market. Apps and e-magazines now open up additional opportunities for print media; stores and streaming services for music offerings. WS: Bertelsmann is primarily a contentproducing company. Do you feel enough is being done to combat piracy? RABE: The protection of intellectual property is a fundamental issue that affects all creative works and content, which is why it is essential not only for Bertelsmann, but also for the artists, writers or producers we represent. Effective IP laws and enforcement are necessary to protect the creative industries and ensure diversity and quality of content. The creative industries are a major economic force, providing millions of jobs, and they make an important contribution to society as well as culture. For more from Thomas Rabe, see page 207.

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JEREMY DARROCH Sky

Sky is the leading pay-TV company in Europe, with operations in the U.K., Ireland, Germany, Austria and Italy, and one of the most successful pay services in the world. As its chief executive, Jeremy Darroch, explains, Sky has always prided itself on finding the most innovative and convenient ways to deliver a wide variety of content to its subscribers. WS: What strategies must Sky pursue in order to remain the market-leading pay-TV company in the markets in which it operates? DARROCH: First and foremost, it’s critical that we don’t lose our mindset of embracing change and reinventing ourselves, stepping into opportunities. That has always been at the heart of this business. We view a changing media landscape very positively because we see possibility and opportunity in it rather than just challenge. Alongside that, it’s important to remember that in most markets in Europe, certainly all the markets that we are in, there is very significant headroom for growth. Pay-TV penetration is still not at the levels that we see in the States or in many other markets around the world, so there is good opportunity. In addition, distribution networks are opening up with new ways to get to customers, and barriers to entry are coming down. These are all positive for our business. The second thing is to not lose sight of the fundamentals of the business: building out our content assets and our channel brands; being willing to continue to invest on-screen,

which is ultimately what customers value more than anything else; and continuing to lead the way in technology. We’ve got great content. We can use our powers of innovation to help you get the most from your subscription service and get access to that content across multiple devices or multiple pathways. Today a Sky customer will consume content in multiple ways—through the satellite, either linear or on demand, over broadband, over mobile, through a catch-up service—and we can super-serve customers by embracing that. The third thing is to never forget that you win on the ground in each of those markets. We’ll win in Italy by being great in Italy. We’ll win in Germany by having a great German business, and likewise in the U.K. One of the cornerstones of Sky’s success is our understanding of what it takes to deliver a great proposition to customers. We’ve been very good at harvesting that learning and reapplying it across the value chain. That

ear schedule, but at a different time from when it’s first transmitted. Live sport is the opposite. It’s all about the live experience, and customers want to watch it as it happens. They cut away from that and then lose interest quite quickly. I think that we’ll continue to see viewing behaviors change, but the growth of on-demand and catch-up services and the ability to access content away from home will be important trends. WS: Do you foresee a time when on-demand will overtake viewing of the linear channels? DARROCH: I think for some channels that will happen faster than for others, but it is important to remember that viewing is still dominated by linear viewing if you look at it at a massmarket level. I think the on-demand viewing trend will continue, and some of the niche channels will be at the forefront of that. Of course, individual customer segments will move faster than others. We still have a number

Sky is on the front lines of TV Everywhere, ensuring that its customers get the content they want on every possible device. means thinking about what that means in terms of the content we want to buy or commission. Or thinking about how we get innovation right, not overly complicating things but making our products easy to use. And thinking about what is really important for customers from a service point of view. Having an appetite for change is key, alongside sustained investment in the core fundamentals and having deep consumer insight, which we can apply in deciding what we do and how we do it. These are the things that will keep us ahead of everybody else. WS: What are you learning about how your customers want to watch movies and TV shows? DARROCH: If you look at the last 12 months there has been an explosion in on-demand viewing. Customers are really starting to say, for certain types of content, that they really want to watch it on their own time, at their leisure. So if you take a channel like Sky Atlantic, which carries a lot of HBO’s content and our own comedy and drama content, we see a lot of that consumed not through the lin-

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of customers today who choose to consume Sky just through the DVR and they are very happy! For us it’s key to understand the broad trends, but then also to make sure that we can translate what they mean to individual segments of customers and serve those directly. WS: How do you envision distributing content in the future? DARROCH: I can see us continuing to broaden our distribution. We’ll always have the retail business in each of the markets that we compete in, but we will also continue to seek to broaden how we get to customers. We’ll do that by distributing our own content directly through our own channels over broadband and mobile networks but also as a partner with others. Today we’ve got more relationships in place with cable operators or the big telcos across Europe than ever before because we know that will be the best way that we can serve the whole market. For more from Jeremy Darroch, see page 295.

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DAVID ZASLAV Discovery Communications 3 billion cumulative subscribers in more than 220 countries, and our average international audience increased 10 percent last year. Another real game changer for us is Eurosport. In 2014 we took a controlling interest in Eurosport, and I get more excited about this brand and platform every day. That acquisition is expanding our reach and ability to attract new audiences, as well as diversifying our content portfolio. Lastly, we own all of our IP and programming. That presents a lot of possibilities and options with the growth of new digital platforms.

With a commitment to satisfying curiosity and entertaining viewers with high-end programming, Discovery Communications has grown from the flagship channel it launched in 1985 in the U.S. to a leading global programmer whose portfolio of networks reaches some 3 billion cumulative subscribers around the globe. As its president and CEO, David Zaslav, explains, offering content today means providing it on all platforms and devices. WS: With the media landscape changing so rapidly, what strategies does Discovery Communications have in place to drive growth and build new businesses and brands? ZASLAV: Over the past 30 years, we’ve built our company through a consistent strategy: investing in our channels and programming in the U.S. and around the world. We’ve also invested in local teams and infrastructure to drive our global business, and we own our rights and IP across platforms. We’ve launched networks that have terrific worldwide appeal, but what’s distinct about us is that many of our channels have a local feel. If you wake up in Italy, you feel like Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet or Science is a local channel, your channel. At the same time, there are genres that just travel well and have universal appeal, like crime (with Investigation Discovery) and cars (with Velocity/Turbo). Our annual $2-billion content investment and a focus on programming to a global audience has driven us to nearly

WS: What type of programming does it take to stand out in today’s crowded nonfiction programming genre? ZASLAV: It starts, begins and ends with a laser focus on quality storytelling across our global

ZASLAV: In the U.S., we’ve recently struck deals with Sony for its new PlayStation Vue platform, as well as renewals with all of our traditional distributors. Those deals all recognized the full value of our content, so we think the prospects across traditional linear distributors, plus the new market entrants like Sony, are good in the near term. We believe that investing in and developing the best content will fuel viewership regardless of platform, and that owning that programming and IP positions us well for a longer-term future across multiple viewing devices. WS: And how is Discovery positioned to play in both arenas, so to speak, on linear channels and nonlinear digital platforms? ZASLAV: We are the world’s number one pay-TV programmer. Our reach on traditional systems across the globe is unmatched. We

Through its digital-media division, Discovery is building web-native channels like Seeker that deliver original online content. portfolio. We are constantly talking to our audiences about how they want to be nourished by our content and brands. And it’s also about the superfan. We have superfans that are devoted to our brands and shows. On Investigation Discovery (ID), we have ID Addicts—that’s what they call themselves—that have driven the network to be number one in length of tune-in of all the networks in the U.S. So finding strong niches of content and developing shows with great stories to nourish those audiences is crucial. Secondly, I think it’s important to take some risks and big swings. For 30 years, we haven’t been afraid to create TV that no one else has done. That has served us incredibly well, and our talented creatives are encouraged to develop programming that stands out in a crowded landscape. WS: Given consumers’ continued penchant for watching programming on demand, what is your view of the future of the linear channel business?

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have an incredible distribution advantage. In terms of digital viewing, all of the U.S. [carriage] renewals in 2014 offer subscribers authenticated access to Discovery content inside and outside the home. So that’s a strong start to building a robust U.S. TV Everywhere offering—and another element of our strategy of capturing a growing share of the streaming audience. As for linear, owning all of our IP is a huge advantage as digital viewing becomes a bigger piece of the pie. In Europe we’ve gained valuable insights on our own direct-toconsumer products with Dplay in the Nordics and the Eurosport Player across Europe. While we are relatively new to overthe-top offerings, I’m excited about our near- and long-term growth in this area. Those platforms already have nearly 250,000 subscribers paying $8 a month and offer fantastic learnings that we can apply in the U.S. and other markets in the future. For more from David Zaslav, see page 395.

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ROY PRICE Amazon Studios

When Amazon Studios announced it was starting to produce original series, it approached the process differently from other streaming services. First, the studio solicited scripts from the public as well as from established writers. Then it posted pilots on the Amazon Prime Instant Video site and let subscribers provide feedback. As Roy Price, the head of Amazon Studios, explains, this system has allowed for a lot of experimenting. It also resulted in Golden Globes for best comedy series and best actor for the show Transparent and its star, Jeffrey Tambor. WS: What have you learned from submitting pilots to subscribers? PRICE: We’ve learned that customers around the world are very eager to try out new shows, certainly in the U.S., U.K. and Germany. They give us a lot of feedback. We get feedback in various ways, and it’s been a very helpful process allowing us to try out different things. WS: What considerations go into deciding whether or not to take a pilot to series, and how are your considerations different from those of a linear network? PRICE: A network has to take into account more contextual issues. They have a linear schedule so they have to look at their lineup or what’s happening Wednesday at 9:30 p.m., while we look at shows more in isolation. We do see them as part of a lineup,

but we don’t specifically have a limit on the number of one-hours or half-hours we can do, [and we’re not thinking] we need the next one to be a half-hour, or anything like that. We just want the greatest show we can get, and there are no other considerations. Because we don’t have lead-ins and because it’s an on-demand environment, we really want to have a show that is going to stand out and be somebody’s favorite show. I think everyone wants their shows to be someone’s favorite, but there is a slightly different problem you are trying to solve if you do have a lead-in and are looking for a Wednesday 9:30 p.m. show. It’s a slightly different analysis. If a network has a show that 80 percent of the people like, that might make sense, because it can hold an audience. But we are focused more on having that show that, I don’t know if 80 percent of the peo-

PRICE: Yes, it feeds on itself. We are trying to give each creator the opportunity to make a statement. We are not trying to get people to make a certain show that we have a model for. We want them to make their show with their voice—do that show they’ve always wanted to do—and we really support that. We want every show to be unique and different and memorable and pushing television ahead to a new place. That is where we can add value in the television environment. There are a lot of shows already out there, so it doesn’t really help for us to make four or five or six more TV shows that are just fair. We’re looking for people to do something fresh, and we try to give people all the resources they need to do that. WS: You’ve announced that the studio will be producing and distributing feature films.

Amazon Studios has brought the democracy of the internet to the pilot process, allowing users to vote on which shows they’d like to see get a green light. ple like it, but if 30 percent of the people love it and are fanatics about it [that’s good for the subscription model]. WS: Woody Allen will be making his first TV project for Amazon. How did Amazon and Allen come together? PRICE: We are always looking for super talented people who are innovators, have a voice, create things that people care about and break new ground, and Woody Allen has always been the archetype of one of America’s greatest filmmakers. So we reached out to his representation and wound up having a couple of meetings in New York with Woody over the course of a year or so. We talked about what we were trying to do and it all came together that way. We are delighted and looking forward to the show. WS: Does the momentum the studio has gathered, the critical acclaim and Golden Globes, all play a role in being able to attract A-list talent?

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PRICE: We’re just getting started, but the goal is to release 6 to 12 movies next year here in the U.S. We are probably just going to take the U.S. rights on these movies. Some we are going to acquire, some will be fully funded and produced by us. We want the best movies that we can get for Amazon customers. In many ways we are following the same principles that we do on the TV side, which is we want every movie to be memorable, worth talking about, special, and to make a statement. We are looking to work with creative visionary filmmakers, because, again, the problem isn’t that there aren’t movies—there are, there are lots of movies. We can do something worth doing if we really support innovative filmmakers who are looking to do something important and that people will care about. That’s our priority. I’d rather have something try to be great and fail than to have something that is just [average] or low risk. We’re looking for films that are interesting and worth talking about by visionary filmmakers.

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WS: And you will be releasing movies six to eight weeks after their theatrical premieres? PRICE: Generally our movies will come to digital six to eight weeks after theatrical. We really want to support a robust theatrical run, as robust as each film can support. Today, the SVOD window is usually 9 to 12 months after theatrical. Then there are some people who say movies should come out in digital first or come out in digital the same day as theatrical. We’re trying to find a happy medium where the theatrical experience leads off and people get the opportunity to see the movie in great movie theaters, and then it comes to us after that. We think there is a good opportunity to work with theaters and devise a release pattern that will work for everybody. If we bring the digital distribution up from where it typically is today, we can make the whole pie bigger, which will benefit filmmakers. It also benefits customers because if they see a trailer, or read a review, or hear about a movie and they want to see it, we’ll make it available while they still remember it. If it comes to digital a year after theatrical release, that’s way too late; they will have forgotten about it by then. We’re looking to strike a balance so that movies have a strong theatrical run but shortly thereafter consumers can see them in their homes.

WS: As viewers of all ages are increasingly watching content on demand, how do you see the future of linear channels? PRICE: I don’t do a lot of speculating about that sort of thing, but however things evolve, a lot of the linear channels have very strong brands that people care about and will continue to care about even if things evolve considerably. I know the business will keep evolving, but I’m sure a lot of these very successful content brands will adjust and evolve along with it and they will still be meaningful to customers because of what they stand for. WS: What do you see as the biggest challenges and opportunities for Amazon Studios in the next 12 to 18 months? PRICE: The biggest challenge and opportunity is to separate the good from the great. The challenge is not separating the bad from the good; that’s the easy part. The challenge is separating the good from the really meaningful—shows that people will be talking about for a long time and that will really add value to the television environment. That is always the ongoing challenge. Something that is really new and different often can seem nonintuitive at first, so you have to stay openminded. Throughout the history of television one can make the case that a lot of ground-

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breaking, interesting shows have come from new networks or networks that were trying to turn themselves around and were in a particularly open-minded place. But then when they become more successful, one could make the argument that sometimes they become more conservative and protective of what they have built, and somebody else gets the groundbreaking show. But the challenge once you’ve had a little bit of success is to retain the hungry, open-minded, creative and experimental attitude that you need in order to really bring to customers the shows and movies that people are really going to care about and are really interesting. WS: Does the fact that it’s not only your team making decisions—you also get feedback from your customers—help you remain open-minded? PRICE: I think that’s right. If you do it all in a bubble it’s inevitable that, for example, you would wind up betting on people’s past track records. Sometimes that will work, but it makes it a little more difficult. You have to really be bold to go against that and order the show that really doesn’t have the same auspices but is brilliant. But if you do have the opportunity to try things out and get feedback, then I do think you can be more experimental.

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VICTOR KOO Youku Tudou a much more targeted audience and they’re used to multiscreen internet technology, and the way they consume content is entirely different. So the way you create and produce content to address that new market segmentation should be very different. That’s why innovation in terms of content production may be happening faster in China than in the U.S.

With an estimated 600 million internet users out of a population of 1.35 billion, China has become the world’s largest OTT market and is set to remain so for the foreseeable future. Among the companies catering to this massive audience is Youku Tudou, which is delivering high-end imports and original content to Chinese web audiences. Chairman and CEO Victor Koo is focused on keeping Youku Tudou as China’s number one internet video service by driving innovation in content, business models and technology. WS: What does innovation mean for you in the context of online video? KOO: Content distribution, production and marketing are all evolving. In all areas related to content, innovation is happening on all fronts because of technological changes, because of behavioral changes, because of how people are consuming content today. In the U.S., where internet penetration is so high, if you look at the people watching Netflix and the people watching HBO [the linear channel], the demographics aren’t that different. In China, if you look at the demographic watching Youku Tudou and contrast that with the demo watching terrestrial television—we don’t have an HBO equivalent—it’s actually dramatically different. Internet penetration in China is maybe 600 million people out of 1.3 billion. The demo watching television is broadly 5 to 75; for the internet we’re talking about 15 to 35, 15 to 40. The mobile screen has expanded that demographic group somewhat, but still it’s

WS: How are you innovating within your own original production efforts? KOO: Youku Tudou started working on original content back in 2009—before our international counterparts started. It began more organically because we have video sharing and UGC [usergenerated content] roots. Some of these users [creating content] are like independent directors, so we started working with them. It was web-native content, targeting the urban youth population, first on the PC screen and then the mobile screen. As our strategy evolves, we’re

in]. As we’re developing more and more original content, we have IP we can leverage into new mobile games that [we can sell] as well. WS: How responsive have brands been to shifting their dollars online? KOO: Multiscreen video from a marketing and advertising standpoint is pretty mainstream now in China. Three or four years ago that wasn’t the case. Now whether it’s multinational clients or domestic clients, people see it as an important part of the mix because it reaches an audience that other screens are not as good at reaching. Also, [we can provide] TV-like advertising spots and more innovative internet-based advertising campaigns. We do produce original content, so there’s a lot of product placement and sponsorships. And, instead of just [providing] reach and frequency, there’s also a lot of engagement and interactivity solutions that Youku Tudou can offer.

Youku Tudou is the leading online video company in China, the world’s largest OTT market, with 900 million views a day on its platforms. moving more to bigger productions and even moving to the big screen. Some of our shows have [been acquired by] TV stations. So we’ve gone from web-native, smaller productions and progressed to larger productions, addressing larger screens. But the core target audience is still the urban young; that hasn’t changed. WS: Tell us about the revenue models you’re exploring outside of advertising. KOO: Advertising is a sizable market. On the consumer side, the subscription business has been growing very strongly. It’s partly because of the anti-piracy initiatives by the government. There were always two problems in trying to build a Netflix-type model in China: one was the payment issue and the other was the piracy issue. What we’re seeing is that payments via mobile have improved considerably. Piracy was quite a problem. It’s not gone away, but I think there are efforts to address that now. Also, we have games, especially on the mobile side, which we market very similarly to movies. That’s another area [we’re expanding

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WS: How important are recommendation engines and analytics for Yukou Tudou? KOO: The [benefits of] big data and cloud computing apply to users, marketers and our content partners. From the users’ standpoint, we’re pushing different kinds of content to your mobile phone or having different recommendations on your personal page. As our big data gets better, [we can do more] in terms of targeted advertising. One of the reasons movie companies like working with us is that we can provide a lot of consumer insight—about the kinds of content our users watch and how to promote releases to a movie-going audience that is young and urban and internet savvy. [We can showcase] trailers, exclusive behind-the-scenes footage and related music videos to help drive audiences to the movie theaters. That’s why we’ve become a joint producer and a joint promoter of movies and have been very successful with it over the last few years. For more from Victor Koo, see page 448.

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YNON KREIZ Maker Studios is long form but just shorter, but is it a different kind of content altogether? KREIZ: It is a different medium, and many people make the mistake and think it’s like long form but shorter. It’s not a departure in terms of its strong focus on storytelling and quality content. That is still very much the same; you can’t get away from that. But it’s a different medium in the way you consume it, how you produce it, how you measure it, how you commercialize it, how you share it, how you market it. The closest way to think about it is the difference between movies and television; in the same way, short form is as different a medium relative to other forms of video content.

Maker Studios is the largest content network on YouTube, representing 55,000 creators whose shortform videos attract some 11 billion views each month. This kind of clout among the Millennial crowd caught the attention of The Walt Disney Company, which acquired Maker for $500 million—with an additional $450 million if performance targets are met. Together they represent an unrivaled stable of properties combining Maker’s online sensations with Disney’s treasure trove of characters, and as its president, Ynon Kreiz, explains, all ripe for exploitation as long-form and short-form content. WS: What appealed to you about joining Maker Studios? KREIZ: It was a combination of things. I saw the growth around short-form video content even while I was at Endemol. I could see how rapidly this industry was growing and I wanted to get into the space, initially as an investor. At the time I met most of the main players on YouTube, and within what was quite a crowded environment at the time, Maker stood out as a company that in my mind represented the most exciting part of this space. It had a strong focus on quality content, with great creators, and that’s what I believed would be the most relevant and impactful way to get into this new medium. WS: Is the content that Maker represents a complete departure from traditional longform content? Some people think short form

WS: Would you give some examples of successfully producing, monetizing and marketing this short-form content? KREIZ: I can point to many examples, but an easy one is Epic Rap Battles of History, one of

sense, by the way, there are no shortcuts. You can’t fake it and you can’t reach a lot of people if your content is not good, because it is completely disintermediated and people either like your content or they don’t. You can’t just promote it if there is no merit. But if it is successful, reaching a vast audience is much more achievable and more dependent on the quality of the content. It’s important to point out that the content has to be organic. It has to be authentic. It has to be endemic, and that is why it is so unique and special and requires this special skill set. WS: What is the ratio between people who want to be represented by Maker and those who are selected, and how do you make the selection? KREIZ: We get between 10,000 and 15,000 new creators a day that come to our site to initiate the whole on-boarding process. By the end of the day we select about 100. Ini-

The first web video company to lure significant investment from Hollywood, Maker Studios is a leading incubator of online talent. our main franchises and one of the most successful online series. Today it has already generated north of 2 billion views with over 50 episodes. It’s a show we produce and is led by the two creators, our partners Nice Peter and EpicLLOYD, who have been doing such an amazing job in creating the show and performing in it. These two extremely creative guys have managed to build a franchise and make it a global hit. This is one prime example of how you turn great content into such a successful franchise. WS: Is it easier to get a large-scale audience on the internet than getting a high rating on a linear television channel? KREIZ: It’s actually quite hard because the internet is so crowded, but if you are successful and your content is appealing, then it becomes very achievable. You are not dependent on the decision of a network executive or a head of programming to decide if your content is good or not. It’s much more democratized and you can successfully reach an audience. In that

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tially the selection is more algorithmic and it’s more a process driven by technology, where we look at copyright and other issues just to create an initial filter. In the end it’s an editorial decision. We look for people we believe have a high potential for success and fit our editorial framework, and those get onto the network and we have them maximize their reach and monetization to the highest degree. WS: Speaking of monetization, how are the CPMs that you are seeing on the channels Maker represents, and on other YouTube channels, compared to CPMs in television? KREIZ: It varies. It’s not really comparable, although obviously being a commercial enterprise we are very focused on monetization. So at Maker it’s a combination of CPMs and also reach. Whereas in television the audience is defined and more finite, here you see a continuous growth of monetization. And we’ve been pretty good at it and we’re continuing to grow economically. We always want more. But we’re pretty happy with the growth so far.

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WS: Why was the deal with Disney important, and how will Disney and Maker benefit from it? KREIZ: The deal with Disney was transformational not just for Maker but for the short-form industry because this is the first time that such a large media company entered YouTube through the front door. For us it gave Maker access to the best content, the best IP and the best franchises in the universe. No one company comes close to Disney when it comes to the strength of their content and programming. That in itself was key because, as I said earlier, we are very focused on quality content and consumer experience, and there is no better partner than Disney to help us facilitate that. For Disney we provide expertise, unique technology with access to data, and analytics to expand their existing businesses into short form. Disney is already successful in everything they do and now they can expand into this new medium. It was a great fit, and as different as the two com-

panies are, they are both focused on quality programming and consumer experience. WS: You have plans to offer the best of Maker Studios as branded blocks to pay-TV and freeTV outlets. How would that work? KREIZ: We are looking to extend our reach into all outlets where we can find people. Not everybody is on YouTube, and not everybody is online all the time. So we have announced an arrangement with Dish whereby we extend our offering to Dish’s new OTT service, Sling TV. Likewise we are looking at other opportunities to extend our content into more traditional distribution media, but always leveraging our expertise in the Millennial-market category and leveraging our online talent. WS: How do you see Millennials’ tastes and viewing habits influencing the way content is produced, monetized, marketed and consumed as we go forward? Will they have a big impact on the industry?

KREIZ: Huge impact. Millennials’ behavior is not what we were used to when we grew up. When you look at their content, it’s being consumed and shared and selected in different ways. It’s a very difficult audience category to reach and engage. All the research shows that they look at traditional media differently and they spend their time online, so you have to be a very proactive player in the online space to be successful with this demographic. WS: They also seem to not want to pay for anything. The older Millennials grew up with the idea that if something is on the internet it’s free. Do you see that mindset changing? KREIZ: Pay services are a different proposition from ad-supported services, not just in the way you charge but the entire offering has a different DNA. It’s yet to be proven that Millennials would be willing to pay for that. There are different services that have tried [to charge for content]. It remains to be seen if they will be successful.

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CECILE FROT-COUTAZ FremantleMedia WS: What kind of born-digital content are you interested in? FROT-COUTAZ: We are building relationships with a new generation of online talent, both on-screen and behind the scenes, through our strategic partnerships. We’re inspired by new talent, relevance, tone, authenticity and more. It’s a really exciting place to be. We’ve already had success producing original digital content within food (Munchies, with VICE Media), sport (FullTimeDEVILS) and general entertainment (The Crew for StyleHaul). Our aim now is to create new brands that will have the potential to cross over from one media/platform to another but that are popular in their own right.

FremantleMedia’s global network of companies creates more than 8,500 hours of programming a year and rolls out more than 60 formats. Digital content and branded entertainment have become important growth areas, and CEO Cecile Frot-Coutaz is encouraging her teams to mine the online world, as well as traditional television production houses, for opportunities, ideas, content and talent. WS: Is the industry moving increasingly to niche audiences and passionate communities of viewers? How does a company like FremantleMedia serve them? FROT-COUTAZ: Yes, and scale is vital in making digital a viable business. We need to reach a bigger global audience and we will do that by increasing our own digital footprint, acquiring networks, such as Divimove, working with the networks within the RTL Group, like StyleHaul and BroadbandTV, and with key external partners like VICE Media. WS: How do you continue to serve broadcasters that need mass-appeal programming? FROT-COUTAZ: Mass-appeal programming will remain our core business, but as eyeballs are moving to digital, ad revenue will follow and we must be in both places. Therefore, we will continue to invest in both our core business and digital through investments in development, partnerships and acquisitions where it makes commercial sense and complements our existing portfolio of content and creative talent.

WS: How can this content migrate to more traditional outlets? FROT-COUTAZ: We are already seeing this happen. IP and talent originating in digital has

WS: What developments are you seeing in branded entertainment? FROT-COUTAZ: Brands are increasingly looking to production companies for their expertise in creating longer-form storytelling. For instance, we worked with TBWA in Finland to create a 10x30-minute comedy called Buy This!, based in a fictitious ad agency in Helsinki. The clients in the show are real brands and our team in Finland worked collaboratively with TBWA to create the show’s scripts by using real briefs from participating brands. TBWA went on to develop real TV ad campaigns for the brands, which launched in the real world the week after each respective episode had aired. The show has already won numerous advertising industry awards, and we’re rolling out the format to other territories with TBWA this year. We are doing more integrated campaigns with brands across our TV shows that could include any or all of: sponsorship, product

Through its network of companies and alliances with innovators like VICE, FremantleMedia has become a major player in native digital content. already started moving to more traditional platforms: for example, the success Penguin Random House had with Zoella, who is one of StyleHaul’s biggest YouTube stars. Increasingly, networks are optioning IP and hiring talent from online. Examples of this are E! creating a talk show for YouTuber Grace Helbig, or HBO optioning a pilot from Issa Rae, who created the hugely popular online series Awkward Black Girl. WS: What other opportunities are you seeing in the digital world? FROT-COUTAZ: On-demand platforms are growing, and there are more commissioning opportunities in this space. We always look for opportunities to mine our archive in new ways. For example, our U.S. digital studio Tiny Riot! has recently launched a YouTube channel called Buzzr which features the hottest YouTube stars re-creating some of our classic game shows. It’s a great way of extending our back catalogue to new platforms and new audiences.

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placement, social media and second-screen integrations, experiential programs and more. Brands want their products to be part of great stories, and we’re able to integrate them into what we already create. WS: What growth areas do you see in the next 12 to 24 months? FROT-COUTAZ: We’ll see a rise in original content being commissioned by on-demand platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime. And, of course, we’ll see digital continue to grow. By that I mean a rise in original digital content being produced for online first, and the continued rise of online talent. There will be more examples of digital IP and talent moving across platforms, and indeed great stories and talent will become increasingly platform agnostic. The next 12 to 24 months will see the industry addressing the challenge of finding a longer-term viable economic model for digital. For more from Cecile Frot-Coutaz, see page 194.

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BRIAN ROBBINS AwesomenessTV WS: What kinds of talent are you finding and working with? ROBBINS: There is so much exciting talent coming up, and we are finding them on multiple platforms. Look at Cameron Dallas. He built up a following through Vine and then YouTube, and we put him in a movie, Expelled, that debuted at number one on iTunes. WS: What benefits can AwesomenessTV derive from Hearst? ROBBINS: Working with them will enable us to broaden our audience and create new content channels. And they have great subscription video-on-demand technology that we now have access to.

Brian Robbins started his career in entertainment as an actor and went on to produce and direct tween and teen series and movies. Working with this demo he noticed the power of YouTube to attract young people as viewers and creators of content. He launched the YouTube channel AwesomenessTV, whose reach attracted investments from DreamWorks Animation and Hearst Corporation. He continues to create multiplatform content and to crosspollinate talent between linear and digital channels. WS: When did you first start noticing the talent and content on YouTube? ROBBINS: My first experience with YouTube talent was a meeting my agents set up for me with Lucas Cruikshank, a teenager whose YouTube channel was the first to get more than 1 million followers. It was built around a character he had created called Fred. I had never heard of him, but I went home that night and asked my sons and their friends if they had ever heard of Fred. They all knew him, and when I asked if they would be interested in seeing him in a movie, the answer was an emphatic “Yes!” As a result, I did something I had never done before—I financed and produced the movie myself. WS: Is what is taking place on YouTube similar to what was happening in cable 25 years ago? ROBBINS: I believe the ESPNs and CNNs and MTVs and Nickelodeons of tomorrow will come out of this ecosystem even faster than I thought possible.

WS: What other collaborations are in store? ROBBINS: We have so many projects in the works. That’s the great thing about incubating material online. We get to experiment, and the

ROBBINS: I don’t think traditional TV is going away. As a matter of fact, more people watch TV today than ever before. They just watch it differently. So we’re filling a service for a certain audience. More than half our views are mobile. It’s all shortform, snackable content. If you’re going to watch an hour of television, or even a half hour, you still want to lean back, watch it in your living room, watch it the way people watch traditional TV. But our stuff can be watched on a school bus, while you’re waiting at the doctor’s office, and in between studying or doing your homework. You can fill these voids that we now have in our lives more than ever. There’s a lot of waiting time, and we’re filling the waiting time. WS: What is your advice to content creators producing programming for the Millennials?

Amassing some 800 million views per month, AwesomenessTV has become the authority on serving youth audiences. cost of failure isn’t high. We don’t hold “development meetings.” We have “making stuff” meetings. WS: What plans do you have for international expansion? ROBBINS: We already enjoy a large global audience since a significant portion of the AwesomenessTV channel subscribers are international. We definitely plan to expand our international footprint. WS: What have you learned about the way tweens watch content? ROBBINS: Kids are demanding ever more available content and they are watching it on multiple devices in short spurts. They have the appetite and time to consume a lot of content but they want it delivered when and where they want to watch it. WS: As more and more viewing takes place online, what happens to the traditional linear model of television?

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ROBBINS: You have to be authentic. They can smell insincerity a mile away. I think the one problem traditional broadcasters have had is that they only make a couple of shows. Think about the slate at Cartoon Network or Nick or Disney: it’s a handful of shows, and they repeat a lot. In this world where you have so much choice, why do you have to watch something that you’ve seen ten times? These kids have both the appetite and the time to consume a ton of content. WS: How do you think their viewing habits will change the way talent is found, and even how content is distributed in the future? ROBBINS: This generation is creating content in addition to consuming it, so that’s making a big difference in the way we discover talent. As for the future, the safest bet is that we’ll be talking about some new distribution platform that none of us ever dreamed about. So we will just keep creating great content so that we can take advantage of all the available distribution opportunities, now and in the future.

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DAVID ATTENBOROUGH Documentary Filmmaker ter. But one of the most mind-blowing advances is in picture quality. The programs we made in the ’50s were on tiny screens, and even on those the quality was poor, but now with 4K and 5K you can project the picture on a screen the size of a building and the quality and detail is breathtaking.

With his signature melodious voice, Sir David Attenborough has been transmitting his unwavering excitement about the natural world to generations of viewers. First with the Zoo Quest series in the 1950s, followed by a constant flow of visually stunning programs, including The Private Life of Plants, Planet Earth and, most recently, David Attenborough’s Great Barrier Reef, he has always displayed an insatiable curiosity and an eagerness to use the latest technology in his explorations of habitats, animal behavior and the minutia of the plant kingdom. WS: Would you give some examples of what filming was like in the 1960s and 1970s and how cameras, lenses and other filming equipment have improved over the years? ATTENBOROUGH: Filming equipment has improved beyond measure in the last 50 years. [Decades ago,] it was two of us and a 16mm camera, which we took turns using in order to film. Linking sound with what we had recorded was impossible, so I only spoke to the camera in a studio, filmed much later. Now we have stunning macro cameras to capture the smallest, otherwise imperceptible, movements. We have an octocopter, a remote-controlled drone, with which you can film aerials that would have previously been impossible with a helicop-

WS: How do you envision documentary filmmaking evolving in the near future? What more will technology offer? ATTENBOROUGH: A new evolution in filmmaking is the rise of virtual reality (VR). VR presents both an exciting challenge for filmmakers and the opportunity for viewers to experience the world in a way like never before. It offers the observer the chance to be in remarkable places around the world, it can give global audiences the ability to dive into the Great

their first use on the Great Barrier Reef, for the forthcoming BBC One series. WS: What did you want to explore this time that you couldn’t the first time? ATTENBOROUGH: Using the Triton submersible we were able to explore down to extreme depths of over 300 meters. In fact, the sub operator told me that the three of us—myself, the operator, and Paul Williams, the cameraman—have now been deeper than anybody else on the Great Barrier Reef. Submersibles such as this allow scientists to explore and study ecosystems that were previously unknown, and what is being discovered is invariably extraordinary. They are finding new species, and rediscovering species of coral, living at depth, previously thought to have gone extinct due to climate change.

David Attenborough has embraced every new technology available to filmmakers, from the dawn of color TV to HD, 3D and, now, rich-media apps. Barrier Reef and experience the wonders for themselves. If coupled with entertaining and immersive stories it could be very compelling. Having seen a few examples myself, I can say that it is a wonderful experience. WS: You recently returned to the Great Barrier Reef. What new tools does technology provide to help you film and explore that habitat? ATTENBOROUGH: Ways in which one can explore the reef have evolved, and are still evolving, remarkably quickly. When I first visited the Great Barrier Reef, in 1957, we were able to explore the reef using the Aqua Lung [the first scuba-diving equipment], which was truly revolutionary, and allowed us to get closer to these organisms than ever before. In the span of a lifetime we are now able to go to depths previously thought impossible using Triton submersibles. I was given the great privilege of using one of these Triton submersibles, on what was

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WS: This is your tenth project with Atlantic Productions. Have you developed a kind of shorthand or comfort zone working with Anthony Geffen and his team? Why is this beneficial to the programs you produce together? ATTENBOROUGH: Anthony has more energy than anyone I have ever known, and his big vision has allowed us to make ten ambitious projects around the world over the last six years. We both wanted to find new ways of telling natural-history stories in 2D, 3D, and for giant screens and apps. To do this, Anthony has had to push the development of the latest technology, including camera systems and extraordinary computer graphics from Atlantic’s CGI company, ZOO VFX. Anthony and Atlantic have also managed to build teams that have helped us to push boundaries with each successive project. For more from David Attenborough, see page 424.

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JASON SILVA Futurist

A media artist, philosopher and futurist, Jason Silva spends a lot of time thinking about technological innovation and its impact on the future of humanity. His popular Shots of Awe YouTube videos have earned Silva—who also hosts National Geographic Channel’s global hit Brain Games—the ear of moguls like Richard Branson and tech giants such as Google. Silva shares how his online show emerged from his observations of the changes in the media landscape and offers up predictions on how we’ll be accessing content in the not-too-distant future. WS: What led you to create Shots of Awe, your online video series? SILVA: I wanted to create epiphany bombs, basically. I went to school for philosophy and film. I stay up late thinking about big ideas. I read dense, cerebral books about philosophy and artificial intelligence and the future of the human race. I’m a total geek filmmakerphilosopher at heart. Shots of Awe was birthed from people watching content on their mobile devices, from people having increased ADD [attention deficit disorder] because there are so many things competing for their attention. I felt that something that was short form, yet powerful and cinematic, could be a new art form. They are philosophical espresso shots, hyper-dense monologues about big ideas, edited like movie trailers. People like Ron Howard have become fans. Richard Branson has blogged about my videos. I’ve gotten to keynote at Google and

Intel and IBM and Electronic Arts and Cannes Lions, all over the world, on the back of those videos. Certainly it helps that I’m also the host of an Emmy-nominated series, but a lot of times the people who are booking me [for speaking engagements] have been forwarded a Shots of Awe video. Then they do more research and discover everything else, including Brain Games. It usually starts with one of these little video pills in an inbox somewhere. We have close to 20 million views now, 200,000 subscribers. I just got back from speaking at Richard Branson’s Necker Island to a bunch of entrepreneurs about creativity and technology, so those videos continue to be a source of inspiration for people around the world. And they’re a nice counterpoint [to Brain Games]. It’s a multiscreen experience. You can watch me on Brain Games, and then if you want to go deeper into a certain rabbit hole you can find Shots of Awe on YouTube.

tent have an intensity, to compensate for the lack of real estate. Content will always adapt to its constraints. IMAX has space, so you’ll adjust your storytelling quality because they have screen real estate. YouTube videos have smaller-screen real estate, so you have to adjust the way you tell a story. I’m fascinated by certain things working on certain platforms and certain screen sizes. WS: Kids today are consuming as much content on their phones and tablets as they are on the traditional TV set, if not more. What kind of content landscape do you see them living in 10, 20 years from now? SILVA: They’re going to live in an on-demand content landscape where all the screens will be connected and synchronized. They’ll walk into their house and the sensor on their phone will connect to the TV and whatever they were watching will pop up on their TV screen auto-

One of the web’s most-buzzed-about personalities, Jason Silva hosts his popular online series Shots of Awe on the YouTube channel TestTube. WS: What excites you about how technology is reshaping the way we consume media today? SILVA: I’m particularly excited about virtual reality. Something like Oculus Rift [a new virtual-reality headset] has the capability to create a sense of presence when you consume media. You’re able to amplify one of content’s unique capacities, which is [that it can be] an engine of empathy. Why do movies work so well? Because movies are intersubjective technologies that allow you to inhabit another mind, to enter the subjective world of another character. That is what empathy is—to inhabit someone else’s perspective and make you more humble and kind because of that. The United Nations recently released their very first virtual-reality short film, from a Syrian refugee camp. People who put on the Oculus Rift goggles felt like they were there. Making content in the short-form space, I’m dealing with smaller-screen real estate. Watching content on an iPhone is less immersive than in a movie theater and certainly less than in virtual reality. That has forced me to make the con-

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matically and continue the story. Recommendation engines and the contextual computing revolution are going to make it so that you’ll have this sense of serendipity from a user experience. So everything that’s being suggested to you is so on point with what you’re into that it’s just going to be astounding. Everything that pops into your attention span is going to blow your mind. It’s going to lead to deeper and deeper mediated engagement. There are bigger questions about whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. But personally, I don’t mind being mediated. We’re mediated by language; we’re mediated by culture; we’re mediated by religion; we’re mediated by everything that surrounds us. Everything we design is designing us back. I think the feedback loop is the new metaphor for understanding humanity. I want to participate in those feedback loops by making sure that I’m outputting the best possible media that provides the best possible engagement and takeaway. For more from Jason Silva, see page 428.

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THE MAGAZINE OF INTERNATIONAL MEDIA • APRIL 2015

www.worldscreen.com

ANNIVERSARY REPORT

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BY ANNA CARUGATI

30 Years of World Screen Five years ago, after publishing our Silver Edition, which marked the 25th anniversary of World Screen, part of me wondered how we could possibly top all that we had already accomplished—what with so many in-depth interviews with heads of media companies, programming and channel executives, showrunners and actors. But after our celebration at MIPTV 2010, we buckled down and redoubled our efforts so we could continue to offer our readers online and in print a window to the most important movers, shakers, decision-makers, creatives and even disruptors in media. The fact that the media business has changed more in the last five years than in the previous 50 has been a fortuitous coincidence for us. To mark our 30th anniversary, I collected quotes from interviews we have done in the last five years and arranged them in a sequence that offers a narrative about the developments in programming for the small screen. This special 30th Anniversary report is divided into three sections. In The View from the Top, presidents and CEOs of major media companies explain some of the trends in the content business and look ahead to what’s next. Then, through the words of top programming executives and showrunners, we learn about this new age of Auteur Television and the migration of feature-film talent to the small screen. We then focus on our Top 10 list of dramas and let executives, showrunners and actors describe the shows that have created the most buzz, garnered the highest ratings or won the most awards. I would like to emphasize that what is compiled in this report is the fruit of the labors of many people, certainly not just my own. Mansha Daswani and Kristin Brzoznowski conducted many of the interviews. Victor Cuevas adds beauty and visual clarity with his layouts. And Ricardo Guise acts a bit like the North Star, offering direction when we reporters and editors get a little lost in the excitement and minutiae of our interviews. Lastly, I would be terribly remiss if I didn’t thank the executives, producers, distributors, showrunners and actors—and their respective publicists and PR representatives—who place their trust in us and give so generously of their time. 4/15 World Screen 141

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The View from the Top Over the last five years, technology and online services have seemingly colluded to give consumers more and more ways to watch what they want when they want. As a consequence, media executives have had to grapple with the resulting disruption of the business by offering content on multiple platforms, understanding its value and monetizing it properly. Successful executives are also constantly looking ahead, trying to anticipate consumers’ needs and behaviors, ready to serve them with the right content and products. nal content that frankly has nothing to do with CBS content. So overall you could say CBS is trying, as we do on our network and on Showtime, to put premium content in as many available places as people can get it, and the content can come from CBS or it can come from elsewhere as well.

JOSH SAPAN, PRESIDENT & CEO, AMC NETWORKS, 2011:

LESLIE MOONVES, PRESIDENT & CEO, CBS CORPORATION, 2011: The strategy has been, how do we best maximize the content that is currently on the CBS network or Showtime, which is also one of our assets, and make it available either as full episodes or some offshoot of those shows? TV.com is also a social-media site for commenting on television shows. At the same time, with sites like CNET and the games site, we want to offer origi-

If we first look at cable on demand, which is content on a cable system that subscribers can access, what you see in statistics from cable operators is that the use of on-demand as opposed to linear viewing increases by the day…a seismic shift is taking place. You particularly see it among younger people. The trend is moving away from linear schedules— television when it’s assigned—toward television when you want it. And I think that the next generation will view TV a lot more in terms of timing and time frame, like they view the web. That is to say, they won’t first think when it’s on, they will first think of when they want it and make an assumption that it will be there when they want it. Linear television scheduling is still important today in terms of the economic construct, but in the broader mix of DVRs and authentication and multiplatform—with the exception of live events—it will increasingly become a less important construct.

TED SARANDOS, CHIEF CONTENT OFFICER, NETFLIX, 2011: I think that people should not be threatened by Netflix, they should embrace it and be excited about it. The revenue opportunity that will come from taking

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local content global is much greater than the local threat will be. We very actively don’t get into the crosshairs of cable operators, because we think that the thing that people most value on television is live events and sports, and I’ve come to that conclusion because that’s what people pay the most for and that’s what has the highest ratings. So we are completely out of that business—we don’t pursue sports licenses, we don’t do American Idol or The X Factor in any country. I’m not into results-oriented shows, I really am looking for long shelflife content. So we stay out of the thing that’s most valuable to most suppliers, which keeps the existing food chain pretty stable. What we do is offer a different way to monetize that content and it’s differentially attractive to consumers, and we price it low enough that you don’t have to cancel or get rid of anything else to afford it. It’s bringing the efficiencies of the internet to an otherwise slightly inefficient market and actually expanding the revenue for everybody and more importantly growing consumer excitement for content. I grew up a complete TV nerd—I knew all the character’s names, I knew what was going on, I was excited about the fall season. Now I find that people have no relationship to content whatsoever because there’s so much clutter in the market that you’re unlikely to find something that you love. We really focus on finding something that you’ll love.

ADAM CROZIER, CHIEF EXECUTIVE, ITV, 2012: Television has been remarkably resilient and, if anything, has grown over the last few years, and social media is driving

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that—ITV has something like 20 million Facebook likes. There is fantastic opportunity in the fact that people can now watch TV in places they could never watch before: sitting on a train or a bus, in the back of a car. People can get access to simultaneous schedules when they are watching on iPads or Android. And increasingly, we will be offering consumers the opportunity to access our archives as well, which opens up new revenue opportunities. The really big thing here is that television has a future where it doesn’t just reach mass audiences on linear TV, but also those watching on connected TVs. That represents a wonderful opportunity for us, but I don’t ever see it taking over from traditional television. If you get your programming right and you’ve got great, must-see programs, then linear TV will survive and prosper.

JEFFREY BEWKES, CHAIRMAN & CEO, TIME WARNER, 2011: Linear channels have already become branded environments, so when you go to HBO or TNT or MTV you know what kind of programming you will get. What branded linear channels

have to do is take the programming that makes them a branded environment—a clear voice—and offer it on demand. There is one channel that has already done that, and that is HBO. It’s been on demand in the U.S. now for ten years and has very high usage of on-demand viewing. Depending on the show, upwards of 30 to 50 percent of the viewing on HBO is on demand. There is no reason that the same thing could not happen to CNN or MTV or NBC or any other channel. If you like the channel and like the shows, and you have the shows on demand, you’ll tend to watch them when you want to watch them.

It’s a very complex equation, because we all have a pretty good poster boy for how not to do it, and that’s the music business. They did everything they could to avoid new business models, and it’s taken away 50 to 60 percent of their business, probably on a permanent basis. That’s a pretty good cautionary tale—don’t ignore the new models. On the other hand, don’t commit suicide. These are very lucrative existing businesses, and you certainly don’t want to encourage their demise. You have to be very close to consumers, you have to experiment, and you have to look for ways that you think are likely to build new businesses.

JON FELTHEIMER, CO-CHAIRMAN & CEO, LIONSGATE, 2011:

PHILIPPE DAUMAN, PRESIDENT & CEO, VIACOM, 2013:

Content creation drives the whole value chain. You take something that reaches an audience and has long-lasting value and then you build a distribution pattern and a business model around it. You can’t create a deal and then look for content that fits the deal. Fragmentation within the digital marketplace fits our business model of targeting large niche audiences, and that has changed the game for us. A lot of shows, particularly cable and paytelevision shows, can generate really significant profits in a digital world by aggregating lots of revenue from lots of platforms without attracting the tens of millions of eyeballs that broadcastnetwork shows do. A show like Mad Men, whose loyal audience isn’t that broad but is really deep and continues to increase on a long-term basis, can air on multiple platforms over a long period of time and become a very, very valuable franchise.

We may have learned a little something from what happened to the music industry in some respects, and when appropriate, we’re cautious about what relationships we enter into as we get into new distribution platforms. We are very welcoming of new ways to reach consumers—it’s the lifeblood of our business—but we do it in a way that is consistent with our overall business objectives. We try to give consumers more, in different ways, but we do it in a way that also preserves the underlying economics of our companies, which, in turn, allows us to make better and better content. If you look at video content in general, the variety and quality keep going up. Yes, there is a lot of variety in music, but it’s always a three- or four-minute song, whereas because the budgets in television are so huge, there are cinematic-quality television shows. And each of our networks spends more every year. We have increased our investment in programming every year over the last several years, including during the recession. We cut costs everywhere we could, but not on the content part. When you take the cumulative impact of all the companies investing in content, there is more and more choice, not just more types of shows, and the quality keeps going up.

PETER CHERNIN, CHAIRMAN & CEO, THE CHERNIN GROUP, 2012: [Digital platforms are] an extraordinarily complicated and challenging issue…. One of the things I always used to say when I was running News Corp. was that our job isn’t to protect things, because ultimately you can’t protect them. Our job is to do the best possible job we can in maximizing the amount of revenue we get out of the existing businesses. But at that same time we need to build new business models faster as the old ones may or may not decay.

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GUILLAUME DE POSCH, CO-CEO, RTL GROUP, 2013: Digital is important for the whole of RTL Group. FremantleMedia is a content creator, and can therefore be

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The even bigger challenge is to establish and develop the right business models, so that in the future it really won’t make a difference, in financial terms, what devices and services viewers watch our content on. To achieve this, we also have to add a new skill set to our group: technology. We are great at producing content, at scheduling and selling TV commercials, but state-ofthe-art technology is a key driver for our digital businesses, from online advertising sales to audience measurement and video recommendations.

DAVID ZASLAV, PRESIDENT & CEO, DISCOVERY COMMUNICATIONS, 2014:

platform neutral. Bare in mind that certain criteria need to be met when you are doing business with all platforms: What level of exclusivity do you grant? What price do you receive for your show? How protected is your show from a copyright point of view? What kind of marketing does the platform offer? All these questions are weighed by FremantleMedia in their decisions regarding whether to be on one channel or another.

ANKE SCHÄFERKORDT, CO-CEO, RTL GROUP, 2014: Nonlinear TV services have clearly increased the complexity of the TV business: you can watch programs for free, financed by advertising. You can pay per view for a single episode or buy a season pass. Or you can pay a monthly subscription fee to get an “all you can watch” TV menu. In four key European countries—Germany, the U.K., France and the Netherlands—subscriptionbased VOD revenues grew by 108 percent in 2013 alone. The consequence: if possible, we have to secure as many rights as possible to exploit content across all platforms and services.

It is a great time to be in the content business, especially for a company like Discovery, because we own most of the rights to everything we produce. As viewers seek to consume content on new platforms and devices, it creates more demand from distributors for those rights and more opportunities for Discovery to gain additional value for that content. TV Everywhere is an attractive solution for both content providers and distributors, because it preserves the traditional cable model and bundle. For programmers, it is measurable, so we can earn advertising revenue for viewers who are watching on mobile devices and tablets. For distributors, it is authenticated, so viewers need a cable subscription to view content.

JEFFREY KATZENBERG, CEO & DIRECTOR, DREAMWORKS ANIMATION, 2013: There is a whole new platform that is very quickly revealing itself as a new form of engagement for audiences. Here is the way I would explain it. In the 1950s, television came along and it filled these very big gaps that existed in all our lives, meaning, what do you do before you go to school, before you go to work, while a housewife is doing chores around the house, coming home after work, after dinnertime, on weekends? This incredible thing called television—the linear experience—filled these gaps. Six and a half hours a day, that is what the average American is spending watching television—it’s kind of astounding. Then about four or five years ago, a confluence of things happened that started to reveal that in addition to these gaps that people have in their lives, they

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also have spaces—the in-betweens. The in-between is when you are waiting for an appointment. Or when you’re on a bus going to your job. Or you are waiting for a friend outside a store. Or you arrive early to a dinner at a restaurant. In your day, there is an amazing amount of inbetween moments. Suddenly a portable device comes along that allows you to fill those in-between moments…. This is a very fast evolution that is driven by the device itself. Today, we have in our hands devices that can deliver rich media instantly. Five years ago that did not exist. As these devices got smarter and smarter, so became the quality of what you could do in these spaces. Today, and this is where AwesomenessTV comes along, and what Brian Robbins calls “bits, bytes and snacks,” which are filling this incredible place of opportunity. I’ll say something certainly bold, it may turn out to be stupid, but I’ll say it: five years from now, the in-between moments that we have in our lives—and the smartphone is going to expand what we can do in those moments—are going to be as valuable as the gaps. Because our lives are getting filled up with many more things every day, we will have more in-between times than gaps, and in a handful of years the value of that in-between time will be as valuable as what we call television today…. I think people are going to be surprised by what starts to happen in these spaces. I will not be surprised if three or four years from now there will be a series as compelling and as exciting to me as Homeland is, and for which I get a five-minute episode every day, and pay for it. If somebody could tell me that starting next year there will be another season of Breaking Bad but it’s going to be in snacks rather than in full meals— every day five days a week, I’ll get a fiveminute serial on Breaking Bad—I would be there.

JOSH SAPAN, PRESIDENT & CEO, AMC NETWORKS, 2014: There has been an increase in viewership and utilization of off-linear services, whether it’s cable on demand, satellite on demand, or internet subscription video services, inasmuch as they have the shows, which from us is generally a year after they air. What is curious is that we have seen our linear ratings escalate rather dramatically, while the utilization or consumption of on-demand has increased at the same time.

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Perhaps the most notable example of that is Breaking Bad, which in season one was doing a little over 1 million viewers, and by the time season five aired, the last episode did more than 10 million viewers. That is an interesting phenomenon because there is generally an intuitive assumption that there is a certain number of viewers and if they see it in one place, they won’t see it in the other place. That historically has been a bit of a media paradigm: if you window material and you put it here first, then people won’t watch it there, second, as much…and what we are seeing is somewhat of the inverse, which is that the sampling of shows on the various on-demand platforms, cable, satellite, transactional (by which people often mean iTunes, rented or subscription), is exposing more people to shows like Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead and Mad Men on AMC…and [they] are then coming back in greater numbers to the show on linear. Whereas one may have conjectured that linear was under terrible pressure, in fact, for the shows that are really popular on demand, it has boosted their importance and appeal on linear, if they have the right genetics. I would describe those genetics as being, most importantly, timeliness and urgency.

JAMES MURDOCH, CO-COO, 21ST CENTURY FOX, 2014: We look at the channel business generally as an engine for creating content and programming. Up until now the best way to get a lot of choice and quality in front of customers has been to bundle linear channels together, because that’s the way the technology works. Increasingly, customers are enjoying streaming programming and having more ondemand viewing, and for us that’s really not that different; it’s actually a really great product to make. We are pushing ahead very hard on our over-the-top services, with our investment in Hulu, [and] our authenticated nonlinear ser vices. For example, the FXNOW app, an authenticated app in the U.S., is a tremendous product for the FX brand, which stands for unique quality television programming. The FXNOW app offers on-demand viewing of series, full series stacks in many cases. It’s a great product, which really resonates with customers. We think that the channel business, generally speaking, will move

increasingly to streaming services, and that’s why it’s so important for us to have a number of brands that really stand for something and are destinations where people in an on-demand environment can find programming they love. There is no question that the live viewing of sports is very unique and is something that drives a lot of value for some of these brands. But it’s not a defensive game, it’s more about how you can make products for customers that really work, that deliver the programming that they are going to love, in the easiest way possible. Increasingly, that’s streaming services, and that’s why we are very involved in that marketplace.

TONY HALL, DIRECTOR-GENERAL, BBC, 2014: Linear channels still have a long life ahead of them. For all the success of catch-up services, all the facts show that people still enjoy watching TV live and together. TV channels are, in a way, social media in the true sense of the term. When England played Italy in the World Cup earlier this year, BBC One had an audience of more than 15 million at nearly midnight. This August more than 2 million Scots (out of a population of 5.3 million) watched the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. It was the third-bestperforming program in Scotland since 2001—showing that the power of television to bring people together around big national events is undiminished. In fact, we are seeing a new trend starting—perhaps unexpectedly. There are more big events than a few years ago, and those big events are getting bigger. So in the future, we will need to find the right blend of engaging, wellscheduled linear channels and distinctive on-demand content, so that everyone feels they are getting something from the BBC.

NANCY DUBUC, PRESIDENT & CEO, A+E NETWORKS, 2014: We work hard to constantly stay aware and be prepared for what’s next in technology and the ways our audience consumes content. But we are a content company. Period. That’s the part we control. So for us, remaining relevant requires taking the insights we glean from our tech-savvy audience and tailoring our content accordingly.

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We want every experience with our brands, our shows and our characters to entertain and delight—and that means something slightly different on each platform. So part of our creative process is to think through delivering a great experience on each one.

LESLIE MOONVES, PRESIDENT & CEO, CBS CORPORATION, 2014: The number of people who are watching on linear channels is still close to 75 percent of the total viewership. They are still watching shows at the time they are on. But as the world changes, we are prepared for the shifting schedule. Nielsen is becoming more sophisticated in counting time-shifted viewers and audiences on all platforms. We are fully prepared, so that as more people watch a show three days or seven days after it airs, or on CBS.com, they will be counted, and that’s fine with us. The back end becomes as important as, if not more important than, the front end. And as viewers are changing their habits, it is still about having the best content, and that’s all we care about. How they watch it, when they watch it, as long as it’s counted, it’s fine with us.

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Auteur Television Showrunners and programming executives point to The Sopranos as the show that changed the course of television drama. It ushered in an era of flawed, complex characters, likable antiheroes and sophisticated serialized storytelling. This new creative environment, which rewards auteur television, has attracted countless feature-film writers, actors and directors. They are finding the nuanced characterdriven storytelling on the small screen more satisfying than the many franchise movies and sequels being produced in Hollywood. RICHARD PLEPLER, CO-PRESIDENT, HBO, 2012: The Sopranos was of course a transcendent piece of popular entertainment, but we are not looking to ever find the next Sopranos—there is no such thing. What we are looking for always is the next high-quality piece of programming, and we believe, with gratitude, that Boardwalk Empire represents that, Game of Thrones represents that, Luck represents that and

True Blood represents that. Aaron Sorkin’s new show The Newsroom, Armando Iannucci’s new show called Veep, Lena Dunham’s new show called Girls, these are all, in our opinion, in the tradition of HBO highquality programming. That is what we are selling. It’s very important that you define success correctly every day. And there is always the temptation to define success as your last success. And the truth is that success is really about original voices. And you never know when that original voice is going to come in the door. So you need to have a culture which is responsive and open to those original voices.

MICHAEL LOMBARDO, PRESIDENT OF PROGRAMMING, HBO, 2012: It’s not correct to say we don’t care at all about ratings. It is certainly one of the things we look at. You want to know that your show is connecting with some group. I don’t think we’re making decisions based solely on the number of eyeballs. What we are looking for is: Does the show have places to go creatively? Are there places the creator still wants to take us that still feel vital and interesting? And it’s very important to us that the shows feel like there is passionate engagement by the consumer. Our shows don’t have to be everyone’s favorite, but they better be somebody’s favorite. When someone is making a decision every month, whether to continue paying for HBO, there has to be something on our service that they just can’t imagine not having every month.

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For some people that show is a miniseries like Mildred Pierce, an original film like Too Big to Fail, boxing or series like True Blood and Game of Thrones.

JOHN LANDGRAF, CEO, FX NETWORKS, 2013: Part of what I realized is that when you look at the explosion of quality programming that has come out of America in the past decade, particularly since The Sopranos initially premiered on HBO, and then a couple of years later, when The Shield premiered on FX, we really liberated storytellers. Before that, storytellers either had to fit their ideas into a two- or three-hour film, or had to make a series that would go 22 episodes a year and hopefully make well in excess of 100 episodes. That really limited the number of subjects and types of approaches one could take to a series. When The Sopranos came along, all of a sudden you could do a 13-episodea-year series that had continuity and was essentially a 90-hour movie told over seven years. It just exploded and opened a massive door to quality. I could name so many amazing series that came out of that. While we absolutely are still going to continue to make what I call these 90-hour movies that are essentially seven-year and 13episode television series (and hopefully Justified will go the distance and Sons of Anarchy will go the distance and The Americans will go many years), I really believe there are all kinds of great stories that we are not telling that optimally should be told, not in two hours and not in 90 hours but in 10 or

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20 hours or 30 hours. So, for example, we’ve made a deal for a show called The Strain with noted director Guillermo del Toro. When Guillermo came in and pitched it, it was based on a trilogy of books that he and his coauthor Chuck Hogan had written. As he said, this will either be three, four or five seasons, but it won’t be two, and it won’t be six or seven. It will be somewhere between 39 and 65 episodes. When I read the books I thought, He’s definitely right, we’d have to compact it to do fewer, and we’d have to stretch it to do more. So part of what we realized is we really need to figure out how to adapt our business models to create even more flexibility in terms of the types of choices that storytellers make. The more we can figure out the business model around a story that is good, the better the content that we are going to get.

CHRIS ALBRECHT, CEO, STARZ, 2014: [The straight-to-series order] is one of the things that people are copying from us. It’s what Netflix is doing. It’s what HBO just did with True

Detective. People are now realizing that the straight-to-series order is not unusual, it’s a viable option when they are thinking about how to get in business with people. We’ve learned how difficult it is, especially with these big serialized dramas, to just go right into production without a pilot, so we’ve been spending more money in the development process. If we get a script and we like it, we’ll then put together a small writers’ room. We will then break out the entire season and a few episodes so we really are much more prepared when we go into production. By getting as much of the writing done, you have a better chance of understanding where the series is going. Even though that doesn’t solve all of the issues, such as, Do I have the right actor in the right role? Is my cinematographer shooting it the way that I hoped he would? Those are a few of the things you get to see when you do a pilot. We are getting better at anticipating the challenges of working without a pilot. When I was at HBO we didn’t do a pilot for Rome. We went right to Rome and shot it and looked at the first three episodes and went, Oh oh! This isn’t what we were hoping for! But we had so much money we went back and reshot it. The days of spending that kind of money are over.

CARLTON CUSE, SHOWRUNNER, THE STRAIN, 2014: [With Lost we] ended up violating a lot of rules of television that we were told were inviolable: we had a complicated mythology, we didn’t make a lowest-common-denominator show, it required that you sit forward and pay attention, it wasn’t spoon-fed to you. There was intentional ambiguity, which was something that really intrigued me as a storyteller…. The lesson that came out of Lost was that you could subvert expectations and that in subverting those expectations you give an energy to your show that would really engage an audience. And the legacy of that can be seen on a show like Game of Thrones. The surprising and unexpected death of major characters is something that we did on Lost, and they have taken the mantle of that and run with it very successfully. In

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television the idea of complicated characters that are neither good nor bad is something we were on the forefront of in network television. We could take risks and be commensurately rewarded by an audience embracing our show for all the things that were ultimately novel about it.

RYAN MURPHY, SHOWRUNNER, AMERICAN HORROR STORY, 2014: When I got Popular on the air in 1999, the landscape had started to change. Things had started to move. There was Steven Bochco, and David E. Kelley, and David Chase was in the middle of his great success on The Sopranos. But there was no real cable like there is today, so broadcastnetwork executives had a lot more power to dictate rules and say, You have to do this note or we’re not airing your show, or, You’re fired. I remember the network executives on Popular saying some of the most appalling things about women, about gay people, about sexuality, just because they were afraid. They were afraid of protests. They were afraid of losing advertisers, and I would try and fight them the best I could. I didn’t win all those battles. Right around when Nip/Tuck started, that’s when things started to change and that’s when the term “showrunner” came in. That began in the early 2000s, the rise of auteur television, and that was about a vision and that vision is everything. It’s respected and admired and listened to more than it ever was before. Now I don’t really get notes from executives. I get this amazing thing—I get brilliant ideas from them. They say, Look, this is your show and you’re going to do what you want to do and we have empowered you and believe in you, but what if we tried this, or what if we tried that? And that is what showrunners are lucky enough to do now. It feels more creative, and it’s about a singular voice. The landscape of how notes are given has changed. And now [network executives] want you to push the envelope; now they want you to be more daring. Back then, forget it, it was not in the water, at least not in my experience. There is much more

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freedom now. Different voices are more celebrated than ever before, because with a strong voice comes success and ratings. People are learning that. The 18th watered-down sitcom about a family living in New York, nobody wants to watch that anymore. They used to, but I think people are changing and we are in the midst of a great revolution.

DAVID SHORE, SHOWRUNNER, BATTLE CREEK, 2014: The division between cable and network scares me a little bit because, look, [with House] I couldn’t show nudity on FOX, I couldn’t swear and I had to come in at exactly 42 minutes and 43 seconds, or something like that. In terms of the topics I explored, there was never a time when they said no. And I worry that the networks are running away from shows they think are cable shows. Good TV is good TV. Good storytelling is good storytelling. And a show like NYPD Blue, which was just a great, great show, probably wouldn’t be put on a network today. There’s no reason it shouldn’t be. Even going back to a show like All in the Family, [if it were pitched to] a network today. It worries me, this division we constantly talk about, because I don’t think there needs to be such a division.

KEVIN BACON, ACTOR, THE FOLLOWING, 2013: I had been looking for about three or four years [to do episodic TV]. I had different layers of snobbiness and resistance to the whole idea, based on the fact that when I started out as an actor, I had done a soap opera, and my attitude was, once you say goodbye to television you don’t go back unless things are really not going well for you. That’s an antiquated notion of the industry based on the late ’70s, which is when I started. Then I saw Kyra’s experience on The Closer [Kyra Sedgwick, Bacon’s wife, starred in the TNT cable drama] and I started to adjust my thinking about it. We were at the dawn of a new age of television, going back to The Wire and The Sopranos and all these television shows that were having such a major

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impact on popular culture. The writing was so good and the performances were so exceptional that I started to say, Hey, maybe I should be part of that. So I threw my hat in the ring and we started this search to find something that would be cool, and that involved also developing things. I had a couple of projects in development. These things take time. I read one amazing script after another and was totally jazzed about the idea now of finding the right thing. I was also very resistant to the idea of network television because I felt like the schedule was going to be too long and the quality wouldn’t be as good as, say, on premium cable. Then I read The Following, and it had all the things that I was looking for.

M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN, DIRECTOR & EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, WAYWARD PINES, 2014: When you’re writing and directing your own movies, it’s a long cycle. When I’m doing my thrillers it’s probably two years, at the fastest a year and three-quarters, between movies. The last two movies I made were big CGI studio films. There were three years between [each release]. In fact, because they were big CGI movies, I didn’t have that intimacy of the art form that I thrive on. At the end of the day, the dinner table scene is my favorite scene. [Wayward Pines] allowed me to work with a battalion of actors that I wanted to work with. If I read a movie that simply doesn’t have enough parts that are fit for a whole bunch of actors I’d like to work with, well that’s another two years that I can’t work with them. My selfish goal is to tell stories that I’m interested in, in a long form on TV, and then put world-class actors in all the roles. That excites me, it motivates me…. You have to work really fast in TV. So you’re stripping away all your comforts and bad habits, especially when coming off two giant movies. The beauty of the TV show was, as we were [in production], the network and I would say, “We really love this scene,” or “This character has now blossomed, I’d love to put that moment in the pilot,” or “I need to bring this out in this character.” It was a fascinating experience, because it also taught me a kind of perma-

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nent vigilance through the process of post-production. I didn’t think of it in the traditional film format of, you prep, you shoot, that’s it, let’s see what your grade is at the end of it. You think of it as listening to the story the whole time, and you work that into how you’re making the [show]. In the movie industry, if you’re not making X, Y, Z comic-book version number ten, if you’re not interested in that or don’t fit into that dynamic, there’s not a lot of space for you. At least 40 percent of movies now are that. We’re certainly not making Terms of Endearment or Kramer vs. Kramer anymore. So there are a lot of world-class actors on the table. I think that’s what the pull of TV is right now—it’s honoring resonance. And that’s a great thing for all of us.

JON BOKENKAMP, CREATOR & EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, THE BLACKLIST, 2014:

JAMES SPADER, ACTOR, THE BLACKLIST, 2013:

I will take you back to an experience that I had in 1990 when a rather prophetic series of statements were made by one of most remarkable filmmakers of all time, Sir David Lean. Jack Lemmon—with whom I had at that point worked on a couple of occasions, although we hadn’t done Glengarry Glen Ross yet; this was 1990, we did Glengarry in 1992—invited me to come sit at his table at the AFI tribute to Sir David Lean. It was, as you would expect, a very beautiful, poignant tribute to this man for his body of work. And when it came to the time that he was going to accept the award at the end of the evening, he dedicated his entire acceptance speech to [addressing] the heads of the studios, or as he said that night, “I want to speak to you money men out there. I am very worried about where the film business is today. I don’t mind that you want to make parts one, two, three and four, but if you look at the list of the recipients of the AFI Award, all of them were trailblazers, all of them were emerging filmmakers. And if this business continues to support emerging filmmakers, the film business is going to go up and up and up. And if you don’t, we’re going to lose it all to television.” He said that in 1990. And that night nobody paid attention. And it was only nine years later that The Sopranos debuted on HBO and changed the landscape forever. Now part of what has happened in the 15 years since The Sopranos

Before I worked in television in any serious way, about 15 years ago or so, I hadn’t really thought about it, and then suddenly I was in it and I discovered what fun there was to be had in that. I like details. I like small things, and television is great for that because it can explore the smallest thing over periods of time. Very often films present a sea change, and in television it isn’t sea changes, it’s small changes that lead to something larger and I like that, I like to see that unfold over a period.

RICHARD PLEPLER, CO-PRESIDENT, HBO, 2012: Ten years ago and even five years ago, there used to be a line that talent didn’t cross—they just did movies and didn’t do anything for the smaller screen. We are seeing that certainly in movies and in series it’s all about the material. With a good script on HBO, we can have a conversation with anybody, and that is exciting.

LESLIE MOONVES, PRESIDENT & CEO, CBS CORPORATION, 2014: I think the quality of television is at an all-time high—some would argue that the quality of television is where the real power is now, even more than in feature films.

I was fascinated by TV and started watching a lot of it. After we had kids, my wife and I started nesting and watching TV rather than go to the movies. I love shows like Breaking Bad and Shameless, a lot of great character television. Over the past ten years movies have become very corporate. They have to be based on a video game or a spin-off or a franchise and have to check off all the boxes of a four-quadrant movie. It feels like television is where independent film was in the ’90s, and it seemed very exciting to me. It was something different to explore.

KEVIN SPACEY, ACTOR, HOUSE OF CARDS, 2014:

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debuted is that some remarkably brave and courageous programming came first out of HBO and then out of other networks. And the movie business has shifted, really after 1999, 2000, out of character-driven drama into more tentpole, comic-book heroes. If you are an artist, or a filmmaker, or a storyteller, where are you going to go? You are going to where the ground is very fertile, and that is television. So it makes complete sense to me that the best writers, directors, actors, producers have moved on to television, because it’s very hard to get films made, certainly out of the studios. It doesn’t mean that the independent film world isn’t functioning. But it’s very hard to raise money. It’s very hard to get a good release. It’s very hard for these films to make the money back, and that’s why I have been so fortunate as a producer to be able, while this sea change has been happening, to get a number of character-driven dramas on the big screen and have them do very, very well. Look, is it a trend? My answer is, when character-driven dramas start making money, the studios will start making them again.

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TOP 10 n the last five years since our 25th anniversary, the world of programming has been characterized, if not revolutionized, by a growing number of risk-taking executives who have paved the way for auteur televisionâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;shows in which writers and showrunners have been allowed to follow their voices and pursue their visions. This has given rise to dramas featuring lavish production values; innovative narrative techniques; fantastic and postapocalyptic worlds never before seen in prime time; and lots of complex, flawed characters, often with compromised moral compasses. The audience has reacted more than enthusiastically to this visual smorgasbord of storytellingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;watching, bingeing, tweeting, sharing, enjoying. And so have we! From the numerous interviews we conducted over the past five years with the executives, showrunners and actors we have been granted access to, we have compiled our own Top 10 list of dramas. Of course, our ranking is not an exact science, but we did take into account the shows that created the most buzz, or garnered the highest ratings, or won the most awards. What follows are quotes from the people that brought these shows to life.

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MAD MEN

Mad Men, created by Matthew Weiner, made television history by becoming the first basic-cable series to win the Primetime Emmy for outstanding drama series four years in a row. Paying as much meticulous attention to sets, props and costumes as to the complexities of human nature, this period drama brings to life the inner workings of a Madison Avenue advertising agency, and focuses on Don Draper, played by Jon Hamm, its most successful adman and ladies’ man. The show also transformed AMC from a lesser-known cable channel to a prime destination for quality programming. MATTHEW WEINER, CREATOR, 2012: The morality of the world [of these characters] is very much like our world. Part of why I am telling the story is because it is really hard to be a person. We are all trying to be moral, and we all have a kind of warped perception of what that is. Religion of any kind is based on sin and starting over, or having someone else help you start over or having it in your heart to start over. I really believe this—and I hope I am never proved wrong, because it would be shocking—but even people who we perceive clearly to be bad or evil have a reason for what they are doing. They don’t see it as a chance to do evil, they see it as paying people back, or righting a wrong, or evening the score, or controlling someone who has wronged them. I feel that Don [Draper], in particular, is always doing the right thing, that Don is moral, but it’s very situational, and these things conflict with each other. He has a good heart and is trying hard, but he really doesn’t make it a lot of times. He feels bad about it, which helps, and he looks like Jon Hamm, which helps! But he is not really on any abstract scale an ethical or moral person. But he is trying really hard, and there are people who are worse than him. That’s life. Betty Draper is really trying hard to be a good mother and to think of other people, but she is not great at it. She probably shouldn’t have been a mom and gets controlled by her vanity and becomes jealous. All these childish, embarrassing emotions that we want to hide, she has them and she expresses them. Is she a moral person?

No. It’s part of the story of the show, and it’s part of that generation. How are you going to be judged as being moral when you are sent off to kill people by the government? Murder is wrong, but it’s not if you are in a war—well that’s already very confusing, right?

very true to human beings. It’s so much about people trying to do the right thing or trying to make their way, trying to be happy. And their jobs involve selling happiness every day to the public. That against their own struggle for their own personal happiness is very interesting. I don’t consider any of the characters bad

The show that placed AMC on the map as a cable network to be reckoned with, Mad Men is often ranked as one of the greatest drama series in the history of TV. JON HAMM, DON DRAPER, 2011: No one on our show is evil. [Bert] Cooper, I think, has the most Zen approach to it. Being this sort of elder statesman of the group, he has the best perspective on things. But also he has his own flaws and issues. So, again, it’s a story about people trying to do the best they can with what they have, which is, in many ways, the American dream. Using what you have to get what you want. But it’s the wonderful irony of the whole thing—these are people whose job is to define and sell happiness. And the fact that they are, for the most part, unclear as to their own happiness is the beautiful irony. That’s what I love about the show—the fact that it really explores that irony.

ELISABETH MOSS, PEGGY OLSON, 2011: The great thing about the show is that the characters make mistakes and they do bad things. But they’re not bad people, and that’s very true to life. That’s

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people—they do very bad things, and are amoral—but that comes from being an actor, and you tend to like your character, and you’re not supposed to judge it. But I have a lot of sympathy and empathy for all these characters. And that’s a testament to the writing, and also to the acting—to people like Jon [Hamm] and [John] Slattery and Christina [Hendricks] and January [Jones], who bring that complexity and those multiple levels [to the characters they are playing] that says not just, this is a bad person, but also this is a good person, which is very true to life.

WEINER, 2012: Anyone who knows me knows this: Mad Men could not be more successful as far as I’m concerned. The idea that I got to make an episode after the pilot already exceeded my expectations! I’m not being modest. I just never expected that to happen. The other thing that anyone who knows me will tell you is that I live under pressure all the time. I am afraid of

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failing. I want the audience to like the show, and at the same time I want to challenge them. I want to do what I like. No one should live by that. If you are just pleasing yourself you are basically making something bad—[a show] is an expression, there is an interaction. I live under a lot of pressure all the time. Once in a while it will hit me— what the show means to people—and that is the pressure I feel. The more people that have this emotional interaction with it, the more I really don’t want to disappoint them. I don’t want them to suddenly point to it and say, “That was crap,” or, “I don’t like it anymore,” or, “Why did you do that?” But they don’t always know what they like, and the verbal expression of their response is not what is going on in their heart, because the truth is they keep watching it because they want to know what happens. So I feel the pressure to satisfy them. I’m accepting the fact now that with the fifth season we are becoming an older show and there is more of it behind us than there is ahead of us. I am prepared for the world to take an interest in other things as we become an older show. Novelty is always important, but the real pressure, I feel, is just the pressure I’ve always felt of, Oh God, don’t be bad, don’t be boring, don’t repeat yourself—that would

be most disappointing. If people think that we are doing the same thing we’ve always done, that would be very upsetting to me. I try very hard not to do that, and it’s really the hardest part of my job.

JOSH SAPAN, PRESIDENT & CEO, AMC NETWORKS, 2011: If there are imperatives in the world of television, they are normally found in the world of sports and great events. But there are certain dramas or TV shows that move into the spectrum of imperative—they are must-have shows. Mad Men is a must-have because of its cultural resonance and watercooler effect. It has made the channel much more valuable for cable operators, because as they carry it, they become imperative. That is very good news. Mad Men’s quality also creates an imperative because it has the effect of elevating what people think of television. On the advertising side, Mad Men has been great for us. It has actually allowed us to increase our advertising presence and be a much better and more valuable vehicle, which has rewarded us in advertising dollars, both in volume and in price. Mad Men, along with the other shows, has really made AMC a truly more potent place to be if you are an advertiser and want to make your

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products move from the shelves or from the showroom. We found that our share and volume of dollars and our diversity of advertisers, because of Mad Men and these [other] shows, have put us in a very different economic position. That is important for us because it has allowed us to fund and fuel our increase in original programming.

WEINER, 2015: I feel so lucky that we got to do something so peculiar. I think that it will be a business model in some ways, as every small basic-cable channel goes into original programming, that you can do something and change your business with one show. That I am happy about, but creatively, honestly, having spent the last ten years doing a show about history, it would be insane to predict or guess what the legacy of it is. I hope that it stands out as a piece of originality that was successful. That is a rare moment, and that is something that I would hope it would be known for. It’s very hard to encourage people to be original, because it’s brutal. I feel so grateful that they let us do this weird and unusual show. It really has proven to be unlike anything else. I didn’t know that when we were doing it—it feels like normal TV to me—but now I’m aware of it.

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BREAKING BAD

There have been a lot of flawed characters on television since The Sopranos, but Walter White in Breaking Bad gives new meaning to the concept of imperfect individuals behaving in morally objectionable ways for good reasons. He takes his terminal cancer diagnosis as free rein to become a kingpin in the drug trade in order to secure his family’s financial stability after his death. Hailed as one of the best shows ever and winner of multiple awards, Breaking Bad was created by Vince Gilligan and featured Bryan Cranston’s brilliant performance as Walter White. VINCE GILLIGAN, CREATOR, 2012: I have never tried meth, and I have never tried chemistry! I was thinking more in terms of midlife crisis. I was about to turn 40 years old when I came up with this story. I was starting to think about how my life is probably already more than half over and I haven’t done all the things I wanted to do. That was kind of a negative inspiration, but I suddenly found myself pondering a story about a guy who’s having the worst midlife crisis, or an end-of-life crisis, in the case of Walter White. I didn’t think a show like this could exist, period! I was gripped by this character, and I loved the idea for this show from the beginning, but I didn’t hold out high hopes that the show would ever exist. Sony Pictures Television was my initial partner as a studio, and we went together to find a broadcast home for this show. I personally didn’t [think] that we’d find one. I knew that if we were going to find one, it would have to be on cable. We didn’t even bother setting meetings at any of the four major networks. A show like this is just too dark to ever be on a network. If it had gone on to a network it would not remotely resemble the show you see now. It would be bowdlerized. It wouldn’t even be a faint echo of what the show is now.

BRYAN CRANSTON, WALTER WHITE, 2013: About 15 years ago, I was able to land a guest-starring role on an episode of The X-Files that [Gilligan] wrote. He had written a character who was despic able, a horrible person, a real

son of a bitch. And yet he felt that it was necessary to write [the character] that way and still try to elicit sympathy from the people who were watching. The reason he did that is an insight to his multilayered storytelling. In this instance in The X-Files, David Duchovny and I are in a car for most of

change it? What if I try to change a character from good to bad? What if we got a character like the guy I wrote in The X-Files, where he does despicable things, yet you still sympathize with him? From that he thought of me, because I had played that guy. After reading the pilot episode of Breaking

In Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan flipped the script on the antihero-seeks-redemption story, chronicling one man’s descent from suburbia to a life of crime. the time. There’s something wrong with my character; he has a brain issue where if the car stops his head will explode. So, Duchovny’s character needs to drive in order to keep my character alive. If Vince wrote my character as a sympathetic nice guy, of course Duchovny’s character and the audience would want to save him. That’s what most people would write. But he wrote me as an asshole, and by doing that, he made the audience feel this split of, God this guy is a jerk, I would just pull over and let him die. He made the audience invest in the story. He put a moral dilemma in the core of his lead character: is this man worth saving simply because he is a human being? That is beautiful! He made his lead character struggle with that. And yet we learn about the human fiber of David’s character—that he just couldn’t [let the villain die]. That was the genesis of the character of Walter White. In the history of television it has always been about stasis, things staying the same. And Vince thought, What if I

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Bad I thought, This is brilliant, I have to be a part of this! So I came in [to meet with Vince] and was loaded with all kinds of suggestions and ideas—how much the character should weigh, how he should walk, he should be depressed—and I was passionate about him. All these things made sense to Vince, and we just played tennis with these ideas back and forth and back and forth. By the time I left that first meeting, I really felt that he was going to be my champion to get this role, and he was.

GILLIGAN, 2012: [The pacing of the storytelling] is indeed quite condensed. That felt right to us for a couple of reasons. First of all because the engine that drives the show, or certainly drove it initially, is Walt’s cancer diagnosis. In the pilot, when he is diagnosed, Walt is told that he has 18 months to live; that clock was put on his life. We figured that Walt should do an awful lot of living in a short span of time.

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The other reason is because, as smart as Walt is, typically your master criminals of the world don’t do the outlandish and evil things they do for very long without getting caught. Walt does an awful lot of smart criminality, but you figure eventually the other shoe is going to fall. Law enforcement is going to finally catch wind of who this guy is.

CRANSTON, 2013: When I started the first season I was reading a couple [of episode scripts ahead] here and there. I started to get confused because of the twists and turns that Walter White took. We were shooting episode two, but I had read three, four and five, and then I [had to remember], Wait, I don’t know that yet, not at this point. I had to erase what I knew so that I wouldn’t mis inform what I was acting on that particular episode. It didn’t help me in any way. So I thought, This is such a journey for this character, why don’t I just go for the ride. As opposed to getting on the roller coaster and knowing exactly where the twists and turns were going, I decided to not know, just

like everybody else. It’s been the ride of my life.

ble of great darkness and great evil, and that has become more and more apparent as the seasons have progressed.

GILLIGAN, 2012: Walt has done things that are so dark and reprehensible that it even shocked us writers. That may sound strange, since obviously my writers and I came up with it, but when it’s working really well in the writers’ room, we try not to set limits. On a really good day, when things are clipping along, the characters themselves are telling us the story. In a sense, we’re just stenographers writing it down. That takes you to some very dark places. With a character like Walt, he tells us what it is he needs and what it is he’s capable of doing to get what he needs. We just transcribe it. Other days the opposite is true, and we come to grief for it. Some days we say to ourselves, We really want this to happen, but then Walt tells us, I don’t want that to happen, I want something else. We try to tell the story as organically as possible. I’ll never try to fit a square peg into a round hole storywise. Having said that, if we let the chips fall where they may, Walt is capa-

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CRANSTON, 2013: [My experience on the show] has altered the landscape of my professional opportunities completely. There would have been no Argo without Breaking Bad. When you go into this profession as an artist, as an actor, as a writer, the only thing you are truly hoping for is not to have someone hand you a job but to give you an opportunity. Opportunity is the only thing you want: “Give me a chance to show you what I can do. Give me a chance to play in this playground.” Then, you better be able to deliver. I have been given this opportunity by Vince, and it has been a life-altering experience, professionally, artistically, emotionally, physically—I’ve seen my body transform, with the weight loss and going through the harsh deserts. I look back at some of the scenes that were filmed six years ago and I think, Wow, that guy is different. I don’t even know who that guy is anymore! It’s been so transformative.

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HOUSE OF CARDS

When Netflix decided to venture into original scripted content it did not move timidly. It attracted top featurefilm talent, including Academy Award winner Kevin Spacey, not only as star (he plays Francis “Frank” Underwood) but also as executive producer. It allotted a more-than-generous budget, reported at some $5 million per episode, and it granted the writers complete freedom to follow their vision. The result was House of Cards, which created tremendous buzz, garnered critical acclaim, won Spacey and co-star Robin Wright Golden Globes and attracted legions of addicted fans that assiduously binged on multiple episodes. TED SARANDOS, CHIEF CONTENT OFFICER, NETFLIX, 2011: We’re trying to give our subscribers what they want, and they like these really highly serialized one-hour dramas— shows like Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Weeds and the first couple seasons of Dexter are doing phenomenal. People really love this connection with content in a way that they can binge and watch multiple episodes in one sitting, and it’s a new behavior that people really enjoy. Someone described to me these one-hour serialized dramas as almost the new literature in America, because you can take a long time to flesh out characters, so it’s much different than watching an episode of a sitcom or even sometimes watching a two-hour movie. So we’re trying to do what our customers want and help them get these great one-hour serialized dramas. The economics for those shows are very challenged: DVD sales have slowed dramatically on box sets, and it’s very difficult to syndicate a serialized show, especially the more serialized, the worse for syndication. What I saw this past season was we looked at a couple of pilots that ended up on networks, and the networks actually unserialized them before they brought them to air, because they were so worried about this phenomenon. What I saw was that these shows would not be made for commercial television and that pay television— HBO, Showtime, Starz—is unlikely to want to sell to us, so that if we were going to want to bring this content to our customers, we may have to develop the muscle of doing it with producers instead. We’re excited to jump in the

fray and do a show like House of Cards, which would’ve been a perfect show to go to HBO in the first window, but instead we’ll spend a lot more bringing it to Netflix in the first window. It kind of forced us into a competitive space with them where I don’t think we needed to be, but if it turns

worked together previously as actor and director in Se7en—started throwing around the idea of wanting to work together again. This conversation went on for a little while, maybe a month or so, just poking around with the idea. Then he came to me and said that he had heard that the

Inspired by the BBC trilogy of the same name, House of Cards marked Netflix’s arrival as a major player in the original drama business. out to be successful, then it’ll be an efficient way for us to spend programming dollars.

SARANDOS, 2013: As a company we move pretty quickly, and what I didn’t want to do was create a multiyear test to figure out if original programming was going to be successful on Netflix. I didn’t want to do something small and then if it didn’t work, wonder if it was because it was too small. I thought we had to do something substantial that would send a very loud signal to talent that we really were in this business, and to our subscribers that this was a meaningful differentiator among subscription services. So we had to make a little bit of noise the first time out.

KEVIN SPACEY, FRANK UNDERWOOD, 2014: I produced a film called The Social Network. It was during the shooting of that film that David Fincher and I—we had

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rights of a British television series that he had never seen called House of Cards were available. I said, Well, I have seen it, and I thought it was really terrific and actor Ian Richardson was brilliant. So he went away to watch it, I went away and watched it again, and we came back together and decided that it would in fact translate very well to a U.S. series. From there we began to develop the idea, and Beau Willimon was brought on. He wrote the first two scripts, and then we went out and pitched it to all of the networks that one would pitch something like this to and ultimately we also pitched it to Netflix.

SARANDOS, 2013: It was very adventurous for House of Cards to make that jump to Netflix, but what they have seen since is that we can build an audience, we can bring attention to the show and make sure that it gets seen and that it gets appreciated, even at the highest levels

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in the form of nine Emmy nominations. When we went into this, we did not have an awards-driven agenda. We didn’t even think that we qualified for Emmy Awards when we first convinced David Fincher or Kevin Spacey to bring House of Cards to Netflix.

SPACEY, 2014: Perhaps your readers won’t know that actually the role of Francis was based on Richard III in the original books by Michael Dobbs [author of the House of Cards trilogy]. That’s why the direct address [Frank speaking directly to the camera] happens. While many people think Ferris Bueller was the first direct address, it was actually William Shakespeare, and in Richard III he created direct address. It’s different from a monologue. In Shakespeare, a monologue is a character expressing his thoughts and sharing them with the whole theater. In direct address you’re looking directly into the eyes of the audience and engaging them individually. To some degree, Frank and Richard III have certain shadows of each other, but obviously Frank is a very different kind of character and obviously in a very modern setting. But both of these works are about the nature of power, the nature of what people will do to retain it and get it.

SARANDOS, 2013: In the case of House of Cards, they are relatively uniform running times, but none of the episodes contain traditional cliff-hangers. We certainly don’t have the commercial-break cliff-hangers either. So it really gives storytellers the freedom to tell their stories without worrying whether or not the audience remembers what they watched last week. That also frees up 10 or 15 percent of the show’s running time to create much richer characters and denser plotlines. Those cliff-hangers trick you into coming back after each commercial or after each episode. When you strip all of those out of each episode, you find it creates a very different rhythm to the show.

SPACEY, 2014: There is definitely [creative] freedom, because we weren’t asked to do a pilot. We didn’t want to do a pilot, because a pilot is quite often just an audition in which you have to establish all the characters in 45 minutes. You have to come up with arbitrary cliff-hangers, you have to mechanically do things. What we were given was a very long runway and an ability to allow for characters that would develop over time and give them space. That’s the kind of freedom

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we had. For me this has never felt like I am doing a television series. I don’t think of it episodically. I think of it as if we’re telling you a very long story. It’s a little bit like making a very long film. When friends tell me, Oh, I loved episode so and so, I literally have no idea what episode they are talking about! Because I don’t think of them as episodes, we think of them as chapters. I suppose with respect to the way we work, the platform really doesn’t have anything to do with our creative process. Yes, we are fortunate that we don’t have commercial breaks, but then again, our audience can decide when they want to break. It’s the same way that you treat a novel: you decide when you want to put it down on your bedside, you decide when you want to pick it up. It’s very much the same thing that is happening with how people are consuming and how people have consumed since the Gutenberg press. We didn’t invent this way of viewing; it’s been going on since box sets [of DVDs]. The difference has been that the audience likes being in control, and the Netflix model has proved that they like making these decisions for themselves. I would say that I think appointment viewing is more behind us than ahead of us.

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DOWNTON ABBEY

That Downton Abbey, the period drama that chronicles the trials and tribulations of the aristocratic Crawley family and the servants who work for them, would capture a loyal audience among British viewers was no surprise. But that this lavishly produced series, which illustrates the impact of historical events and changing social mores on the manor’s upstairs and downstairs residents, would become a worldwide hit and garner critical acclaim certainly took its creator, Julian Fellowes, and executive producer Gareth Neame by surprise. The show has won Primetime Emmys, Golden Globes and BAFTAs, among other awards, becoming the most successful British costume drama since Brideshead Revisited in 1981. GARETH NEAME, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, 2010: Julian Fellowes and I were working on another script that wasn’t really getting any traction, and we were having dinner one night doing a debrief on that other project, and I said, “You know, what we should really work on together is a return to a territory similar to what you already covered in Gosford Park and do it as an episodic series.” My thinking was to do something contemporary in feel that would really allow him to explore all the characters, as you can do in a series, with his unique knowledge of that world. I thought we could combine the elements of a wellresearched period drama with a really commercial mainstream series. Julian came back to me a few weeks later and said he wanted to give it a go.

JULIAN FELLOWES, CREATOR, 2014: Downton is a very tight team. Gareth Neame, Elizabeth Trubridge and I make the show. We work very, very closely together. For the major casting, even the minor casting, we weigh in. I finish a script and my wife, Emma, reads it. I do her notes. Then Gareth and Liz read it, and they have big notes and I do one big note session. Then they have little notes, you know, he’s using a glass, wouldn’t it be better if he had a cup? Then I do those. Only then does it go to ITV. And then if they have useful things to say we do them, but basically by the time Emma and the three of us have finished with the scripts, it’s getting very near to what will be shot.

NEAME, 2010: There are really only two options in the market for this sort of project, BBC One and ITV1. I wanted the show to have the sort of broad impact that it eventually did have, and that’s a different level to

place. That is why dramas about police departments and hospitals always go on, because you can have all these different backgrounds and different age groups and different conditioning all in one place believably. I suppose that the class

Bringing soap-opera sensibilities to the vaunted tradition of British period drama, Downton Abbey has become a massive global hit. what one can achieve on BBC One. Of course, I had no way of knowing how successful that show would be, that it would become part of the national conversation, but I had a sense that being on BBC would be a lot more predictable. It would be sort of “the son of Cranford.” [Cranford was a very successful high-end BBC costume drama.] I didn’t want it to be part of a tradition and a portfolio of things. I wanted it to stand out. I also liked the idea of it going on ITV at nine o’clock after a great night of general entertainment [Downton Abbey was scheduled after The X Factor]. I didn’t see any reason why the show should not be on ITV. It’s nice to hear people say that the show has helped to enhance the image of ITV, but I don’t subscribe to that view. I think ITV has consistently made fine dramas. But I do recognize that the show has made more impact by being on ITV.

FELLOWES, 2012: In a drama you want to have a great variety of people who are believably in one

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system is another version of that. You have all these people under one roof, and yet they all have completely different expectations of life and different ambitions, maybe, or maybe not, and different chances of realizing them. But I suppose the conditioning of class where—not so much now, but in the old days—you were expected to define yourself and your hopes and dreams along class lines, seems so extraordinary to our generation. It is rather interesting that so many men and women lived within those kinds of confines.

FELLOWES, 2014: One thing that I always try to do, and it’s a theme of the show, is that we have as much respect for Daisy [a maid] dealing with her issues as we do for Edith [the Earl’s daughter] dealing with hers. We’re all dealt a set of cards in this life. Some hands are rather better than others admittedly, but in the end we have to play them as best we can. I don’t mean people who are really at the bottom and

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are having an absolutely ghastly time all the time; I exclude them from this. But from the working class and the middle class and the upper class we have examples of people who have made a success of things and people who have made a great mess of things—you can find them up and down the social ladder.

NEAME, 2010: The principle reason [for the show’s success] is that it follows a soap narrative. Julian has 18 principle characters, all with meaningful action in each episode, all with a journey to follow. That makes it fulfilling for the actors and rewarding for the audience. It’s a sort of posh soap, which has never really been done before. It follows the same narrative rules of complex, intertwined personal relationships. I did not want it to feel like a historical show. I wanted the mechanics to feel like a contemporary show. Julian’s writing is very economical in a contemporary way. You come into scenes later and leave earlier and take great leaps in the narrative. It isn’t a costume drama. A costume drama is usually based on a Victorian novel, where a writer has adapted Jane Austen or Charles Dickens and the underlying novel narrative must be adhered to and translated for a television audience. That is a completely different job from creat-

ing an original TV show that happens to be set 100 years ago.

FELLOWES, 2012: American television reinvented the concept of the drama series a few years ago with this layered, multistory, multinarrative, very fast-paced movement. One thing we perhaps did do right with Downton is that although in one way it is a traditional period series, the kind British television was making 30 years ago—and some of them were marvelous—when you look at those shows, they are generally single narrative and, to our rhythm, quite slow. Instead of going back into that territory, we really modeled Downton more on a modern American show in the sense of having lots going on and getting involved with all sorts of characters simultaneously. In the old days, when you were watching one of those shows, you could go out and make a cup of tea, whereas now, if you are watching ER, you can’t go and make a cup of tea, unless you have a television in the kitchen, because you come back and you’ve missed the whole end of one story! That was the pattern we were looking at rather than traditional British television. The world at the moment is slightly unsure of itself. Our economy has gone AWOL, and we don’t know what we are

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doing. I don’t think this is the end of anything. I just think we are moving from this period into the next. While you are going through a period of transition, that can increase the sense of insecurity and it’s tempting to look at periods that appear to be more settled, when people were more secure in their own selfworth. Of course, if you were living in 1890 or 1920 or 1960—well, I was living in 1960—there was as much insecurity in people as there is today. But looked at from the outside, from a later period in time, people had more rules to hold on to. There was more of a shared knowledge of what you were supposed to be doing, of what you were supposed to be wearing, of what you were supposed to be saying. All of that gave society a kind of a framework to hold on to, and we have chosen to abolish our framework. We’ve moved into an era of “casual chic,” whatever that means, and we don’t have the rules that our forebears had. Of course, the other side of that is that we also have far more freedom. Whether or not we would want to go back into a world of rigid rules is quite a different matter, but television can give you the security of the rules without the difficulty in sustaining them. We enjoy a world where everyone knows what’s what but we don’t have to get up at four in the morning to go clean the grate!

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THE WALKING DEAD

The Walking Dead has shattered all ratings records for a basic-cable show. Starting with the 5.4 million viewers who tuned in to the premiere on AMC in October 2010 to check out the postapocalyptic zombie drama based on the comic books by Robert Kirkman, the audience just grew and grew. Over the course of five seasons, the show has reached upwards of 17 million viewers. The series also broke a longstanding television taboo; it routinely kills off main characters. Kirkman manages a delicate balance between the stories in his comic books and those in the series and guides the cast, including star Andrew Lincoln, through a constant turnover of characters. ROBERT KIRKMAN, CREATOR, 2014: Some of the writers are a little bit more immersed in the comics than even I am, which is at times very embarrassing. There’s been more than one occasion where they’ll say, “I really want to adapt that scene where so-and-so says this thing.” I don’t remember specific things people said! That’s always a fun treat. But we sit down and look at the original comic-book stories, and then we do our work in the television writers’ room. We look at the different characters we have. We look at how the characters that exist in the show that don’t exist in the comic would affect and change stories we want to adapt from the comics. As we get into the work of doing that, new story lines start to arise, and every now and then one of them leads to a fairly unexpected death. That’s how you get characters like Andrea, who die earlier in the show than they do in the comic book. It’s all just a group of writers working to craft the best story. Sometimes that follows the source material, sometimes it doesn’t, which I support 100 percent. If we were adapting the comic book directly, I would be bored. Despite the fact that sometimes I don’t remember all the ins and outs of a story, I do know that I’ve already written it before. So I wouldn’t want to write it a second time.

GALE ANNE HURD, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, 2012: Well, the interesting thing is that Robert Kirkman’s underlying comic book, The Walking Dead, is also a huge success. The fans care very deeply about it. The 100th issue is now the best-selling comic

book in 15 years, outselling Marvel and DC. Over 350,000 comic books were sold. It would be very difficult [to decide] what to change if it were not for the fact that Robert Kirkman is not only an executive producer of the show, but he’s in

and saying to them, Where do you think Rick’s breaking point is? And they wrote it. Losing his wife [Lori, played by Sarah Wayne Callies] has seriously pushed him into a place that he’s never been before.

A global phenomenon, The Walking Dead has legions of ultra-devoted fans, dominates social media when it airs and routinely breaks ratings records for cable TV. the writers’ room, part of that discussion about what to keep, what to change and what to invent. And with his blessing, I think that the fans accept those changes.

ANDREW LINCOLN, RICK GRIMES, 2013: It was always the intention of Robert Kirkman, Frank [Darabont, showrunner of season one], Gale [Anne Hurd] and AMC to have this extraordinary world with ordinary people in it and [explore] how this world changes them. In the space of three seasons, Rick has been on this tumultuous journey. He begins as a man awakening into this new world and discovering it. He is the eyes and the ears of the audience—you discover this new hell along with him. Being reunited with his family gave him a stronger impetus to survive. And then season two was about a man struggling for his ideology. Can you retain your humanity in this new world? Or will pragmatism win the day? With season three…I made the fatal error of going into the writers’ room

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FRANK DARABONT, SEASON ONE SHOWRUNNER, 2011: I’ve always loved the zombie genre and have long wondered how I could approach it in a fresh way that hadn’t been done before. Many self-contained films have been made, many excellent ones, so I never saw the reason to try that. Then I read Kirkman’s comic, and I thought, Here’s the different way to do it: as an extended character-driven saga for television, a serialized take on the zombie apocalypse seen through the eyes of an ongoing group of characters. That, to me, felt like the fresh approach that hadn’t been done before. The biggest difference I’ve found between adapting for film versus adapting for television is that with television you have a far greater period of time to explore the story and characters; you’re not trying to squeeze everything into the two-hour running time of a film. A TV series can be a creative luxury in that sense: you can let the story and characters expand and breathe because you have a far greater span

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of time to tell the tale. But that does involve a shift in thinking when it comes to adapting material: you have to resist the urge to say everything all at once, as you would in a film. For television, you stretch the story out rather than compress it, hopefully in a way that keeps the audience intrigued rather than making them impatient.

KIRKMAN, 2014: [Losing actors] is always hard. There are traditions—we have a big death dinner where everyone goes out and celebrates the actor that we’re losing. Those traditions help people a little bit. I think everyone knows that it’s around the corner for [them as well]; to a certain extent, it’s a matter of time. People do sign on to the show now thinking, Am I going to be around for a season? Two seasons? Three seasons? Everyone knows that this is a show that portrays a very dangerous world where anyone can go at any minute. In order to honor that, we have to lose characters from time to time. It’s certainly an emotional thing for me coming from the comics. Telling these stories in comic-book form, it’s just artist Charlie Adlard and me deciding not to write and draw an imaginary character. The show is different. [The cast members] are very close on set in Georgia. They all get together on weekends, and their kids get to know each other. They’ve become a big family, so it is an emotional thing when we lose a character. But we have to do it for the sake of the show.

While a death irrecoverably changes the group dynamic, other characters come forward. New characters, new blood, new ideas, they keep regenerating the show. I hope that will be the enduring strength of the series. Sarah Wayne Callies is a consummate professional, and she’s been the greatest leading lady. We e-mail one another as TV Husband and TV Wife, TVH and TVW, and now it’s DTVW. She is a phenomenal actress, but she also has that incredible emotional intelligence, which I think is probably why a lot of women are watching the show. That is a remarkable achievement for this genre. But then, it was never pitched to me as a genre show. It was pitched as a character-driven show.

HURD, 2012: AMC is very bold. They roll the dice on their programming, on things that other networks haven’t done before. The same is true for FOX International [Channels, a global partner on the show]. People were wondering, given the dark and graphic nature of the comic book, would it transition into a television series successfully? And the truth is that if it hadn’t been for the support of AMC and FOX International, if we had done a watered-down version, I don’t think it would have been the success that it is. We’ve never once gotten a note to tone it down.

LINCOLN, 2013:

KIRKMAN, 2014:

It’s very hard. It’s the one downside to this glorious job. We’ve become [very close] by virtue of the subject matter, how we work, where we work—it’s our own little bubble in the South, in Senoia, away from lots of cell phones; they don’t work there, everybody just has to learn their lines and fight zombies! It’s a unique experience. The crew is magnificent. And everybody fights for each other and works for each other. It really is the greatest family I’ve ever had the privilege of working with. So when we lose a family member, we have a death dinner. And no one stops being in the Walking Dead family. It’s a very moving thing. Everyone knows when we’re wrapping seasons, and you get e-mails from [former cast members] wishing love and luck and congratulations to the crew and cast. The beauty of it is it’s almost like we’re a moving target—the show keeps changing, it keeps evolving. It’s not like a procedural drama. It keeps moving forward.

Creatively, you do projects for yourself. When I’m writing The Walking Dead, I’m trying to do things I would find the most entertaining. You can’t go, Are audiences in Argentina, Spain, Germany and the U.S. going to respond to this in the same way or a different way? You’d never get anything done if you tried to take all that stuff into consideration. Really, it’s just, Hey, do I think this is neat? And then in the back of your head you’re thinking, Man, I hope other people think this is neat. That’s all you can do. Everything else after that is in the capable hands of FIC and their marketing team and the people at AMC and everyone else trying to make people aware of the show that you’ve done. From the outset, you’re really just doing it for yourself.

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HOMELAND

Homeland premiered shortly after the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and immediately struck several chords with viewers. It served up complex issues like terrorism, patriotism and how far an individual will go to right a wrong. The series, loosely based on the Israeli drama Hatufim (Prisoners of War), featured a damaged and possibly turned ex-POW; a bipolar CIA operative, played by Claire Danes; and totally absorbing storytelling from showrunners Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa that wasn’t always easy to watch. But the gripping award-winning drama kept viewers coming back for more. GIDEON RAFF, CREATOR, PRISONERS OF WAR, 2013: I met with Avi Nir, the CEO of Keshet, who wanted to collaborate with me, and I really wanted to collaborate with him. He told me, “Send me an idea.” I said I’d been working on something. And he goes, “I hope it’s a sitcom.” And I said, “It’s not really!” [Laughs] I sent him three pages describing Hatufim. He took them with him [on the flight back to Israel], and when he landed he called and said, “Start writing.” Avi Nir pitched it to Rick Rosen at WME and Rick said, I love this idea and I have the perfect partners for you. I translated the pilot episode into English and sent it to Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa. They read it, they loved it and they asked me to translate the rest of the series, and I did. It took me about five days to translate the whole thing. I was so excited that Howard and Alex were into it that I just didn’t sleep! [Laughs] Then we started meeting in Los Angeles and discussing the differences between our cultures and how to best adapt this story to America. I told them, I wrote this show during the Iraq War and during the war in Afghanistan and I never saw pictures of coffins on the news. American prisoners of war were never discussed on a national level. Most of my educated, savvy, political friends here in America don’t know that there’s an American prisoner of war right now with the Taliban who has been there for almost three years. In Israel, [prisoners of war are] a huge issue. Israel negotiates for their prisoners of war, so [the prisoners in the Israeli series] came back after a long negotiation. The U.S. does not negotiate

with terrorists, and that’s why Brody [Homeland’s returned POW] was released in a military operation. The focus of Homeland is very much on the interrogation; it’s very much on the thriller. In the Israeli show, the family drama is just as important as the secrets they are hiding.

HOWARD GORDON, SHOWRUNNER, 2012: What Alex and I appreciated, particularly with regard to this series, was what I’d call the rhythm, just the fact that we didn’t have to be interrupted by commercials. This show required what we hoped was a trancelike involvement or a spell—not to

Said to be President Obama’s favorite show, Homeland has earned lots and lots of awards, and fans, for its deft portrayal of antiterrorism activities in post-9/11 America. DAVID NEVINS, PRESIDENT OF ENTERTAINMENT, SHOWTIME NETWORKS, 2013: Homeland was originally developed partly with a mind toward broadcast television, so it was both about moving quickly and also about reimagining what the show could be in a pay-cable environment. That entailed making the characters a lot more ambiguous: making the good guys in the script less good and the bad guys less evil. And then moving very quickly in convincing Twentieth Century Fox [which would produce the show] why it was worth their while to come to Showtime. And convincing the producers why it was worth their while to come to Showtime and also showing that we had a good broadcast plan for their show. I knew exactly where I was going to put it, and from the very beginning I told them that the show would air in the fall of 2011, playing with Dexter on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. That was influential for them when they had choices of where to take it.

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sound pretentious but for lack of a better word—and we knew commercials would disrupt that flow. So not having to write to those artificial breaks was very liberating, and I think was part of the show’s success. Aside from the fact that on a broadcast network show, you probably couldn’t have a heroine who is bipolar.

ALEX GANSA, SHOWRUNNER, 2012: We definitely had Claire [Danes] in mind. The minute we actually began to speak of a female intelligence officer, she was the first actor that was in our minds. Temple Grandin had just aired [on HBO], and her performance in that film is just extraordinary. We thought that we were going to have a very complex, interesting character at the heart of this piece and Claire could be perfect to play it. She was also just the perfect age. There was a lot of discussion when we were casting this role about how old this woman should be, and Showtime had a history of casting slightly older ladies than Claire

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in their shows, and they were sort of pushing us in that direction, in more of the Robin Wright age range. We thought that our character should be younger than that, especially because she was so troubled and complex. You feel that the younger she is, the more hope there is that she could get over [her condition].

CLAIRE DANES, CARRIE MATHISON, 2013: The pilot was immediately gripping. It was obviously a piece of excellent writing, which one doesn’t come across very often. I was intimidated by it. It was ambitious, and this character was and still is incredibly dynamic and complex and a little difficult. When I get just a little bit afraid, I think, Gosh, OK, fine, I think I have to do it! The pilot was terribly engaging, and I wanted to read the next episode. I believed that other people would feel the same way. It was a very interesting little syllabus I put together for myself before the first season. I did delve into both of those subjects [CIA and psychology], and found them to be incredibly riveting. I have to tune up every so often; I have to go to that material and remember what I had studied so intensely before we started. But I kind of get it now. It was about seeing her through all these various adventures with as much integrity as possible. These are both subjects that happen to naturally appeal to me. I am interested in psychology. And the world of espionage is totally fascinating, and not entirely unrelated to the world of theater. It’s about role-playing and being intensely perceptive.

GANSA, 2014: Homeland is unlike a lot of shows. We have a very open-door policy. We will take good ideas and encourage good ideas to come from anywhere. I always tell the story about Patti Podesta, who was the production designer on the pilot. We were scouting locations. There is one scene in the pilot in which Carrie is in a bar and she is picking up some guy and she is listening to a jazz band and watches the fret work of a bass player and realizes, Oh my gosh, Brody was communicating with someone when he was on television by using a tapping code [with his fingers]. The version of that scene when we were scouting the location of that bar was that Carrie was on her way out of the bar and passed a booth where a bunch of deaf college students were signing at each other. There is a very famous university for the

deaf in D.C. called Gallaudet, and these students were signing at each other and when she saw them using sign language, that’s what gave her the idea that Brody was using a tapping code to communicate in front of the cameras. So we were all at this bar, scouting this location and there happened to be a jazz band playing, and Patti Podesta looks at me and says, “Alex, look at the bass player.” And I look at the bass player and she says, “Wouldn’t that be better than the deaf kids?” And from that conversation, obviously the scene changed. But not only that; Carrie’s love of jazz came out of that location scout. And the production designer, whose last job it is to talk about stories, came up with this idea and we said, That is so much better. There’s an example of the production designer, but believe me,

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Showtime has had a number of fantastic ideas, and the first and foremost one of them is they pushed us to make Carrie more of an extreme character than she was when we first wrote the script. Although they didn’t suggest specifically the idea that Carrie was bipolar, they said, “Look, we need something more, what else can you add to that character? She’s not just a maverick; she’s not just a pariah in the CIA. Is there something else we can add to that character that makes her more alive and more interesting?” So Howard and I went away and thought about it for a while, and we came back with this idea that she had this bipolar illness, which, again, informed the series on such a deep level, and it was a direct result of Showtime pushing us to be something more.

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BROADCHURCH

In a television landscape replete with antiheroes of all stripes, zombies and medieval fantasy creatures, it was a bit surprising that a classic whodunit, shot more as a documentary than a TV series, set in a sleepy coastal town, featuring ordinary yet damaged people, would captivate British viewers for eight weeks, becoming one of the highest-rated series of 2013 in the U.K. Broadchurch, about the murder of an 11-year-old boy, was created by Chris Chibnall and stars David Tennant as Detective Inspector Alec Hardy. It garnered such high critical acclaim that FOX in the U.S. commissioned its own version called Gracepoint, also starring Tennant. CHRIS CHIBNALL, CREATOR, 2014: It was a long-gestating idea in my head. I had always wanted to do a really big ensemble drama. I’m a really big fan of murder mysteries. I’ve been living in Dorset for seven or eight years, where the show is shot. I live a mile from that beach. It’s so beautiful. I had been thinking somebody should really film something here, and then I thought, Oh my God, I’m capable of writing something that can be set here! Actually, there is no greater community than a small town, like the small town where I live. It’s a beautiful cinematic landscape, and I really fancied doing a good old-fashioned murder-mystery whodunit in the Agatha Christie tradition. But there were also two American shows that were a big influence on me in my twenties and have stayed with me ever since. You can see them in Broadchurch—they are Twin Peaks and Murder One, the Steven Bochco show that is one legal trial over 23 episodes. All that stuff was in a creative cocktail shaker and out comes Broadchurch!

DAVID TENNANT, ALEC HARDY, 2014: I had previously worked with Chris Chibnall on both Doctor Who and on his TV movie United, about the Manchester United Munich air disaster. So I knew Chris well, I knew his work well, and I knew that it would be a script worth reading. James Strong is a director I’ve worked with many times, again on Doctor Who and on United. So the fact that it was them approaching me meant that I was all the more inclined to be part of it. And then I read [the script] and thought, This is fantastic—a brilliantly

drawn portrait of a terrible event with these extraordinary characters, all of whom you need to know more about. The whole world of it was so evocative. At the end of episode one you are desperate to know what happens next. All those things collided to make me think, This is something to be part of.

was doing that a long time ago in sci-fi with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. What people want are real emotions.

TENNANT, 2014: It seemed to catch a moment. It took all of us by surprise. Whenever you make something, you hope it’s going to be

In the spring of 2013, the tale of the murder of a young boy in a sleepy seaside town was a national obsession in the U.K., becoming one of ITV’s highest-rated dramas ever. CHIBNALL, 2014: I’m writing as production is going along. On the first season we were greenlit into a particular slot, so it was quite a fast turnaround. I was writing as we went along. With the schedule for the second season, it’s a bit the same. But I like the active process of calibrating the show as you’re watching dailies. You end up tailoring characters to performances. It’s a really inspiring thing if you can keep finessing the show as it’s shooting. Because what you write is different from what ends up on the screen. You have to enjoy and use what ends up onscreen and feed that back into the writing. That’s where the great symbiosis is. What you want are stories to help you make sense of your life. What I was interested in in Broadchurch was to say, If this really happened, how would it feel for all the people involved? How would they respond emotionally? It was really taking that genre structure of the story and then applying emotional truth to it. But that’s not a new thing. Joss Whedon

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well received and enthused over, that people will hopefully think it’s as good as you do. But that kind of thing, when it takes on a life of its own, when it becomes a national talking point, I don’t think any one of us was quite prepared for that. It’s wonderful to be in the center of something like that, but quite overwhelming! [Laughs] During the run-up to that final episode, people were going crazy about what was coming. It was fantastic to be part of a national conversation.

CHIBNALL, 2014: I wrote one very early draft for myself, because I wrote it on spec, it wasn’t a commission. I wrote that first draft and then, I can’t remember if it was a few days or a few weeks later, I woke up one morning, literally doing that thing that people only ever do in movies of sitting bolt upright and saying, Oh my God! I had an idea! My subconscious kind of solved it! It worked its way out of my

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system and onto paper. It just suggested it to me, and from that moment on I thought, Well, it can’t be any other person because it made sense of what I wanted the show to be about. That was way before we started shooting, so I knew from very early on.

TENNANT, 2014: We found out [about plot developments] as the scripts came out to us. I had no idea, for instance, who the killer was until I got the script for episode eight. I had my own suspicions and my own theories, but I was as in the dark as Alec Hardy was. I was genuinely investigating each character as I came across them. And I had no sense of who was lying to me and who wasn’t. That was quite useful as an acting exercise.

CHIBNALL, 2014: I was heavily involved in setting [Gracepoint] up. I wrote the pilot episode, and I spent time with Anya [Epstein] and Danny [Futterman]. We chose them as

showrunners because they are terrific writers and producers. I was there throughout that initial process, helping it all come together. Then they took the ball and ran with it. It was a really nice experience. I’m proud of what they’ve done…. We talked and we started from a very similar place, and Gracepoint soon became its own thing. What I wanted to do was protect the tone and pace and emotional language and visual language of the show, which is very different from a lot of other television shows. We wanted to have all that in place and then allow Gracepoint to grow into its own show. You set up the parameters and say, This is what I think is important about the show, and now, within those parameters, make your own thing. That sort of collaboration is really interesting. As soon as you bring in a new cast and go to a different landscape, everything becomes fresh anyway. For all the success of Broadchurch for us in the U.K., in America it had a very small audience. It’s not that well known a show publicly, so it presents a great

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opportunity to do an American version that can speak to the audience there. In addition, there are two extra episodes in Gracepoint. It happens quite organically. It has a movement away from the original; it’s a really nice thing to behold.

TENNANT, 2014: I’ve had a few close calls with various American television projects that, for various reasons, hadn’t quite come to fruition. There was something very appealing about the fact that this was something I knew was good. It was going to be executive produced by people I knew and trusted. It was going straight to series, which of course is quite rare. It felt like there were too many positives to look a gift horse in the mouth. It was an unusual situation, trying to re-create something I had done in a whole new set of circumstances, but that felt like it might be an interesting challenge. There were so many positives to the project that it would have been churlish to say no.

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SCANDAL

Scandal premiered on ABC in the spring of 2012 to not exactly stellar ratings. But it immediately drew an extremely loyal audience. Viewers quickly took to social media to share their enthusiasm for the series about a Washington, D.C. crisis-management expert named Olivia Pope, who cleans up the messes and outrageous problems created by the powers that be, including the President. By its second season, Scandal was one of the highest-rated shows on network television, with a passionate Twitter following that was drawing more viewers to live television. Scandal was created by Shonda Rhimes and stars Kerry Washington. KERRY WASHINGTON, OLIVIA POPE, 2014: I got a call from my agents. They had read the script, and they really loved it. They said, “There is this script we want you to read. It’s almost as if Shonda wrote it for you.” Of course she hadn’t. At the time, Shonda and I didn’t know each other at all. But I read it, and I too just felt, Oh my God, this role is amazing. It’s me in some ways, and in the ways it’s not me, these are things I want to explore as an actor. I just really, really, really wanted to be a part of it, as did lots of other actresses! I spend a lot of time with Judy Smith, who is the inspiration for the character Olivia Pope. She’s a real-life crisismanagement expert who works out of Washington but is also in New York and L.A. I spent a lot of time with her, shadowed her and tried to absorb as much as I could about her world. She does a lot of consulting with the scripts. A lot of times the writers will come up with the most scandalous situations they can think of, and then they call Judy and ask, “What would you do?” It’s not that she pitches ideas based on her previous clients, because she’s not allowed to do that, obviously. And even with me, often she will explain a story or a situation, but she’ll never attach a name. But she is very helpful in getting us to understand the process of crisis management.

SHONDA RHIMES, CREATOR, 2014: We have a lot of fun on that show coming up with those moments. There is magic to the way that room works, to the phenomenon of the energy of all the writers in there together. We’re all excited about politics. We’re all excited about conspiracies. We’re all excited about red

wine! But also we all like telling stories in a fast-paced way. We all have the same level of impatience. We all have encyclopedic knowledge of television shows and say to one another, “That bores me, I’ve seen that before,” or, “We’re moving too slowly and things have to go faster.” So it’s a really collaborative, exciting effort.

PAUL LEE, PRESIDENT, ABC ENTERTAINMENT GROUP, 2013: If we believe in a show, even if it starts out a little bit weaker, and we believe it’s got long-term value in terms of its creativity, and we believe in the cast and the showrunners, then we will

In the on-demand era, Scandal has demonstrated that there are some shows that viewers still want to watch live—and talk about, in real time, on Twitter. WASHINGTON, 2014: I always say [to the writers], I don’t know what drugs you guys are on, but stay on them! I think the writers are just very bold, and they’re not holding back. They are having a good time, and we get to therefore have a great time because of it. We have this really talented ensemble of actors, and everybody’s toolbox is very different—how they approach the work and how they live in the work. One of the great joys for me, because I get to work with most of the characters, is that I get to be privy to everybody’s differing processes and watch how different people work, how they approach the work, how they get to where they need to be. It’s really fun. I feel like I’m always learning from how each actor approaches the material. It’s fascinating. The one thing I’ll say is that it’s like being part of an amazing theater troupe. We are always pushing each other and supporting each other to do better and be more and more courageous in the work.

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stick by it. Scandal had an OK launch last year. Now it is a big hit for us because it’s really found its feet. Kerry Washington is superb, and Shonda Rhimes is knocking it out of the park. We gave Scandal time to find itself and find an audience, and now it really has. Social media is absolutely critical to the entire conversation and buzz that surround a show. We do what we call “viral storming” when we launch a show. We’ll not only pre-sample it, we’ll have a huge amount of activity with the showrunners and stars on Facebook pages, on Twitter, on every single platform. The truth is, with a great show it gains a life of its own. If you look at a show like Scandal, I think it is the number one highest social metric show on broadcast television. We did a spectacular job of listening to, reaching out to and connecting with our audience on Scandal, and that audience is now so passionate and so vocal about what they think of the show. And by the way, Shonda

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has a fantastic Twitter feed—that helps. The show has gained a life of its own, and honestly, it’s impossible to imagine what it was like before social media.

WASHINGTON, 2014: In some ways we owe the show to our fans’ enthusiasm—they loved this show into a second season, and a lot of it had to do with a grassroot social-media following.

RHIMES, 2014: That was an amazing phenomenon in terms of the power of Twitter and the power of the voice of an audience, which I think is fantastic. Kerry Washington came to me early on and said, I think all of us should be on Twitter. I was on Twitter and she was on Twitter, and we both loved it. She thought the entire cast should be on Twitter, but Kerry is very smart, she thought [the suggestion should come from me]. So I went to everybody and said, “We should all get on Twitter,” and the entire cast—they are very game and they are very excited and very enthusiastic—got on Twitter. They discovered that they all love the experience of live tweeting and the conversation that went with live

tweeting. They embraced what that meant, and that was great for us. The audience went along with it, which was fantastic. To have people discover the show because their friends were talking about it on Twitter really changed the game in terms of how television was talked about and viewed. It changed what watercooler conversation was, and it also changed the idea that you want to be watching the show live now because you want to be having a conversation on Twitter, you don’t want to miss what is happening there.

WASHINGTON, 2014: There has been so much talk about the historic nature of Scandal and how there hasn’t been a woman of color leading a network drama in almost 40 years. Obviously, if you look at the state of Hollywood right now, that’s not because of a lack of talent, it’s because of a lack of opportunities. So I really thank ABC and ABC Studios and the Disney/ABC family for the opportunity of giving this show a chance. Anne Sweeney [former co-chair, Disney Media Networks, and president, Disney/ABC Television Group] and Paul Lee and Bob Iger [chairman and CEO of The Walt Disney Company] taking a

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“risk” on this show is so powerful and so important. And a lot of that has to do with the creative currency that Shonda has built up at the network—having successes like Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice really created a landscape where she could take these swings and call the shots. It’s really exciting. She is still hands-on with our show, and I’m just so grateful for her talent and her imagination. I feel really blessed because we are in a golden age of television right now where some of the best work that is happening in Hollywood is happening in television. To be a part of that is really exciting. A lot of that has to do with the fact that there are more writers in television than there are in filmmaking. One of the reasons why our show resonates is that it does have a little bit to do with this antihero moment going on in a lot of our media. There are no good guys, and there are no bad guys. Everything is about flawed human beings just doing the best they can. And I think people relate to that. That’s how we all are— we’re all flawed. We all want to be the heroes of our own lives but are struggling to do that.

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DOCTOR WHO

Doctor Who first aired on the BBC in 1963 and is still being produced today. It tells the story of the Doctor, a time-traveling humanoid alien, who explores the universe in a blue police-box-shaped spaceship called the TARDIS. The show has become one of the U.K.’s biggest exports, with legions of Whovians across the globe. It has also hosted some of the U.K.’s leading actors and writers, among them Chris Chibnall, who went on to create Broadchurch. Through the decades a host of actors have portrayed the Doctor—there have been 12, including David Tennant—and there have been a series of head writers. Steven Moffat took the reins from Russell T Davies in 2010. RUSSELL T DAVIES, FORMER HEAD WRITER, 2012: When I brought back Doctor Who in 2005, I grounded it in real-life emotions, within family and friendships. Frankly, that’s what made it a success. It was the number one show on British television some weeks, ahead of the Simon Cowell shows, the soaps, all of them.

STEVEN MOFFAT, HEAD WRITER, 2013: You don’t really feel much pressure at the beginning of a TV series because you’re just making a home movie in a big shed! You don’t really think anyone is ever going to watch it. Toward April 3, 2010 [the British premiere date for Moffat’s first season as head writer], I started to feel the pressure a little bit. We were doing Sherlock at the time as well and Matt Smith’s Doctor for the first time, so Benedict [Cumberbatch] and Matt were waiting in the wings of fame. I remember thinking, If these two things screw up, I’m finished! I just thought, What if they’re rubbish? [Laughs] This could be a really terrible year. I could crash Doctor Who and screw up Sherlock Holmes and if I’d just shot Daniel Craig in the face I’d have ended all of British culture. But it didn’t work out that way. [Laughs] It was a very, very good year, and they’ve been very good years ever since. It’s interesting to look at the three modern Doctors—and there’s about to be a fourth—and see what each of them brings to the show. Christopher [Eccleston] brought a gravitas and an importance, a statement that this is a serious proposition—a famous actor

playing the part [of the Doctor]. He brought a toughness to it, a sensibleness to it. And then David [Tennant] for the very first time got the idea that the Doctor could be cool and sexy—a sort of dashing hero. What Matt

the 50th anniversary special], whether it’s socially or professionally. She’s a great pal. Matt I didn’t know quite so well, but we got on famously. It could have been an awful experience really—by rights it

A national treasure in the U.K., Doctor Who is also one of the BBC’s biggest brands globally, especially in the U.S., where the show has developed a cult following. brought to it, which is the last thing you’d expect from the youngest-ever Doctor, is he absolutely restored the idea that the Doctor is fundamentally an absent-minded professor. Matt’s Doctor is quite, quite mad. I remember David saying, “I wish I had done it like that!” Matt has such a madcap quality that what he brought was more than eccentricity—he’s absolutely insane. If David’s Doctor turned up [at your house] for morning coffee, he’d be fine. He’d be a lovely young man and he’d chat everybody up. Matt’s Doctor would turn up on a camel. He’s bonkers. The last thing anybody thought when we cast the 26-year-old was that what we’d get is a return to the eccentric old boffin that he is at heart, the hipster boffin.

DAVID TENNANT, THE TENTH DOCTOR, 2014: It’s always a joy to reunite with Billie [Piper, companion Rose Tyler to Tennant’s Doctor, who returned for

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was his show, so with me coming in and trying to jump all over it, he would have had every right to feel a little disgruntled about it. But he couldn’t have been more generous and excited about the prospect himself. It was enormous fun to do. Doctor Who is always fun. That’s one of the reasons why it is so popular, and it’s as much fun to make as it is to watch. It was lovely to revisit that world and to be part of something that was such a big deal. There are very few TV shows that make it to 50 years. To be part of the celebration of that was wonderful.

MOFFAT, 2013: I frequently call Doctor Who the most perfectly evolved predator in television. It is the perfect television show. It is the show you can’t kill. We could all drop dead tomorrow, all of us who work in Doctor Who, and they’d just carry on making it. [Laughs] It is dependent on no indi-

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vidual. You give it your all for the years that you do it, and when you leave it won’t even notice—you’ll be shed like scales! And you can recast the Doctor. Not only can you recast the Doctor, you can create a Doctor who is appropriate for the times. He can always be modern. He can always be new. It’s an ancient tradition and yet it’s a brand-new iteration of that tradition. So it feels old and new at the same time, old and young. Think of the range of the Doctors— his apparent age can change from the seventies to the twenties and back again. He can be heroic, he can be funny, he can be scary, he can be silly; he can be any of those things.

TENNANT, 2014: You’re very aware that something like Doctor Who has a cultural heritage with it and it has a generationslong appeal. It was particularly won-

derful to be part of something like Doctor Who.

excellent, day in and day out. That is a great environment to work in.

CHRIS CHIBNALL, WRITER, 2014:

TONY HALL, DIRECTOR-GENERAL, BBC, 2014:

I did [an episode] called “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship,” and that was an impossible brief! Steven Moffat, the showrunner, just gave me the title and said, “Do you want to do that?” I thought, Well, there is no way we can do that on a 45-minute BBC budget! But we did, and I think what you take from that is there are some really talented people working on that show. Like a lot of British people, [Doctor Who] is part of my DNA! So it’s always great to drop in and do an episode of that. It’s even more fun working on it than you can possibly imagine! Everybody is great. Everybody loves the show. What’s really exciting about it is you feel that everybody wants it to be constantly

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Somebody like Steven Moffat can work with the BBC to create two fantastic shows in Doctor Who and Sherlock, both of which are hugely popular with audiences, but which have the ability to evolve at their own pace in a way that just wouldn’t happen at a commercial broadcaster.

MOFFAT, 2013: The thing about Doctor Who is it’s a different show every week. It speaks with a different voice on a weekly basis. It must be fast-moving. It must be funny and exciting. Those were all present in Russell’s era, and I hope they are all present in mine. I serve at the pleasure of the TARDIS.

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10 THE BLACKLIST

One of the few breakout hits on network television, The Blacklist has successfully combined the continuing story elements of serialized dramas so popular on U.S. cable channels and the one-case-perepisode formula of broadcast procedurals. Created by Jon Bokenkamp, the series tells the story of exgovernment agent Raymond “Red” Reddington, played with panache by James Spader, who has been one of the FBI’s most-wanted fugitives. Red turns himself in, willing to help the FBI track down a blacklist of the most dangerous criminals, but with the caveat that a rookie female agent works with him. JON BOKENKAMP, CREATOR, 2014: The Blacklist came out of an idea between John Fox, one of our producers, and myself. He was also a feature guy; he had no experience in television. I had written one TV script before, and nothing happened with it. Off of that, John and I were talking and talking about ideas that would be fun and interesting. He wanted to do some kind of show about a mythic crime figure. This was right after [organized crime figure] James “Whitey” Bulger was found in Santa Monica. John’s idea was, What if an 80-year-old man was captured and started to talk? What kind of stories could he tell? We could go back and find out who shot JFK and where Jimmy Hoffa is buried and all of that. That was the kernel of the idea that eventually became the show. We almost didn’t shoot the pilot, because we couldn’t find a lead, which sounds preposterous to me now! I remember speaking to James for the first time and he was very articulate and intense and specific about the character, and I thought, Wow, this guy is going to be great! But he wasn’t who I was thinking about when I was writing the pilot. But in terms of what James brings to the role, one of the biggest things is just a wonderfully strange sense of humor. We talk daily during production; it can be a lot of fun. When you get him on a roll with something that is just preposterous or something gets us laughing and discovering who the character is, it’s a real joy. We had a bit with this sort of Julian Assange character who had been in house arrest. We thought Red should

bring him a gift when he visits. So he brings him a fruit basket with some vitamins and some Richard Pryor albums. Who would bring Richard Pryor albums, actual vinyl records? Red would! It’s those sort of things, when James and I and John get to giggling about it, there is nothing better than

He is fascinated and interested and open, so for me there is a big element of wish fulfillment with that character. He says and does things that we may want to do or may think about, but he just does them! He isn’t one to sit around and worry about the repercussions. There is a big part

The Blacklist reflects two major trends in drama today—the wave of feature-film talent coming to TV and a move toward more serialized storytelling. that! So one of the things James brings is a wonderful sense of humor, and he is adamant that once we think we know that character, we know nothing about him. We are constantly trying to deepen that character in unexpected ways.

JAMES SPADER, RAYMOND REDDINGTON, 2013: All of my prep is really script-based and imagination, and I read the paper every day. It’s funny, I’ve never been one to read a lot of crime novels or thrillers or espionage. I’ve read a couple of John le Carré novels over the years, but beyond that I’ve never really read that genre very much. But I love to read about that in the papers. That world fascinates me, and I follow it closely. Through your life you meet people who have lived in and out of those worlds.

BOKENKAMP, 2014: Red is a guy who loves being Raymond Reddington. He relishes life.

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of that. Obviously, Spader plays a big part in bringing the character to life. It’s a show that could easily be dark without much sense of humor, and we try to recognize when stuff is bit of a reach or a bit preposterous—Red acknowledges that. I think there is a bit of self-awareness to who he is. The biggest thing is the enjoyment that Red and Spader have in living that life.

SPADER, 2013: In the character of Red I saw the possibility for [combining drama and comedy], considering his life and the world he lives in. He’s got a strange and ironic prism through which he sees the world around him, and it’s left him with a strange sense of humor. Red’s hair was cut very, very short, but I thought it suited him well. His invisibility for the past 20 years has been incredibly significant and important. He’s had to move swiftly and cautiously through life. It just

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this little baggage from previous lives that I’ve had as a performer. So I thought it would be nice that when he takes his hat off in the pilot he does not look like me.

BOKENKAMP, 2014: James is able to play those nuances and subtleties without saying a word, he is very warm and engaging. I’m fascinated by that, and it’s one of the things we try to do in the show. I credit Joe Carnahan, who directed the pilot, with a look that was very big and cinematic and muscular, and then we would go in super close for these über-close-ups that were really intimate and warm. We try to do that with the writing and the pacing of the show—we’ll have something that is a big set piece with lots of blood and things exploding, and then all of a sudden we will slow down and take time to let a very specific moment or scene breathe and let the audience just sit with that. That juxtaposition to me is really interesting. Quite honestly, I don’t watch a lot of network television. A lot of what I have watched most recently have been hyper-serialized cable shows. I am a huge fan of those characters and of the way those stories can feel very cinematic. Yet at the same time I wanted to try to do something that would fit the network model of a new case each week. That is a constant balancing act that we are still exploring and trying to discover the right balance. At times last season I wondered if we got too serialized, but we don’t want to be too standalone either, because one of the things that is fun about the show is the interplay between the characters and those stories. So it is an interesting tightrope to walk, but it was very intentional from the beginning.

SPADER, 2013: seemed streamlined to me and eminently practical, because no matter where he is he can pop into a little barbershop anywhere and get his hair cut, or he can cut it himself in about ten minutes. It seemed to fit his life very well. I also liked the idea that my hair was very long when I showed up in New York to start shooting the pilot. I liked the idea that an old out-of-

date surveillance photo of Red that the FBI had on the Most Wanted list was one with long hair. When you see Red for the first time in the pilot, I liked the juxtaposition that he looks quite different. I’ve never worn my hair this short in anything I’ve ever done. I thought it would be nice that if I’m playing someone who’s come out of the shadows after many years of being away, that he not carry

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[The show] is international in its scope. The character that I play and the world that he inhabits is the international world, and therefore the cast of characters that are going to show up through the series are also international. And the people who work in the intelligence community that he encounters and so on are to a certain degree international as well. I like that about the show.

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Virgin America’s Red inflight entertainment.

TAKING OFF Technology is transforming the inflight entertainment market, creating new opportunities for program distributors. By Kristin Brzoznowski or content distributors working in the inflight entertainment market, the skies have never been friendlier. The current global market value of this business segment is estimated to be upward of $2 billion, and it’s forecast to increase by 7.5 percent each year for the next four years. “Overall, this is a ridiculously great time in the inflight entertainment industry for a variety of reasons,” says Robin Cole, the VP of global business development for Global Eagle Entertainment, a leading provider of media content, technology and connectivity solutions to the travel industry. “It has a

watershed feel to it. You’ve got airlines that are not just recognizing that they need to monetize inflight entertainment connectivity, but they’re embracing it and making it a part of their strategy. They’re not nickel-and-diming their passengers; they’re trying to figure out how to build in that value exchange as part of their strategy of entertaining and informing passengers on their flight. That’s a huge piece of the puzzle falling into place.” The second big puzzle piece that’s fitting together right now is that passengers are bringing their own devices on planes, allowing them to download movies or shows made available through

inflight entertainment. “You not only have seatback [entertainment], which we’re all very used to, and we’re programming that and trying to make that more dynamic, but you’ve also got this rich environment where you can offer an engaging experience, especially from a digital media and content perspective, and for advertising as well,” says Cole. Passengers can also use their devices as second screens, “so you’re adding value to existing inflight entertainment solutions that are already on board.” The third factor that makes it such a vibrant time in the inflight market is the change in passengers’ expectations. “They want

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connectivity, they want entertainment, they want a rich, engaging experience,” Cole says. “They’re bringing their own devices with them, so if they can [watch a program or surf the internet] on the ground in their living room, they’re starting to expect that as part of their inflight experience. This is opening up all kinds of opportunities for advertisers, content holders and service providers, making it a very, very exciting time.” Entertainment One (eOne) is among the distributors enjoying the new opportunities being created within the inflight market. “The technology behind inflight entertainment is evolving, and airlines

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Lifestyle programming, including the travel-centric series World’s Weirdest Restaurants, has sold well for Beyond Distribution with inflight entertainment buyers. are getting increasingly savvy about how they’re offering entertainment and reducing the cost of maintaining what once were very expensive systems to offer content,” says Maria Safont, a sales executive at eOne. “The bring-your-own-device trend is breaking through,” and, as she explains, cheaper costs should also allow budget airlines to enter the market as new players.

Barry Chamberlain, the president of sales at CBS Studios International (CBSSI), is equally enthused by how these new developments have invigorated inflight sales. “While the market continues to evolve, and bring-your-own entertainment has been available in one form or another for a while now, the need for quality TV programs to exhibit on embedded seatback

systems remains as important as ever,” he says. CBSSI is fortunate to have a vast catalogue of programs that are known all around the world. In particular, says Chamberlain, the global appeal of the CSI and NCIS franchises make them very attractive for airlines. “Viewers want popular shows that are of a high quality, whether it’s at home or in [the air],” he notes. “When it comes to our hit franchises, passengers expect to see them while in flight.”

BRAND PLANS

ABC Commercial’s The Flying Winemaker offers educational take-away value for passengers.

BBC Worldwide is also armed with a large catalogue—some 50,000 hours—that contains a number of global brands, many of which have been top picks with airlines. “With drama, we have some classic shows that will always do well, for example Sherlock and Doctor Who,” says Zina Neophytou, the director of travel and special markets at BBC Worldwide. “The new series of Doctor Who, with Peter Capaldi as the Doctor, has been licensed by a number of airlines, including British Airways and Cathay [Pacific], to name a few. Sherlock is one of the biggest shows that we sell. This fantastic detective drama has a global appreciation and is a global brand. “Top Gear is a huge brand globally as well,” Neophytou continues. “It does really well for inflight. We’re promoting series 22 at the moment, and we’re excited about

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being able to offer a new season of Top Gear to the inflight market.” At FremantleMedia International, sitcoms have proven popular with airlines, according to Catherine Pierce, the company’s sales executive for non-theatrical/closed circuit. She points to The IT Crowd, Birds of a Feather and Cuckoo in particular, as well as the U.S. comedies Park Bench with Steve Buscemi and Web Therapy with Lisa Kudrow. FremantleMedia International also has a number of global entertainment brands that have done well in the inflight market. Pierce highlights the Young Hollywood franchise and the long-running competition series Project Runway as strong sellers in this space. Since content with global appeal is in high demand among airlines, it can be difficult for distributors with more niche product to cut through. “A challenge we have is competing with distributors who supply movie content and highend U.S. and British dramas and comedies, as it can be tricky to encourage buyers to buy something that’s a little bit ‘different,’” says Scott Kimpton, sales manager for inflight in the Asia Pacific at ABC Commercial. “But, we have some great gems—both one-offs and series—and once [inflight] buyers give our content a go and realize it works for the audience, they often come back for more.” ABC Commercial has been particularly successful with its kids’

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programming and factual content, especially in the genres of lifestyle and arts. “Passengers want content that is enlightening, thoughtprovoking, educational, entertaining and well-made,” says Kimpton. “Many passengers also appreciate programming that’s related to their destination, for example The Flying Winemaker, Fashion Asia and Thai Street Food,” all of which ABC Commercial distributes.

FACTS OF LIFE A similar mix of genres has been selling best with inflight buyers for Beyond Distribution. “Children’s content, science programming and lifestyle shows sell most widely on inflight,” says Zoe Wilson, the company’s sales executive for inflight. “I think the reason that these genres are in higher demand is their appeal to a wide audience. It is important that inflight content be accessible to a range of people, and titles such as MythBusters and World’s Weirdest Restaurants attract broader audiences.” Additionally, Wilson points out, lifestyle, science and children’s content is generally “inoffensive, relaxing and easy viewing,” making these genres attractive for an inflight audience. ARTE Sales has been doing steady business in the inflight market with its factual programming. However, Audrey Kamga, a sales manager who heads up worldwide inflight at the company, acknowledges that “factual is not the first concern” for many airlines. She says, “When people come to us, they are trying to fill in some missing blocks because they already have output deals with the studios for feature films and drama series.” From the ARTE Sales catalogue, the most-requested titles for inflight have been World Medicine, ARTE Cultures, the culinary-themed Happiness is On the Plate and Global Food/Global Drinks. “So far, we are working on a cherry-picking system [with airlines],” says Kamga. “We are more than open if anyone wants to make an output deal with us for our catalogue. It’s difficult to get [output deals] for factual programming

though. We have a lot of collections, so it’s the type of content where airlines will try one or two episodes, and if they see that it’s working, they will keep taking new episodes in the same collection.” For ABC Commercial, inflight deals have also mostly involved airlines selecting single episodes or whole series, “but we try to negotiate output deals with major clients over a 12-month period so they have the option to acquire higher volumes of content or to select one or two titles at a time,” says Kimpton. “In the past, the majority of sales were one-off documentaries or individual episodes picked from various series,” says Beyond’s Wilson. “More recently, there has been a shift and airlines are keen to try to commit to an entire series. In some situations this has meant that more episodes are being licensed for each airline cycle, and

in other instances we have reduced the license period to one month and licensed each episode of a series on a monthly basis.”

TURN UP THE VOLUME At FremantleMedia International, inflight deals have involved a combination of single-episode sales and high-volume pickups. “Some airlines might cherry-pick their favorite episodes of a series, perhaps an episode that best fits their brand,” says Pierce. “Then we do have some series that lend themselves well to a box-set sale, in particular sitcoms, for which clients have been keen to pick up the whole set of episodes.” Pierce says that most inflight buyers want the hottest shows and the latest episodes. “They want content that’s been a big hit with viewers or caused a stir on social media, with topics that are trending.” Providing this can sometimes

be complicated, however, given the timelines required by airlines for receiving materials. “One of the challenges that we’re faced with is the very early delivery deadlines,” says BBC Worldwide’s Neophytou. “We would love to be able to make the latest episode available for distribution to show on board next month, but because we have to deliver three months in advance of play periods, unfortunately it doesn’t always mean that the passengers are going to get to see the latest episodes, unless an airline has late-load capability, like British Airways (BA) does. BA can get content on board the day after it’s been [broadcast] and it is fantastic to get that early window. “Connectivity is going to enable a lot more content to be delivered to aircrafts much quicker,” Neophytou adds, so that the delivery deadline of 10 to 12

ARTE Sales, home to such programming as World Medicine, has found inflight to be a steadily growing part of its sales business. 4/15 World Screen 181

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Airlines such as Emirates are using sophisticated new inflight entertainment offerings to enhance the flying experience for passengers and differentiate themselves. weeks in advance of the play period “will hopefully be a thing of the past as technology evolves.” Also important as technology evolves is content suppliers’ ability to work quickly when they do receive an order for inflight. “Sometimes you may only have ten days to deliver the materials,” says ARTE Sales’ Kamga. “It’s easy for us, because all of our programs are already digitized. If we have to deliver the materials within the same day, we can do it. But for some other companies it’s complicated to send the order to the video lab, then get it back in time. It’s important to be reactive.” Another important proposition for ARTE Sales lies in its ability to offer content in multiple languages. Kamga says that airlines often make requests for a French version, German version, Italian version and so on. “The more versions you have, the better it is for them because they have some quotas where they need to have a percentage of the programs in English and other languages,” she says. “The more languages we offer, the better it is for our business.” FremantleMedia’s Pierce says that it’s also important to hold the global rights for programming when negotiating inflight sales. She says, “Our clients would really

love if we could go to them and say, You can have whatever [rights] you want. So what I’m trying to do is work with our acquisitions team and our lawyers to really maximize the rights that we have for our shows to make sure that we can offer them to as many clients as we possibly can.”

LET’S MAKE A DEAL Managing and maximizing rights is one of the challenges in navigating the inflight market; negotiating fees is another. “It’s a market with longestablished parameters and terms, so they’re not very used to negotiating the fees,” acknowledges eOne’s Safont. “On occasions, they have walked away from a deal rather than coming back with an offer.” CBSSI’s Chamberlain adds, “It is always challenging to convince buyers that budgets for TV acquisitions need to be increased to account for the increasing costs and quality of the programs. We also always try to remind buyers of the growing usage and importance of hit TV programs in the inflight entertainment market.” Distributors, though, need no reminder of the importance of inflight entertainment, as many are highly optimistic about the growth of this segment. “I think there is still huge potential for inflight sales to

continue increasing,” says Beyond’s Wilson. “The developments in technology and the way that inflight entertainment is moving forward with downloads and streaming is only opening more opportunities. [Genres] that are traditionally less appealing to airlines, such as true crime, are starting to become more acceptable, particularly if they are only accessible for individual download. This step forward in the way that inflight entertainment is viewed during a flight increases the opportunity for a broader variety of programming.” “The possibilities are endless with inflight web connectivity and wireless streaming,” agrees ABC Commercial’s Kimpton. “One day passengers will have the ability to watch a program in flight and then click on a link at the end to purchase their own copy; this creates opportunities for a second revenue stream direct from the customer.” Further adding to the revenue potential in this space is how inflight advertising is evolving. All parties involved stand to benefit as the relationships between advertisers, airlines and content providers get stronger. “The airlines now recognize that there’s an opportunity to responsibly monetize their passengers,” says Global Eagle’s Cole. “We can take

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curated content and pair it with relevant advertising, and we can offset the cost of delivering that for airlines. Advertisers get a brand-new, highly qualified audience—we know exactly who’s getting on the plane, we know the demographics: they’re a captive audience, literally and figuratively, which advertisers love—and then you can give them curated content.”

FLYING HIGH Cole continues, “The experience of being on a plane is very different now from what is was even five years ago, when you had to watch whatever the two television shows were that they would put on the overhead screens or the collection of maybe 50 movies you could choose from. Now, it’s curated content based on regional [tastes], based on timely topics, based on things that happened over the weekend, and brought to you by a sponsor that wants to be associated with that content. It feels real and relevant to the passengers. It’s a value-add for the advertisers and the distributors, and the airlines get to differentiate themselves.” As advertising and connectivity get more sophisticated, and more money is flowing through the inflight market, program distributors are sure to reap the benefits.

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ONE-ON-ONE

hat do American Idol, Fifty Shades of Grey, Good Times, Bad Times, The Cat in the Hat, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, Scènes de Ménages, The Da Vinci Code, Stern and Got Talent all have in common? They are all TV shows, books or magazines published, produced or aired by companies belonging to the German media giant Bertelsmann. And John Legend just won an Oscar for his song “Glory,” the rights of which are owned by BMG, also part of Bertelsmann.

Such a broad range of properties illustrates how far-reaching this media company is. What started as a company specializing in printing religious works in the sleepy town of Gütersloh in 1835 has diversified into journalism, broadcasting, television production and business services. Bertelsmann’s operations have expanded far beyond Germany, with offices around the world. Thomas Rabe has been chairman and CEO since 2012 and prior to that, starting in 2006, was chief financial officer. He heads a media behemoth that encompasses a number of companies. The RTL Group, a leading broadcaster in Europe, has interests in 49 television channels—including RTL Television in Germany, M6 in France and RTL 4 in the Netherlands—and 29 radio stations. The group also owns FremantleMedia, one of the largest producers and distributors of content outside the U.S. Penguin Random House is the largest trade book publishing group in the world, and every year it publishes about 15,000 new titles and sells 700 million books, audiobooks and e-books worldwide. The printing and publishing company Gruner + Jahr reaches readers in some 30 countries with more than 500 media activities, magazines and digital offerings. BMG holds the rights to the music of recording artists such as Elvis Presley, Santana, Mick Jagger, Pink and Alicia Keys. Rounding out Bertelsmann’s holdings are Arvato, a provider of B-to-B ser vices; Be Printers, which offers print and communication services; and other corporate investments. Although Bertelsmann is heavily invested in traditional media, Rabe has made digital transformation one of the company’s strategic priorities. In fact, the RTL Group is making programming available on screens of all sizes, offering video on demand, catch-up TV services and second-screen apps. FremantleMedia has several online video networks and is investing in digital content. Penguin Random House publishes thousands of e-books in multiple languages. Gruner + Jahr makes magazine apps and is creating communities online for people with specific interests, such as cooking and parenting. Bertelsmann’s digital and growth strategies are paying off. Revenues for the first nine months of 2014 were up 4.3 percent year-onyear to €11.82 billion ($13.25 billion), reaching their highest level in seven years, with operating EBITDA at €1.48 billion ($1.66 billion). Besides ensuring that the company’s assets live comfortably in the digital world and meet consumers’ needs, Rabe is also focused on international growth, particularly in China, India and Brazil. He talks to World Screen about his vision for Bertelsmann.

THOMAS RABE BERTELSMANN

By Anna Carugati

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Original series like Peplum are crucial for M6 in France, one of the 49 channels in the portfolio of the RTL Group, which has been majority owned by Bertelsmann since 2001. WS: Bertelsmann was built on the strength of its books and magazines, and later on its music, television and production assets—all considered traditional, analog media. What has been the company’s strategy in moving its assets into the digital world? RABE: Bertelsmann is an active player in digital media and ser vices. RTL Group is the most digital TV group in Europe. Among trade book publishers, Penguin Random House is the worldwide leader in e-books, both in terms of the number of titles available— more than 100,000—and in terms of total revenue. Our B-to-B ser vices provider Arvato serves many global IT and high-tech companies like Google and Microsoft. So, Bertelsmann is primarily a content and services company— we are not and we will not become a technology company. Although we do need to have a comprehensive understanding of new technologies, our activities will continue to center around the work of our artists, authors, producers, songwriters and editors—in short, around creativity. However, technology and digitization

offer great opportunities for enhancing our products and reaching more customers. Put in a wider context, digital transformation is one of our four strategic priorities, the other three being strengthening the core, establishing and expanding new growth platforms, and generating a higher share of revenues in highgrowth countries such as China, India and Brazil. Our strategic objective is to make Bertelsmann a faster-growing, more digital and more international company. WS: Given the problems the music industry faced making the transition to the digital world, what is the state of the music industry today? What growth opportunities do you see for BMG? RABE: The music industry has been massively disrupted since the late ’90s, with digitization causing piracy to unfold and albums to unbundle. In contrast to books, it took several years to establish an e-music ecosystem. First it was Apple’s iTunes and then streaming services that stabilized a recorded music market that had been in decline for 15 years.

The music publishing market, however, has grown slightly over the same period of time, as it benefits from a much broader range of rights. Against this background, Bertelsmann deliberately pulled out of the traditional recorded music business, selling our 50-percent shareholding in Sony BMG in 2008. We felt that both the structures and behavior patterns of the market were not capable of reform. Instead, we built BMG as a greenfield venture with an artist-centric services model and an all-rights approach— master rights, publishing rights, audiovisual rights. Six years after its launch, BMG has become the fastest-growing start-up in the history of the music industry. Today, we are already number four in the market and administer the rights to more than 2.5 million songs. BMG has a lineup of 70,000 artists and songwriters, is present in the ten largest music markets and scored 53 Grammy nominations in 2014. WS: If you are looking to expand Bertelsmann through acquisitions, what qualities are you looking for in a company? What

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types of companies complement the ones already in the group? RABE: We have defined clear investment criteria, which we apply to all of our new businesses, such as growth potential, digital opportunities and scalability. Investments into digital therefore have been a priority for us over the last few years. BMG and RTL Group [have made] acquisitions in the fields of MCNs [multichannel networks] and online video advertising. Additionally, we have invested in fast-growing services businesses driven by digitization, for example e-commerce services and financial services. Besides that, we are strengthening our footprint in rapidly growing countries like Brazil, China and India. That’s why Penguin Random House last year took over the book publisher Santillana, which has a strong presence in Latin America. At this time, education is a particularly exciting field for us. Our plan is to build an education business of size, and to establish education as our third mainstay of income alongside media content and services. In particular, we

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are interested in three segments: e-learning, universities in the health and human-sciences sector and higher education services. All these markets are fragmented, fast-growing and driven by global megatrends like health, outsourcing and digitization. WS: Because parts of Europe are economically challenged right now, are you looking to invest in or acquire businesses beyond Europe? RABE: We are increasingly looking beyond Europe. However, this has less to do with what’s happening with the economy in Europe right now, and is more part of our strategy for setting Bertelsmann up in a way that will fundamentally enable higher growth. Europe is our home continent and there are some attractive investment opportunities, especially in the services sector. But the U.S. market is not only the largest and most innovative media market in

John Legend, who won an Oscar this year for the song “Glory” from the Selma soundtrack, is one of many artists in the BMG music-rights portfolio. the world—it is already our second most important market in terms of revenue contribution. And it is our primary investment focus right now, along with emerging markets like Brazil, China and India.

The BIC countries have significant growth potential in media, services and education, driven by increased domestic demand from the emerging middle classes. There is a significant increase in consumption—especially

in the sectors Bertelsmann is interested in. We have been present in these countries for decades, scoring some notable successes: Penguin Random House is the largest Englishlanguage publisher in India;

FremantleMedia’s German outfit UFA Fiction made the new Cold War drama Deutschland 83 for RTL Television, with FremantleMedia International selling it across the globe. 4/15 World Screen 209

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Produced for Foxtel by FremantleMedia Australia, the women’s prison drama Wentworth has sold widely and is being formatted, with local adaptations in Germany and the Netherlands. Arvato is a leading services provider in China; and FremantleMedia is present on local TV screens with worldwide formats like Idols, Got Talent and X Factor. We have set up corporate centers in Beijing, Delhi and São Paulo as well as investment funds focusing on digital businesses and education. Our Bertelsmann Asia Investments (BAI) fund in China is highly successful, with more than 40 investments in companies such as BitAuto, the largest car marketplace in China, and Mogujie, the country’s largest female shopping community. Our objective is to increase our revenues in Brazil, China and India to €1 billion ($1.1 billion) within the next five years by expanding our global content businesses and our B-to-B services businesses, and by building education businesses. WS: Technology is constantly offering up new screens and devices on which to enjoy books, magazines and TV programming. How are you making sure Bertelsmann keeps pace with new technology? RABE: We are pursuing different approaches. First of all, we have first-class people with a deep

understanding of content, services and technology. And we train our people, because I think we cannot do enough to foster a digital mindset in everything we do. In 2013, we held an international conference focusing on digitization, bringing our top 200 management representatives to Silicon Valley to meet with the world’s leading tech companies. We followed up on that last year with a similar event in London dedicated to creativity and innovation. But we are not only partnering with global IT and tech companies; we also invest in up-and-coming, disruptive digital businesses. I just mentioned that we are very active as a venture capitalist in the startup scene—and this is not only through BAI, but also through Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments (BDMI) in North America and Europe. In total, we have invested in 80 young companies—in Europe, the U.S., Brazil, China and India. These investments give us firsthand access to technology trends and improve our understanding of the resulting threats and opportunities. On this note, the magazine Global Corporate Venturing recently ranked Bertelsmann as the second most influential cor-

porate venture in media, well ahead of U.S. media companies and miles ahead of all other European media companies—an accomplishment we’re very proud of as an established and traditional company. On top of that, it’s great fun to work with external entrepreneurs who want to put their ideas into practice, and to share Bertelsmann’s scale and resources with them. This way, I believe it’s possible to create a “smallcompany feeling” even in a group the size of ours. WS: Does the ever-evolving media landscape require a certain type of management? If so, how have you built your leadership team? How would you describe your management style? RABE: There are several important factors in managing a complex and highly diversified group like Bertelsmann. It’s important to delegate responsibility, which basically means selecting the best people, empowering them and providing them with the right incentives. I am fortunate to be able to rely on a team of many outstanding colleagues who have done everything they can to support me daily since I took office.

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We have deliberately strengthened the diversity [of our management] in recent years. As a media company that thrives on a variety of products and opinions, the diversity of our management should reflect the diversity of our customers and markets. One of my first decisions as CEO was to set up a Group Management Committee to advise and assist the Executive Board on important matters of corporate strategy. Of our 14 Group Management Committee members, five are women; the members come from six countries and from different age groups. We see diversity not as an academic matter, but as a business matter that we have recognized. Looking back on my first three years as CEO, I can also say that the key to our transformation has been getting everybody involved at a very early stage. Being close to our businesses—and close to our business leaders—is of utmost importance to me. That’s why active internal and external communication is a must, especially for the CEO of a media company. We have to explain what we are doing and why we are doing it. This is one of the reasons why I started using Twitter last year.

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ON THE RECORD

ky (formerly BSkyB) was formed in November 1990 from the merger of two competing satellite television services, Sky Television and British Satellite Broadcasting. Over the course of the following 25 years, not only has Sky established itself as the leading pay-TV company in the U.K. and Ireland, it acquired Sky Italia and took a majority stake in Sky Deutschland, becoming the premier pay service in Europe. Today, Sky serves some 20 million customers. Its success has been built on the seemingly simple proposition of always placing its subscribers’ needs first, and also by displaying a constant, unwavering commitment to quality and innovation. Sky offers its content in a variety of ways, on a range of screens and devices: TV, online, tablets and phones. It not only offers programming, but also broadband and telephony services. Keeping in mind that not all customers can afford a monthly subscription, Sky launched NOW TV, an over-thetop streaming service that provides access to the best of Sky’s content. The content selection is vast indeed. Sky programs four main entertainment channels—Sky 1, Sky Living, Sky Atlantic and Sky Arts—which showcase homegrown commissions and the best of U.S. programming. In addition, Sky Movies is Europe’s largest in-home movie service; Sky Sports offers seven channels of live and exclusive sports, news and analy-

sis; and Sky News reaches more than 100 million homes on multiple platforms across 118 countries. Jeremy Darroch joined Sky in 2004 as CFO and was appointed chief executive in 2007. He has overseen the expansion of Sky from a satellite television provider to a multi-product media company. The group’s other businesses include Sky Media, an advertising-sales house; Sky Business, a provider of TV and Wi-Fi to commercial businesses, including hotels and offices; and Sky Bet, which offers online betting and gaming services. Sky has also focused in the last few years on content distribution, by wholesaling its channels to third-party pay-TV platforms, and selling programs to the international market through Sky Vision. For the year ended June 2014, Sky reported revenues of £7.6 billion ($11.7 billion), with operating profit of £1.3 billion ($2 billion). While there are still consumers in the U.K. who don’t subscribe to Sky—in a total market of 26 million households, about half have yet to take pay TV—the room for growth multiplies substantially with the addition of the Sky companies in Germany and Italy. Now the combined Skys are operating in markets with 100 million households, including some 60 million that don’t yet subscribe to a pay-TV service. Darroch talks to World Screen about scouting out growth opportunities while remaining committed to what solidified Sky’s success from the very beginning: quality content, innovation and customer service.

JEREMY DARROCH SKY

By Anna Carugati

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“MY EXPERIENCE ACROSS ALL THE MARKETS, NOT ONLY IN THE U.K., IS THAT HOME ENTERTAINMENT IS REALLY IMPORTANT TO PEOPLE; IT’S A

WS: What has been the strategy for evolving the company from a satellite-television provider to a multi-product media company? DARROCH: Our focus has been very much on broadening out our business. We’ve done that for a couple of reasons. As we continue to expand, we want to open up new headroom for growth, and it’s also about challenging ourselves to offer a service for everybody and find more ways to get Sky’s great content into even more people’s homes. We’ve seen a progressive broadening of our distribution away from the satellite—even though satellite works very well— to incorporate things like OTT and broadband networks, maintaining wholesale relationships with other companies and distribution over mobile networks. Off the back of that, we’re deepening our relationships with customers to offer them more things: for example, upgrading to high definition; connecting their set-top boxes and offering on-demand services; and building a pay-as-you-go business, where people can either rent or buy DVDs direct from their settop box. All of these things help us to serve the market more broadly and open up new revenue streams.

Renewed for a second season, Sky Living’s Doll & Em was acquired by HBO in the U.S. That’s one of the reasons why we’ve continued to accelerate our growth in the U.K. from an already high base. WS: How has the company invested in its customers in the U.K. in the last 12 to 18 months?

DARROCH: When I think of Sky, I think of us as sitting at the nexus of content, innovation and ser vice. Our job as a brand is to bring those things together for our customers. We know that customers will respond to greater investment on-screen and even better content.

CORE PART OF WHAT WE WANT OUT OF LIFE.”

Sky 1’s popular U.K. original 50 Ways to Kill Your Mammy, a factual-entertainment series, has been licensed into 100-plus markets. 296 World Screen 4/15

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Billed as Sky’s most ambitious British drama to date, Fortitude was co-produced with the U.S. cable channel Pivot and sold widely across the globe via Sky Vision. So we have been deepening our relationships with international partners—HBO would be a good example—but also commissioning more of our own content directly. Then as we think of innovating, how we can help our customers get access to Sky content on whatever device they want, whether it’s mobile or on demand, or whether it’s through the linear TV service. And then we never forget that Sky is a subscription service, so we want to make sure that we offer the very best customer-service delivery in our marketplace. We invest right across each of those areas of content, innovation and service, and in doing so we continue to extend our leadership position in the U.K. And we have a big appetite to keep investing.

or you can buy that movie and we will download it to your box and then send a hard copy in the post. So we see good opportunities to grow share in areas like advertising and the DVD transactional market that can be all additive to our business today. A final area to talk about is a second brand that we’ve launched called NOW TV. It’s an over-thetop streaming service and is a really good way of getting Sky’s content to those customers who don’t choose to take a full subscription service today. They could be young people living in flats where it’s not easy to receive a satellite service; or perhaps they don’t want a full-year contract. We can use a brand like NOW TV to tailor what we do to them to better meet their needs.

WS: You have been offering ser vices in other areas as well. DARROCH: The heart of that has been our connected-box strategy. About two-thirds of our customers now have their set-top box connected to their broadband return pathway, and that has allowed us to develop entire new revenue streams. An example would be a technology we’ve developed in-house called Sky AdSmart that allows us to tailor our advertising to a particular set of demographics. Second, we’ve launched a service called Sky Store, which is our rent-and-buy DVD service. Today you can rent a movie through Sky Store soon after it has come out in cinemas,

WS: What was the strategy behind unifying Sky U.K., Sky Deutschland and Sky Italia? DARROCH: We think we’ve built a very strong and successful global leader here in the U.K., which is performing well. We see the opportunity now to expand into new markets that could open up greater headroom for growth for the business. Today in the U.K. we operate in a market of about 26 million households and about 13 million or so of those have yet to take pay TV. Through the combined Skys we operate in markets with 100 million households with something like 60 million households that don’t yet take a pay-TV service. So the basic headroom for

growth for the business opened up by combining the Skys in Europe. The nice thing is that Sky in the U.K., Sky Deutschland and Sky Italia have got a lot in common: clearly, they have the same brand, we know the management

teams well, they share the same basic ethos and what they do is very similar. We felt it was a good opportunity to open up our headroom for growth by combining very similar businesses that were very successful and very high

Lennie James fronts Sky 1’s new medical drama Critical, created by Jed Mercurio.

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Sky Atlantic is positioned as a channel for top-flight American drama, with a lineup that includes Game of Thrones, licensed to the service as part of an exclusive output deal with HBO. quality with good growth opportunities ahead of them. We believed that together, we could be bigger than we could each be individually. WS: Even though historically the pay-TV business took quite some time to take off in Germany, and Italy is now being battered by a dismal economy, do you still see growth opportunities because of the strength of Sky’s pay-TV proposition? DARROCH: We do, yes. I think it will be slightly different in Germany and Italy. As you say, our German team has done a good job creating momentum in the Sky proposition, really starting to drive a clear differentiation between what viewers get from Sky versus some of the free-to-air providers. I think that is one of the reasons that business is growing well. Germany will be more of a growth market for a while. Italy, you’re right, is slightly different. The economy is clearly quite tough in Italy, but pay TV is a much bigger business there than it

is in Germany today, so we figure there are more scale efficiencies we can bring between the U.K. business and Italy by sharing best practices and capabilities and also by getting Sky Italia to go on the path of the U.K. in broadening their distribution. For example, they just put in place an IPTV partnership with Telecom Italia, which we think is a good opportunity to grow their subscriber base. They’ve launched a service called Sky Online, which is very similar to NOW TV in the U.K. and which will enable them to get to parts of the market that they can’t target particularly well today. We think that over time there is no reason why Italy can’t grow as well. Clearly in the short term this could be more of an economic challenge, but we are in for the longer-term view of the potential of these businesses. My experience across all the markets, not only in the U.K., is that home entertainment is really important to people; it’s a core part of what we want out of life. So if you’ve got an appetite to invest, to improve, to do new

things, customers will respond to that and you’ll be able to grow your business on the back of it. WS: And I imagine you have best practices that you can share among the three countries? DARROCH: Very much so. We are getting more ideas and more ways to share. Product technology would be a very big area. We’ve got a lot of similarities today but we can standardize technology, and that will allow us to innovate more quickly across all markets and more consistently. There are good opportunities in content creation and in commissioning shows that will work across each of the three territories. There are lots of best practices that we can transfer in areas like customer management, cost efficiency, brand development and people. So we can see lots of ways that bringing the businesses together enables us to leverage that capability across a broader set of territories. WS: I know that sports rights are sold on a territory-by-territory

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basis, but do you see in the future the possibility of acquiring some rights for all territories? DARROCH: It wasn’t foremost in our minds when we thought about the transaction. We will follow how the sports-rights holders want to sell their content. I think the big sports will continue to be sold on a territory-by-territory basis, but we are going to be a good partner. So if somebody comes and says, We want to have one conversation that covers each of the markets, we would be open to that. WS: Finally, because it’s the programming that drives the whole business, original productions have been very important to Sky in the U.K. and also in Germany and Italy. DARROCH: Yes, very much so. We’ve invested more in terms of what we’ve produced ourselves, and that trend will continue. Each year we’ve invested more on screen and each year we have grown. We are very clear on our pathway and very ambitious in terms of what we want to achieve.

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IN CONVERSATION

raditional media in most countries are being seriously challenged by digital platforms, as readers so often prefer to get news and sports headlines online or on portable devices and viewers opt for ondemand menus instead of linear schedules. This digital migration isn’t as strong in Brazil as it is in other major markets. Television and print are holding strong—at least so far—in large part because of Grupo Globo. This communications behemoth is the largest media company in Latin America and comprises the country’s lead-

ing newspaper, O Globo; the number one television network, TV Globo, which marks its 50th anniversary this year; the Globosat bouquet of pay-TV channels; Projac, a massive tele vision-and-film-production complex; magazines, radio and more. In 2013, Globo posted revenues of $6.3 billion. Globo produces 90 percent of its prime-time schedule—including telenovelas, miniseries, entertainment shows, news and sports—and it is not unusual for it to capture 70-percent audience shares. The finales of its popular telenovelas have even reached 80-percent-plus shares. These novelas captivate viewers night after night with story lines that not only remain faithful to the tried-and-true formula of love, passion and intrigue, but very often weave important social themes and issues that have been known to motivate the public far better than any government-endorsed initiative. Globo has had a strong tradition of “social merchandising,” by which novelas are used as vehicles to educate viewers about a broad range of issues, ranging from alcoholism, teen pregnancy and tolerance to bonemarrow donations. Globo is a leading source of news for the majority of its viewers. And, of course, it has built up considerable expertise in sports coverage, as futebol is the national passion and obsession. During the summer of 2014, Brazil hosted the FIFA World Cup, and the whole world saw Globo’s production prowess and capabilities. They will be on display again in 2016 when Brazil hosts the Summer Olympic Games. Today, Grupo Globo is led by Chairman and CEO Roberto Irineu Marinho, whose grandfather Irineu Marinho founded O Globo in 1925 and whose father, Roberto Marinho, launched the company’s TV network in 1965 and oversaw the expansion into numerous other businesses. Under Roberto Irineu Marinho, Globo rode the wave of Brazil’s galloping economy, which saw the emergence of a middle class with discretionary income. This new purchasing power has fueled the advertising market as well as the growth of pay TV and the success of Globosat. In the last year or so, the Brazilian market has undergone a change. The growth in the economy has slowed and digital platforms are enticing away readers and viewers. Marinho continues to build the group’s core businesses while developing their digital extensions because, as he explains, Globo needs to be ready for whatever technologies and consumer habits the future may hold. The one constant in this ever-changing landscape is the importance of quality programming. Marinho talks to World Screen about the businesses and values he inherited from his father, and the core principles that he remains faithful to as he continually searches for growth opportunities.

ROBERTO IRINEU MARINHO GRUPO GLOBO

By Anna Carugati

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Globo’s significant scripted output includes, from top, the telenovelas Empire and Boogie Oogie, the miniseries The Party and the drama The Hunter.

WS: Your father, Roberto Marinho, founded TV Globo 50 years ago. What were those early years like? What challenges did he have to overcome? MARINHO: To answer your question, I prefer to quote what my father said in an interview: “Contrary to what many people constantly say, TV Globo was not born ready, done and successful. If so, it would not be exciting at all. There were many risks and an apprehensive atmosphere throughout the first days, months and years. I joined such endeavor alone, engaging the best of my efforts and practically all the skills that I had at that time. Despite the pessimism of almost everyone around me, even the closest partners, I always believed in what I was doing. I was absolutely convinced that hard work, relentless tenacity and huge patience would lead us to success. Yet I never deceived myself. I have always been aware that, when it comes to entertainment and journalism, it is not possible to win audience loyalty and market confidence easily and promptly. Those who thought so had a short life [in the business]. I also believe that once you are successful, once you reach success, you cannot afford to become complacent. Complacency has always been the perfect match for failure. I am pleased to be eternally unsatisfied.” It was a difficult beginning, and in 1969—I was 21 years old at that time—I authorized a loan in which my father mortgaged 100 percent of his assets to be able to keep investing in television. Such endorsement was to guarantee that his sons would not contest the validity of the operation, since my father was more than 60 years old. A year and a half after that, with a lot of hard work, Globo became the top-rated network and was able to pay off the loan.

third lesson is to keep the passion for communication, which “motivates us to build a relationship with our audience, to search for innovation and to keep the quality of the final product,” as my father would say.

WS: What lessons did you learn from your father? MARINHO: Father taught us three lessons. The first lesson is to always believe in Brazil. The second lesson is to work with the best and most talented professionals, regardless of friendship, family bonds or ideologies. The

WS: What lessons were learned from Globo’s coverage of the FIFA World Cup that can be used in covering the Rio 2016 Olympic Games? MARINHO: Brazilian people love sports, and world events always bring an additional involvement. The World Cup allowed us to explore even more thorough cov-

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WS: Your father was an active leader at Globo until a very advanced age. How was the transition process when he decided to retire? How did you manage to separate the responsibilities internally? MARINHO: The succession moment is really important in a family business because that is when most of the conflicts arise. We decided to make it a gradual and planned process. To that end, we made four decisions. The first one was to discuss our family values, as well as each other’s dreams so that we could draft the agreements. The second and most difficult decision was that nobody would take our father’s place as [president and CEO]. The three brothers would take his place as a team. This was a tough decision, for it implied leaving any trace of individualism behind, any personal ambition and vanity, in order to assure success. The third decision was to professionalize the management of our companies with the three of us leaving the executive direction of some of them and, together, taking over the group command. We created three coordination boards (Companies, Editorial and Social Responsibility), and each one of us started to manage an area. However, the corporate decisions would be taken as a group, reaching a consensus on each matter. With this model in progress, we began to discuss the new governance of the group, which, from 2003, was implemented and has reached the model we have today.

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erage because it took place in our home territory. We studied new technological resources that helped us [provide more detailed] coverage. We brought the best sports commentators in the country to help explain the event. During the broadcast, we used a [visual] language that took us closer to the audience. The strategy worked. There were six channels (two free-to-air and four pay-TV) broadcasting the World Cup games. TV Globo’s average audience share for all games was 79 percent. For the Olympic Games, we will seek technological innovations. We have already hired the “Golden Team,” composed of Brazilian athletes who had been Olympic medalists, and we intend to go deep into sports information. We aim to highlight and explain each sport to those viewers who do not know about them. WS: The Brazilian economy has suffered a slowdown over the last couple of years. What impact has that had on the advertising market in general and on your own business? MARINHO: Globo has managed to maintain its share of the Brazilian advertising market over the last years because of its attractive and relevant broadcast-program offering. Today we have the 30 top-rated programs on Brazilian television, and the advertising market recognizes our effort. The market comes to us for brand releases, promotion and development. We understand that if the country grows, and so does the market, it will be good for everyone. For Grupo Globo, which has a diversified presence in different segments, the past few years were really positive, particularly due to the growth of television-advertising budgets and the rise in the number of pay-television subscriptions. WS: Globo is financially healthy, but there are new challenges to face, such as the gradual decline in audiences due to on-demand viewing online, especially among young people. How is the company preparing for these technological challenges?

Precious Pearl, which earned an International Emmy for best telenovela, has been a strong seller for Globo in markets around the world. MARINHO: Quality and innovation are our essential principles. We work so that our audience perceives our products as the best, the most creative and innovative ones. These are the pillars that allow us to maintain high audience ratings in all media. In Brazil, free TV garners by far the highest viewing, and TV Globo has a clear leadership in this business. The rate of pay-television subscribers in Brazil has been growing strongly in recent years. Grupo Globo, via Globosat and its joint ventures with international players, is positioned in this segment in a very prominent way due to an offering of more than 30

channels targeting the most diverse audiences. All Grupo Globo companies have digital operations that are responsible for the extension of their brands, content, interactivity, and connection with the audience. As an example we can mention the content that TV Globo offers online, via subscription, and on on-demand platforms. The content of the pay-television channels is also offered to subscribers on other platforms. Our newspapers and magazines can be read on computers, tablets and cell phones. We also offer digitalspecific content, such as web series and the G1 news portal.

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Several TV shows are based on interactivity with the viewer, which is done via applications, websites and other forms of interactivity. We also offer secondscreen applications, which enhance both the content and customers’ experience. Our newsrooms have adopted new schedules and they are currently oriented to “digital first.” The challenges that we are facing using different initiatives are capturing the young audience— the 14- to 25-years-olds—and the intensified use of mobility and short formats. Social media tends to be television’s partner in capturing consumers’ combined attention.

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On the heels of its World Cup coverage, Globo is gearing up for the 2016 Summer Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, for which it has free-TV, pay-TV, internet and mobile broadcast rights. WS: Your free-to-air channel still attracts huge audience shares, something broadcasters in other countries dream about. However, it seems inevitable that a segment of this giant audience will be migrating to pay television, as seen by the recent increase in payTV subscriptions. What can TV Globo, as a free-to-air broadcaster, do to stop this trend? MARINHO: Free-to-air television is a great national asset. But content is what distinguishes us and ensures the public’s loyalty. TV Globo is top rated across all television platforms because it offers the best programs; it is constantly updating, renewing, introducing new formats, and always seeks the best in journalism, sports and entertainment. We have closely followed the progress of pay television and the growth of new media. For this reason, we want to offer our content in various ways for viewers to see their favorite programs as they wish. WS: Globo has huge influence in Brazil and is also an exporter of television programs all over the world. But your international sales, with revenues of around $100 million, are still a small portion of your total revenues. Are you thinking of increasing your influence across national borders? MARINHO: Globo is a Brazilian company, strongly committed to our “Brazilianness.” Our actions, either

in content production or in business affairs, are guided by this commitment. We often have the opportunity to take our productions to other countries, and our telenovelas and series have achieved substantial success abroad. Our telenovela Brazil Avenue was sold to 130 countries. It was broadcast in Argentina with the same success that it achieved here in Brazil. The last episode was broadcast in the Luna Park stadium [in Buenos Aires], which was crowded with people watching it. We currently distribute some channels globally via pay-TV operators, such as TV Globo Internacional and the sports channel PFC Internacional. Both are in Portuguese and target Brazilians living abroad and Portuguesespeaking countries like Angola and Portugal. We also engage in co-productions, aimed at the Portuguese- and Spanish-language markets, through the combination of Globo’s scripts, direction and expertise with local partners’ resources. Yet it does not mean we do not intend to improve our business positioning and assess new opportunities for the group. WS: TV Globo has always included social commentary in its tele novelas, addressing issues such as HIV, abortion and racial prejudice. How successful have these been in terms of trying to inform the public through entertainment?

MARINHO: This has been one of Globo’s main traits since its origin: to promote actions that contribute to the development of society. Over its 50-year history, Globo has launched some wide-reaching campaigns. Informing society is something we have always done, and TV Globo uses all possible spaces to do it, in areas such as public health, citizenship, education and more. These initiatives are known as “social merchandising.” We have touched upon numerous themes, including racism, alcohol abuse, AIDS, abortion, and domestic violence against women and children. The results have been wonderful and sometimes so significant that they have been reflected in official statistics. For instance, bone-marrow donations increased when we discussed leukemia in Family Ties. Globo won the world’s most important social responsibility award, the BITC Awards for Excellence 2001, in the Global Leadership Award category. It is an initiative we are very proud of, one that greatly contributes to the country’s development. WS: TV Globo is celebrating its 50th anniversary. What makes you most proud of the company? Where do you see it ten years from now? MARINHO: Our biggest pride is in the team of professionals who work for our company and their endless drive for achieving the greatest

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quality and innovation. It is rare to find a team anywhere in the world that is both so diverse and so complete as the one we have at Globo. I am not really interested to know where Globo will be five years from now. I am interested in projecting 20 years from now. Why 20 years? Because if we are going to discuss short term, five or ten years from now, we will have to discuss technology. We will have to foresee which handheld device will be used to read magazines and newspapers, or what your TV set at home will be like, if it is going to be big, if it is high quality, 3D, 4K or 8K. We will be stuck discussing formats, devices, distribution platforms; and we will lose sight of what’s essential—content quality and client relationships. It is long-term thinking, which is always strategic, that allows us to arrive safely in the future. We must have a clear vision of what we want to become further down the road. The answer is none other than our main trait, which is the quality of our content and our relationships with clients. We always need to make quality content that both informs and entertains; that surprises the public and is innovative. In short, that is uniquely creative. Consumer behavior is always an unknown variable. That is what we must try to anticipate in order to foresee major trends.

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EXECUTIVE BRIEFING

hen Discovery Channel premiered in 1985, the television landscape in the U.S., and certainly around the world, was a lot less crowded than it is today. Back then, in the early days of the cable industry, Discovery’s founder, John Hendricks, had a vision for a nonfiction programming service that would satisfy viewers’ curiosity about the world around them. This was at a time when the schedules of the three main American broadcast networks were mostly devoid of documentaries.

As cable penetration grew, so did Discovery’s popularity, as it was the first channel to plant its flag in the real-world content field. Soon, sister services launched in the U.S., while the flagship channel was exported and customized for audiences in Latin America, Europe and Asia. Today, Discovery Communications reaches almost 3 billion cumulative subscribers in more than 220 countries and territories through more than 190 worldwide networks. The biggest brands in the portfolio include Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet, Investigation Discovery, Science and the joint venture OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network. David Zaslav has been president and CEO of Discovery Communications since 2007. Since taking the helm, he has overseen efforts to strengthen key brands, focus on creativity and invest in original programming. He also broadened and diversified the company’s portfolio of overseas assets, acquiring SBS Nordic—a bouquet of television channels across Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland—and taking a controlling interest in the top European sports platform, Eurosport. Discovery has also been rolling out free-TV channels, such as DMAX in Germany and Italy and Discovery MAX in Spain. The strategy is to have hybrid businesses—a mix of pay TV and free TV— in several markets. The strong performance of Discovery’s international networks boosted the company’s 2014 revenues, which amounted to $6.3 billion, an increase of 13 percent compared to 2013, and a net income of $1.1 billion. During the last few years, Discovery, once home to only nonfiction programming, has branched out into scripted fare, including Klondike for Discovery Channel and The Challenger Disaster on Science. The appointments of former Hollywood studio executives Rich Ross and John Goldwyn emphasize Discovery’s continued commitment to scripted programming. Nonfiction content, however, remains the primary focus, with investments in such diverse shows as Planet Earth, Gold Rush and Skywire Live with Nik Wallenda, in which daredevil Wallenda crossed the Grand Canyon on a tightrope without a harness. The live broadcast attracted some 13 million viewers. And speaking of viewers, as they wander through linear channels, video-on-demand offerings and streaming services in search of their favorite programming, Discovery wants to be sure it is placing its content on as many platforms as possible. As Zaslav tells World Screen, strong brands, available on multiple platforms and fueled by appealing content, are among the keys to Discovery’s success.

DAVID ZASLAV

DISCOVERY COMMUNICATIONS

By Anna Carugati

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Last year, Discovery Communications completed its acquisition of a controlling interest in Eurosport, Europe’s leading pan-regional sports broadcaster with a bouquet of six pay-TV channels. WS: What have been some of Discovery Communications’ strongest brands, in the U.S. and internationally? ZASLAV: It’s a great time to be in the content business, and particularly exciting because this year we’re celebrating the 30th anniversary of the launch of the

company and the Discovery Channel. What began as one channel in the U.S. is now the most widely distributed network in the world with nearly 500 million subscribers across 220 countries. Fast-forward 30 years, and from that one network we’ve expanded to 53 distinct entertainment

brands, including TLC, Animal Planet and Science. So, it’s fantastic. Discovery Channel will always be our flagship, but we’ve also had great success rolling out many of these other strong brands globally and in the U.S., and we feel like we’re just getting started.

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WS: What are some of the most popular newer brands? ZASLAV: Our hottest new global brands without question are ID [Investigation Discovery] and Turbo [the international version of Velocity]. In 2014 in the U.S., ID had its highest [ratings] ever and is a top five cable network for women. Just last year the network passed the 100-million-home mark outside the U.S. Velocity in the U.S. continues to post double-digit ratings gains and added 5 million U.S. subscribers in the last year; it now reaches 61 million homes and continues its expansion march globally. Velocity—or Turbo as it is known internationally—is taking off, particularly in Latin America, where we have invested and doubled the channel’s subscribers across the region. We are on track to reach more than 125 million homes with Turbo and Velocity by the end of 2015. These are all fantastic examples of the themes we have found that have global appeal, and we are continuously looking at new markets to launch brands that nourish our audiences. WS: This past year, the revenue growth of Discovery’s international businesses outpaced that of its U.S.

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business. What has been driving growth in your international businesses? ZASLAV: Our global brand rollouts have driven the international business. We have an average of 10 channels in more than 220 countries around the world. But we also have local programming, brands and ad and affiliate sales [teams] in offices around the world. Our global brands, paired with our local content and sales teams—our “boots on the ground”—have fueled our incredible, organic, double-digit international growth story—a true differentiator for Discovery. We have many strong markets in our portfolio. I’d say that Latin America has stood out, recently fueled by Discovery Channel, Discovery Kids and Discovery Home & Health, the number one female lifestyle network in the region. Discovery Kids just had its sixth consecutive year as the number one pay-TV network in Brazil, and that’s not just among kids’ channels, that’s number one overall.

WS: Some countries, particularly in Europe, are dealing with economic challenges. How do consumers view the value proposition of pay TV in Europe, even in difficult economic times? ZASLAV: Years ago we made a decision to invest in Europe when many companies were slashing budgets or leaving. While it is certainly a mature market, we’ve been able to grow our market share and reach new audiences across Europe. We’ve strategically rolled out free-to-air channels, like Discovery MAX in Spain and Real Time and DMAX in Italy, to gain market share and maximize ad dollars, and we now have successful “hybrid” businesses in several markets, with strong pay-TV and free-to-air channels. Of course now that we own Eurosport, the premier sports entertainment provider across the continent, we’re using those rights on our platforms and bolstering Eurosport’s offering. [In 2014], from May to the end of the year,

we inked 24 rights deals—everything from soccer to alpine sports to handball—to expand Eurosport 2 locally and Eurosport, the panregional network. So while Europe has its challenges, we believe there are opportunities to reach new audiences and gain share. WS: Are you looking to make acquisitions in the U.S. or internationally? ZASLAV: Discovery has a strong organic growth story, so we don’t need to make acquisitions to continue growing. At the same time, we’re always looking at opportunities to build our scale and deliver new offerings and content to viewers, advertisers and distributors. We are also big believers in acquiring valuable IP rights and owning our content. In 2014, we made two strategic acquisitions on this front: U.K.-based Raw, creators of Discovery Channel’s number one hit series Gold Rush, and all3media, which owns 20 distinct production companies around the

world. IP ownership not only expands our pipeline of content for our channels and distribution platforms around the globe, but also deepens our valuable IP holdings for use across future crossplatform offerings. WS: What business areas still hold potential for growth in the U.S.? How do you envision growing market share? ZASLAV: Our North Star is investing in content that drives our brands and programming forward. From Discovery Channel to Velocity, we are looking at how we can get viewers to spend more time with our content and how we can address white space in the market. What content will nourish them? Discovery Channel is number one on Friday nights with Alaskan Bush People and Gold Rush. Also, 19 Kids and Counting and the new hit Our Little Family have made TLC the number one cable channel on Tuesday nights among women.

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Deadliest Catch is one of Discovery Channel’s biggest hits, both in the U.S. and on its feeds across the globe, chronicling life aboard fishing vessels in the Bering Sea. Beyond Discovery and TLC—our juggernauts—we’ve launched more new brands in the U.S. in the past few years than any other media company: ID, Velocity, Destination America, American Heroes Channel, Discovery Family, Discovery Life Channel and of course OWN:

Oprah Winfrey Network, now the number one network for AfricanAmerican women. Audiences are responding to these networks’ stories and compelling characters, and by delivering great content across these brands we’ve been able to grow our

audience share in the U.S. from 7 percent in 2008 to 12 percent today, even in a mature market. WS: What do the appointments of Rich Ross and John Goldwyn say to the creative community about the programming direc-

Velocity in the U.S. and its sister international brand, Turbo, target male audiences with automotive-related content like Wheeler Dealers. 398 World Screen 4/15

tion Discovery Channel wants to follow? ZASLAV: Rich Ross just started in January and is already making his mark. He’s a terrific creative leader who has already reinvigorated our flagship channel with fresh ideas and perspective. He has hired seasoned, accomplished executives for his leadership team to lead our big tentpole specials and event programming. John Goldwyn, a longtime producer who has developed many feature films and most recently Dexter, [was hired] to oversee Discovery Channel’s scripted and miniseries strategy. Rich and his team will be aggressive in developing both of these categories, with programs such as Racing Extinction, which debuted at Sundance and will be a global television event this fall with our reach into our nearly 500 million homes around the world. I think you will also see Rich build off of Discovery Channel’s current successes, such as Gold Rush and Alaskan Bush People, both of which are top five shows on cable, and launch a return to the roots of Discovery: exploration and igniting curiosity.

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ADVERTISERS’ INDEX

4K Media 251 9 Story Media Group 239, 275, 496 A+E Networks 73, 140, 399, 404 ABC Commercial 435 ABS-CBN International Distribution 447 ABTA 499 AFL Productions 503 Alfred Haber Distribution 91 all3media international 67 allTV 471 AMC Networks International 23 American Cinema International 55 Animation from Spain 269 Applicaster 65 Armoza Formats 302, 303, 315, 317 ARTE France 387, 415 Artist View Entertainment 8, 9 Astro 445 ATRESMEDIA 107 ATV 12, 13 Audiovisual from Spain 204 Australian Children’s Television Foundation 245, 247, 249 BBC Worldwide 308, 309 Beyond Distribution 89 The Bold and the Beautiful 130 Bomanbridge Media 429, 454 BoPaul Media Worldwide 461 Brand Licensing Europe 509 Breakthrough Entertainment 261, 400, 401 Brightcove 456, 457 CAKE 281 Canada Media Fund 113 Canal Futura 137 Canamedia 421 Caracol TV Internacional 59 CBS Studios International 71 CDC United Network 489 Cisneros Media Distribution 203 CJ E&M Corporation 51, 341, 383, 439 CNBC 87 Content Television 85, 143, 379 Cyber Group Studios 212, 213, 287, 293, 294 D-Rights 290 DHX Media 277, 285 DISCOP 470 DQ Entertainment International 218, 219 DreamWorks Animation 214, 215 Eccho Rights 366, 367 Electus International 57 Entertainment One Family 241 Escapade Media 129 Federation Entertainment 393 Foothill Entertainment 265 FOX International Channels Asia Pacific 432 FOX International Channels Content Sales 394, 430 Foxtel 41 Foxx New Media 33 The Fremantle Corporation 125 FremantleMedia 299, 310, 350 FremantleMedia International 183, 185, 355, 368, 431, 433, 455, 458 FremantleMedia Kids & Family Entertainment 280 Fry Communications 175 Gaumont International Television 364, 365 Global Agency 300, 301, 304, 305, 306, 307, 358, 359, 360, 361, 362, 363 Global Screen 381 Globo 1 Globosat 99 GMA Worldwide 127 Grand Prix Media 131 GRB Entertainment 117, 119, 121, 123 Gusto TV 423 Hasbro Studios 237 HBO 69 HBO Asia 437 HBO Latin America 475 HIT Entertainment 235

Imagina International Sales 199 IMPS 253 Incendo 53 INK Global 291 International Academy of TV Arts & Sciences 542, 544, 545 ITV-Inter Medya 4, 5, 374, 375 ITV Studios Global Entertainment 35, 220, 221, 327, 329, 548 Kanal D 6, 7 Keshet International 49 KOCCA 192, 193 Licensing Expo 541 Lightning Entertainment 26, 27 Limelight Design 469 Lionsgate Entertainment 77, 155 Looking Glass International 43 m4e/Telescreen 233, 279 MarVista Entertainment 2, 3, 178 Mediabiz 502 Mediatoon Distribution 262, 264 Miramax 21 Mondo TV S.p.A. 211, 271, 273 Multicom Entertainment Group 547 Muse Distribution International 18, 19 NATPE 494, 507 NHK Enterprises 413 Nippon Television Network 61 Off the Fence 409 ORF-Enterprise 95 Palatin Media 17 Passion Distribution 79 Peace Point Rights 115 Pol-ka Producciones 133, 345 Portfolio Entertainment 255 Power 15 Rainbow 216, 217 Red Arrow International 37, 39 Rewind Networks 453 Rive Gauche Television 81 Saban Brands 149, 231, 289 Screenz 111 Scripps Networks International 419 Secuoya Content Distribution 343 Smilehood Media 451, 481 Smithsonian Channel 45 SOMOS Distribution 135, 151 Sony Pictures Television 321, 323, 325 SPI International 184 Splash Entertainment 257, 259, 288 Starz Worldwide Distribution 47 Studio 100 Media 272 Studio Glam 335, 337, 339 STUDIOCANAL 145, 373 Sullivan Entertainment 10, 11 SVT Sales 29, 31 Talpa Global 311 TCB Media Rights 402, 403 Technicolor Animation 263 Telefe 477 Telefilms 472 Telemundo Internacional 25, 501 Televisa Internacional 201, 347 Televisa Networks 205 Terranoa 417 TM International 243, 333 Tricon Films & Television 411 Turkish Radio & TV Corp. 63 Turner 74, 75 TV5MONDE 443 TVE 206 Twentieth Century Fox TV Distribution 83 Twofour Rights 405 Universal Cinergia Dubbing 491 Vision Films 459 WWE 105, 479 ZDF Enterprises 177, 187, 223, 225, 227, 229, 369 Zodiak Rights 313, 319, 349, 356, 357

4/15 World Screen 543

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WORLD’S END

IN THE STARS Almost every national constitution forbids the establishment of an official state religion. But this secular bent doesn’t stop people from looking to the heavens for answers to life’s most troublesome questions: Will I succeed? Will I find love? Will Jessica Lange scoff at me? Every day, papers and magazines worldwide print horoscopes—projections for people born in a specific month, based on the positions of the stars and planets. While many people rely on these daily, weekly or monthly messages for guidance in their lives, some readers skip over them entirely. The editors of WS recognize that these little pearls of random foresight occasionally prove prophetic. But rather than poring over charts of the zodiac to predict world events, our staff prefers to use past horoscopes in an attempt to legitimize the science. As you can see here, had some of these media figures remembered to consult their horoscopes on significant dates, they could have avoided a few surprises.

Terrence Howard

Jessica Lange

Elton John

Howie Mandel

JEREMY CLARKSON

ELTON JOHN

stranger to controversy, gets suspended after initiating an altercation with a Top Gear producer. Following an internal investigation into the unprovoked physical and verbal attack, the BBC ultimately decides not to renew its contract with Clarkson, who has worked with the broadcaster for more than a decade. Horoscope: “Think before you act, otherwise [you’ll be] having to correct mistakes and apologize to people when you’ve acted impulsively.” (zodiac-signs-online.com)

cott against Dolce & Gabbana, after the company’s designers make controversial comments regarding gay marriage and in vitro fertilization. He vows on Instagram to never wear Dolce & Gabbana again. Just days later, the musician is photographed carrying a D&G shopping bag while walking into a recording studio. Horoscope: “Stick to your convictions and beliefs, as they serve you well.” (nydailynews.com)

Global distinction: Top Gear host. Sign: Aries (b. April 11, 1960) Significant date: March 10, 2015 Noteworthy activity: The TV presenter, who is no

TERRENCE HOWARD

Global distinction: Empire star. Sign: Pisces (b. March 11, 1969) Significant date: March 2, 2015 Noteworthy activity: On The Tonight Show, the actor explains why he “choked” at this year’s Oscars, during which he spoke awkwardly and slammed into the mic while presenting the nominees for best picture. The reason for his odd behavior, Howard tells host Jimmy Fallon, was a combination of distractions, including realizing he forgot to wear a belt and spotting Oprah Winfrey in the audience. Horoscope: “Don’t lose control, because if you lose your cool you won’t be nearly as effective. Relax—the stars are on your side.” (femail.com.au)

JESSICA LANGE

Global distinction: Screen icon. Sign: Taurus (b. April 20, 1949) Significant date: March 15, 2015 Noteworthy activity: During a Q&A session at PaleyFest LA 2015, the American Horror Story actress—who is not returning for the show’s next installment—is asked if news that Lady Gaga is joining the cast of the new season is enough to change her mind about quitting. Lange gives a slightly puzzled look, then smirks as she replies: “What does that mean? I don’t understand the question.” She rolls her head, shrugs her shoulders and attempts to reply, but instead just gives a giggle. Horoscope: “Although it may be difficult, be polite and hold your emotions inside today.” (horoscope-for.com) 546 World Screen 4/15

Global distinction: Flamboyant superstar. Sign: Aries (b. March 25, 1947) Significant date: March 16, 2015 Noteworthy activity: The iconic performer calls for a boy-

MICHELLE RODRIGUEZ

Global distinction: On-screen bad girl. Sign: Cancer (b. July 12, 1978) Significant date: February 28, 2015 Noteworthy activity: A TMZ reporter asks the Latina actress if she will play Green Lantern in an upcoming film, to which she responds, “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever head.” Rodriguez goes on to say that she thinks it’s “stupid” when minorities are cast as characters that were originally intended to be Caucasian. “Stop stealing all the white-people superheroes,” she says. “Make up your own.” Horoscope: “You will get chances to initiate new work. However, you may face losses due to your own words; hence, think before you speak.” (mykundali.com)

HOWIE MANDEL

Global distinction: Germaphobic comedian. Sign: Sagittarius (b. November 29, 1955) Significant date: March 15, 2015 Noteworthy activity: The America’s Got Talent judge is out of town when notorious prankster Roman Atwood decides to haul in more than 4,000 rolls of toilet paper to cover the entertainer’s mansion. The prank-puller sets up a camera to capture all the action and later posts the video on his YouTube page. Atwood confesses, “I wanted to do a very big toilet-paper prank. Being a friend of the Mandels, I was able to talk his son Alex into getting me in the [gated] community and he was also able to talk his mother [Howie’s wife] into playing along.” Horoscope: “Having a good sense of humor will be an important tool to get you through the day.” (sunsigns.org)

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