News 4
DAY 2
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Quote // Unquote Content London Daily pulls out some of the key quotes from yesterday’s sessions. “People can sometimes assume we’re less commercial than we are. For every House of Cards, there’s also a Virgin River. You don’t want to watch the same thing on a Monday as you do on a Friday night.” Tom Lyons, manager of UK series at Netflix, on the streamer’s need for variety “It's a mad scramble. There's a break in production and you find you've lost your camera department to another production that's willing to pay them more. It's a combination of Brexit, the pandemic and increased competition primarily due to the streamers coming in.” Writer and director Frank Spotnitz on the crew crunch in the UK “More than 80% think Peacock won’t be here in five years’ time. Fifty percent think that of the major national and niche SVoD services, only BritBox and Viaplay will still be here in five years’ time.” Mark Oliver, chairman of Oliver & Ohlbaum Associates, on the results of the Business Sentiment Report cocommissioned with C21 “Disney+ may be new but there’s a thread between what has worked on Disney channels in the past and what will work on Disney+ now. There’s a great opportunity for serialised storytelling. It’s not something we’ve been doing but it’s something we want to figure out.” Orion Ross, VP of animation at The Walt Disney Company EMEA
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Holland: impartiality ‘enriches’ BBC Patrick Holland, the BBC’s director of factual, arts and classical music, has rubbished claims that the UK pubcaster’s impartiality policy risked making its content “vanilla.” Tim Davie has made impartiality in programming a major priority at the BBC since he was appointed director general in 2020. Holland defended the Strictly Come Dancing broadcaster’s nonbias stance and said it “enriches” commissioning. “I'm not sure if people completely understand what impartiality is, and it can often be seen as a way of making content more vanilla or taking away the opinion,” he said. “But what my team would say, and producers who come to us would say, is impartiality is a way of bringing the audience a variety of challenge,
Patrick Holland
conflict and counterpoints.” Holland also said some factual programming on larger SVoD services risked being a “polemic’ because of a lack of balanced arguments. “There is some content on SVoDs where I don’t think the journalism is good enough, and that’s because nobody has said, ‘Where is the counterargument?’, ‘Am I really understanding this?’, ‘Is this just a polemic that is going to go unchallenged?’” he added.
The BBC has come under increasing political pressure from the UK government on issues such as the licence fee, governance and executive appointments, and some critics have accused it of inadequately scrutinising the ruling Conservative Party. Asked if he felt pressure from above and would shy away from commissioning factual content on political hot-potato issues such as Brexit, Holland said: “I wouldn’t shy away from anything. You take on subjects that are going to resonate with the audience, whether that be Brexit or the Charles Moore documentary series that we commissioned about Thatcher’s relationship with Reagan, or a series on climate change. We will go into areas with great complexity and it’s our job to illuminate them.”
No regrets for YouTube over ditching scripted While big-budget scripted is driving streaming subscriptions around the globe, YouTube has no regrets about moving out of the scripted space four years ago and focusing squarely on unscripted. “Honestly, we never even looked back,” Luke Hyams, head of originals EMEA at YouTube, told a Content London panel on Tuesday. The Google-owned platform has been refining and fine-tuning its unscripted commissioning strategy over the past year, and Hyams
believes the company is poised for continued growth. “What we’ve found over the last year that’s worked for us is when there’s a big moment in Luke Hyams the real world that we can make a YouTube original that feels like it is connected to it,” he said, citing a five-hour Pride special launched last year, and a planned Fifa World Cup special for next year. Creating original content for YouTube is a unique proposition,
as the programming is competing with its own user-generated content. And while the videosharing platform has worked with celebrities to attract eyeballs, Hyams said the talent found on the platform has never been more important to its original content ambitions. “I’ll be real with you – YouTube talent has never been more key for us, particularly UK YouTube talent, which we feel has a bright future,” he said.
Penélope Cruz explores child marriage for VIS Social Impact, Paramount+
Penélope Cruz (photo by Georges Biard)
The second project to originate from the cause-driven production division of ViacomCBS International Studios (VIS) will be a docuseries about child marriage, narrated and exec produced by movie star Penélope Cruz (Vicky Cristina Barcelona) for Paramount+. Not a Bride (4x30') comes from Pedro Almodóvar's prodco El Deseo and Madrid-based Mogambo and will expose the shockingly high rate of child marriages around the world. It will be discussed at Content London later today as part of a session on VIS Social Impact, the fledgling studio division dedicated to the development of social impact-driven content. Written and directed by Dario Troiani (Violet, Kalebegiak, A.W.), the series has been picked up by ViacomCBS streaming service Paramount+ internationally.
