TV Europe October 2014

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TVEUROPE

WWW.TVEUROPE.WS

OCTOBER 2014

MIPCOM EDITION

Over-the-Top Platforms / RTL’s Anke Schäferkordt / CANAL+ Group’s Bertrand Meheut / Zodiak’s Marc-Antoine d’Halluin

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CONTENTS FEATURE

Lessons from TV Economics

12 OVER THE TOP

OTT and on-demand platforms are reshaping the media landscape across Europe.

There is good and bad news coming out of Europe these days, some good, mostly bad.

Ricardo Seguin Guise Publisher Anna Carugati Editor Mansha Daswani Executive Editor Kristin Brzoznowski Managing Editor Joanna Padovano Associate Editor Joel Marino Assistant Editor Simon Weaver Online Director Victor L. Cuevas Production & Design Director Phyllis Q. Busell Art Director Cesar Suero Sales & Marketing Director Faustyna Hariasz Sales & Marketing Coordinator Terry Acunzo Business Affairs Manager

Ricardo Seguin Guise President Anna Carugati Executive VP & Group Editorial Director Mansha Daswani Associate Publisher & VP of Strategic Development TV Europe © 2014 WSN INC. 1123 Broadway, #1207 New York, NY 10010 Phone: (212) 924-7620 Fax: (212) 924-6940 Website: www.tveurope.ws

The continent is slipping back into recession—even Germany, the economic engine in the region, has seen its growth come almost to a standstill. The country’s win at the FIFA World Cup, and crushing defeat of Brazil 7-1, served as a welcome distraction for a while, but the current slump is reigniting the debate about austerity measures versus stimulating growth. Austerity has helped in countries like Ireland and Spain, although Spain did more than reduce spending and increase taxes; it also reformed its labor laws. Now Spain is the one country in Europe that is experiencing recovery, albeit a slow one. The situation is grim in Italy and France, and fallout from the economic sanctions against Russia is causing financial jitters across all of Europe.

I’m no economist, but European financial ministers might learn a lesson from two major television companies in the region: the RTL Group and the CANAL+ Group. Both have known when to cut costs and be fiscally responsible. But they also know the importance—and critical need, actually—of investing in programming and content that will attract viewers and push business forward. When running countries, not just companies, simply cutting costs during tough economic times is not the answer; investment is necessary as well.

RTL and CANAL+ also share the same approach to technology; they want to provide consumers flexibility in how they enjoy content. We have interviews with RTL Group’s Anke Schäferkordt and CANAL+ Group’s Bertrand Meheut. Both RTL Television, RTL Group’s flagship channel in Germany, and CANAL+ are celebrating 30th birthdays this year. They each began operating in 1984 and in media years, not calendar years, that seems like three lifetimes ago, not three decades.

It’s interesting to note that what started as a pure free-TV business, RTL, has added pay-TV channels to its bouquet in an effort to diversify revenues. Equally, what started as a subscription-driven pay-TV company, CANAL+, has recently acquired advertiser-supported free-TV channels.

In today’s rapidly changing media landscape, and in a region as economically volatile as Europe is now, it’s critical for companies to be forward-thinking and flexible. In this issue we also speak to Zodiak’s Marc-Antoine d’Halluin, Shine’s Nadine Nohr and Tele München’s Herbert L. Kloiber, plus the executive producers Pau Freixas (Red Band Society) and Patrick Spence (Fortitude). Engaging programming is not just good for business, it’s good for viewers seeking escape from not-so-cheery reality.

—Anna Carugati

12 INTERVIEWS

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CANAL+ Group’s Bertrand Meheut

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RTL Group’s Anke Schäferkordt

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Zodiak Media’s Marc-Antoine d’Halluin

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Tele München’s Herbert L. Kloiber

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Fortitude’s Patrick Spence

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Shine International’s Nadine Nohr

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The Red Band Society’s Pau Freixas

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Atresmedia No Identity / The Secret of Old Bridge / Sing Along After achieving high ratings in Italy, Atresmedia’s daily soap opera The Secret of Old Bridge is ready to conquer new territories, says José Antonio Salso, the company’s head of sales and acquisitions. “We have received a lot of interest from international buyers, especially from Eastern Europe,” he adds.

“More than 900 episodes are already produced, and the series is still on the air in Spain. MIPCOM is a great opportunity to reach new markets for the show.” Also of interest is No Identity, a prime-time scripted series about a lawyer who discovers she was the victim of an illegal international adoption network.

Rounding out the company’s highlights is Sing Along, a dramedy about a singer forced to return to the neighborhood where she grew up after learning her sister suffers from a terminal illness.

“Our main goal this MIPCOM is to consolidate the presence of Atresmedia’s series in the international market.”

—José Antonio Salso No Identity

Audiovisual from Spain Magic Mania / Pepe’s Beach Bar / The Sea Chef The Audiovisual from Spain umbrella brand was established to promote Spain’s audiovisual production and distribution in the international market. There will be around 20 companies exhibiting at MIPCOM under the Audiovisual from Spain banner. This includes Atresmedia, which is presenting No Identity; Filmax International, offering I Know Who You Are; and Mediaset España, showcasing Pepe’s Beach Bar. There are also a number of companies that will be exhibiting entertainment formats. This includes Veralia, which is highlighting Magic Mania, and Secuoya, which had success at MIPTV with The Shower. Phileas Productions will be at the market with its hit format Don’t Say It, Bring It. In the way of factual, Medina Media is launching The Sea Chef.

The Sea Chef

Filmax International The Red Band Society / I Know Who You Are The success of The Red Band Society has helped Filmax International cement its place as “an important player in the TV-drama field,” according to Ivan Diaz, the head of the company’s international division. “The show has been sold in many territories, and a big American adaptation, produced by Amblin Television and ABC Studios, premiered this fall on FOX in the U.S., which is a great achievement for a Spanish drama. In the following months, there’ll be more adaptations of the show to start airing in several territories, and this show has become a very strong property for us after just two seasons produced for the Catalan public network TV3.” Filmax International is launching another new drama at MIPCOM, I Know Who You Are.

“We’re very excited with our new TV division at Filmax.”

—Ivan Diaz The Red Band Society 182 World Screen 10/14

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Global Screen Storm of Love / Homicide Unit Istanbul / Finest Fairy Tales The romantic series Storm of Love is celebrating its 2,000th episode, and Global Screen is bringing the latest season to MIPCOM. “Storm of Love is not only lavishly produced and based on excellent screenplays, its target group is also extremely faithful and sought-after,” says Marlene Fritz, the company’s head of TV sales, of the female-skewed show. At MIPCOM, Global Screen is also presenting Homicide Unit Istanbul. “The excellent ratings in Germany and Italy have created a buzz among the buyers, and we expect to sell the movie collection broadly,” says Fritz. There are new TV movies from the Finest Fairy Tales collection ready for delivery. “As the content is known and the quality is high, the fairy tales are a perfectly universal [offering],” says Fritz.

“Homicide Unit Istanbul is a powerpacked 11-title package of highvalue mysteries set in Istanbul, one of Europe’s biggest and most exciting cities.”

Homicide Unit Istanbul

—Marlene Fritz

Imagina International Sales The Manor House The Czech period drama The Manor House, a MIPCOM highlight for Imagina International Sales, is a family saga set in 1920s Prague that blends mystery, a murder investigation and romance. “Even though the series is set in the Czech Republic and reflects the situation of the country in the ’20s, the plots are universal and appealing to any audience worldwide,” notes Barbora Susterova, sales manager for Imagina.

The company hopes to sell the title to important buyers in several territories, with an emphasis on Latin America. To that end, the series is being dubbed into Spanish for acquisitions in that region. “I’m convinced that it doesn’t really matter where the content comes from as long as it is outstandingly good, as is the case with The Manor House,” Susterova says.

“We believe that The Manor House is an exceptional production, one of the best in the territory, and therefore suitable for any channel.”

The Manor House

—Barbora Susterova

SPI International FilmBox / FightBox / FilmBox Live SPI International has gained a strong presence in Central and Eastern Europe thanks to the increasing footprint of its FilmBox movie channels. “Our objective is to make our premium channels more competitive with exclusive local premieres of such productions as The Musketeers and Call the Midwife,” says Berk Uziyel, the executive director of FilmBox International. Alongside its FilmBox movie channels, SPI International has launched FightBox in Europe. “We are very proud of the recent addition of live content to our FightBox channel,” says Uziyel. “Our goal is to bring a variety of live events featuring fighters originating from the countries where the channel is available.” The flagship online service FilmBox Live has received heavy promotion from the company as of late in Poland, Romania and Hungary.

“In Europe, we keep expanding our pay-TV channel distribution in countries in the east and southeast.”

FightBox 184 World Screen 10/14

—Berk Uziyel

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TM International Sapphire Blue / Valentine’s Kiss / Cosmos Following on the success of Ruby Red, TM International is launching Sapphire Blue at MIPCOM. The new feature film is based on the second part of the best-selling Precious Stone book trilogy by Kerstin Gier. Carlos Hertel, the head of international sales at TM International, believes that the cast of talented and attractive newcomers in the film will appeal to young audiences. TM International is also presenting the miniseries Valentine’s Kiss, which is from the Rosamunde Pilcher collection. “As with all our previous Pilcher miniseries, the production value is simply outstanding and way above other Pilcher adaptations,” says Hertel. TM International has seven new episodes of the wildlife documentary series Cosmos as well.

“Sapphire Blue has a unique blend of time-traveling mystery combined with adventure and a love story that hits a nerve with the teenage audience.”

Sapphire Blue

—Carlos Hertel

TV5MONDE Le plus grand patissier / Les carnets de Julie / Le journal de l’économie After 30 years in the market, the TV5MONDE channel is finding a new, younger audience, according to Diane Couderc, the regional director for Europe. “It reaches out to everyone who likes the French culture and lifestyle, and who has an appetite for the world in its diversity,” says Couderc. The French-language channel has subtitles available in seven languages: English, Russian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Romanian and French (for those looking to learn the language). Programming highlights of TV5MONDE in Europe include a second season of the culinary competition series Le plus grand patissier. There’s also the lifestyle show Les carnets de Julie. The news program Le journal de l’économie, meanwhile, spotlights the economy daily and has a weekly focus on the success of French businesses.

Le plus grand patissier

Le journal de l’économie

TVE Victor Ros / Vicente Ferrer / Prim, the Murder on Turk Street Set in Madrid at the end of the 19th century, Victor Ros is a scripted series about an inspector who solves mysterious crimes through scientific methods. That title is just one of many TVE hopes international buyers will pick up at MIPCOM. “Victor Ros takes the detective genre to the quality of production expected from TVE,” says María Victoria Altemir, TVE’s deputy director of marketing and commercial. “We hope it will be an international success thanks to its mixing of mystery and action.” Another period title is the TV movie Prim, the Murder on Turk Street, a conspiracy thriller set in 1870s Spain, with the made-for-TV film Vicente Ferrer rounding out the company’s highlights. That title is about a Spanish aid worker who spends 30 years struggling to help the underprivileged of India.

“Victor Ros is one of the most important scripted titles we’re presenting at MIPCOM.” Victor Ros 186 World Screen 10/14

—María Victoria Altemir

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OVER the TOP

Hong Kong skyline.

OTT and on-demand platforms are reshaping the media landscape across Europe.

By Jay Stuart erhaps the most highly awaited television launch in Europe this year was not that of a traditional channel at all but that of an OTT service—the kick-off of Netflix in Germany in September. The OTT market in Germany is already crowded.

The lineup of existing SVOD services offering Hollywood fare includes Amazon with its Prime Instant Video offer, Sky Deutschland’s Snap and Vivendi-owned Watchever. The German free-TV broadcasters, meanwhile, have their own online platforms.

The emergence of OTT is possibly the most important innovation to hit the television business since digital channels began to proliferate on cable and satellite platforms. For the first time in many years, there are big new players in the market and new stand-alone channels on a new technological platform. Industry veterans see the

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advent of OTT opening a new stage of competition, as the emergence of pay TV did.

The big difference with this innovation is that OTT goes straight into the consumer’s home without an intermediating cable or satellite package. This new approach has had an immediate impact on the business of TV production and distribution, probably faster than anything that has happened before. OTT video services can be linear or on-demand. From the perspective of incumbent pay-TV providers, OTT is potentially a threat.

For content owners, it’s certainly an opportunity. Eyecatching OTT deals seem to be happening every day. For the Netherlands, for example, Netflix has made deals with Walt Disney Studios for feature films and with NBCUniversal for films and series. In the U.K., Amazon

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Sky Deutschland recently revamped its companion online service Sky Go with additional content and value-added features.

Prime Instant Video is the exclusive window of CBS Studios International’s sci-fi thriller series Extant, which started its online run in July on the day after its premiere on CBS in the U.S. The platform also has a deal with Tandem for Crossing Lines.

SOARING SPENDING Global spending on OTT video will rise to $4.7 billion (€3.53 billion) by 2018, according to Strategy Analytics.

Even more bullish, PwC predicts that OTT streaming revenues will increase to $10.1 billion (€7.8 billion) in 2018.

While forecasts show incumbent pay-TV operators grabbing much of the growing pie, it is pure-play services such as Netflix and Amazon’s streaming offerings that are generating the buzz.

According to Clemens Schwaiger, the global head of digital media strategies at the Telecommunication, Information, Media & Electronics (TIME) practice at the Arthur D. Little management consultancy, the excitement around the newcomers is still a bit greater than the market reality at this point.

“OTT is not having a big impact on the TV market as yet,” he says. “The buzz is bigger than the reality. About 99 percent of the value of video and more than 80 percent of the consumption of video still come from television. But nobody would say that OTT does not represent a major change.”

“OTT is a fundamental change,” says Jakob Mejlhede, the senior VP of acquisitions and programming at one of Europe’s biggest TV players, Modern Times Group (MTG), and chief content officer of its digital division, MTGx.

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“There has been a surge of competition in SVOD services. It has really been quite dramatic.”

To put what’s happening in perspective, he says the current climate is “like pay-TV competition” in the early days of that sector.

“OTT is absolutely growing in volume, and the new services are growing as businesses,” says Gina Brogi, executive VP of worldwide pay TV and SVOD at Twentieth Century Fox Television Distrubution. “I think they will live and continue to evolve. There is room for all of these platforms.”

OPENING WINDOWS The traditional program-distribution business has actually accommodated OTT without too much trouble so far.

“SVOD has almost always been a part of the business of subscription television,” Brogi says. “It has evolved into an OTT business, and this has caused our business to evolve.”

The windowing structure continues to work for movies— theatrical, then premium pay TV. Many traditional linear services have their own on-demand services. So in the case of Sky, for example, a film could be on Sky Movies and ondemand and on Sky’s OTT service, NOW TV (which was launched to compete with new OTT providers). “Whether they buy separately or together with the linear services depends on the market,” Brogi says.

Television series usually start on advertiser-supported freeTV channels. They could be on SVOD after that. Frequently, SVOD is a way to offer previous seasons of series that are still on linear channels. In the case of 24, for example, when the

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British pay-TV giant Sky widened its potential customer base with the contract-free service NOW TV, delivering entertainment, news and sports, including English Premier League football action.

limited series 24: Live Another Day aired on FOX, the previous eight seasons were available on Amazon Prime in the U.S. Internationally, the studio has used different iterations of the same tactic.

SVOD can also offer an alternative for shows with more niche audiences. “It can breathe life into series that might not have a place in the market otherwise,” Brogi says.

This has been the case for MTG, which has used SVOD to get more value out of shows that might struggle on linear free TV. “We have seen a decline in linear ratings,” says Mejlhede.

“Part of the reason is that many U.S. series are more narrow in appeal than they used to be. They struggle to find a broad linear television audience, but they can work well on SVOD. Take a personal favorite of mine like Dexter [from CBS Studios International]. It had dismal television ratings but it is a strong SVOD program. Thanks to Viaplay [MTG’s online streaming platform], suddenly the show became viable for us.”

BEING TERRITORIAL From the content owners’ viewpoint, the OTT market may be pretty smooth sailing, but for stand-alone OTT services like Netflix, the rights market is tricky.

“The video market is riddled with national territory rights,” says Arthur D. Little’s Schwaiger. “You still need to buy rights nationally. That’s why it’s taking Netflix so long to conquer Europe. There are specific OTT rights, subscription video rights, but these are traditionally the last window.”

Netflix also expanded into Austria, Switzerland, France, Belgium and Luxembourg this year, having launched in the U.K. and Ireland, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden in 2012 and in the Netherlands in 2013. Since its birth in 2007, the streaming service has grown to more than 50 million subscribers in 40-plus countries with close to 28 percent of them outside the U.S. at the end of the second quarter of 2014. A report from Digital TV Research issued prior to the European expansion ranked the U.K. as Netflix’s second-biggest mar-

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ket outside the U.S. with 4.5 million subs, followed by Canada and Sweden.

Netflix has an interesting situation in Austria, where the company launched last month. House of Cards, one of its signature original series, repped by Sony Pictures Television, has been licensed to public broadcaster ORF, so it does not have the show for its own OTT service.

“The value from television for rights’ owners is much greater, and it is going to remain that way for a very long time,” Schwaiger continues. “The rights business is all about negotiation. Pay-TV companies and rights’ owners want to protect their businesses. Deals are negotiated very carefully.”

Viasat is one company buying exclusive OTT rights. “If I am going to make a big output commitment I want to have everything,” says Mejlhede. “I’m not interested in having freeTV rights to a show that’s on Netflix for SVOD. Over the last year or so, we have been seeing how we can convert the rights in our output deals to a mixture of free-TV and SVOD. Output deals are under pressure in many places. But you can provide a good solution for the rights’ owners if you have all platforms, as we do.”

ALL-ACCESS PASS For Ioris Francini, the president of IMG Events & Media, “technology is further enabling rights’ owners to segment their offering and enabling consumers to access specific content.

OTT will not be a revolution. It will improve access.”

In the long run, Schwaiger says, OTT will not kill off traditional pay-TV companies like BSkyB because of the importance of premium sports, which have their established subscriber bases and whose rights cost more than OTT players can afford.

“OTT won’t demolish the infrastructure of pay TV,” Francini says flatly. “That’s not going to happen. OTT is about the long tail of choice.”

High-profile Netflix might not be the biggest OTT challenger to the status quo. The company is a heavyweight in the OTT-only space, but compared to its main adversary, online retailer Amazon, it’s actually a lightweight in the bigger economic scheme of things.

Amazon’s launch in the video-subscription business in 2011 opened the door to a new kind of bundling well beyond the old tiering model of cable and pay TV. Amazon Prime members can access thousands of movie and TV titles on their Amazon Instant Video service, at no additional charge beyond the annual fee they pay for expedited delivery of their Amazon orders. It’s probably not a coincidence that the fast-delivery fee has risen to $99 in the U.S. since the inclusion of video.

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Amazon Prime Instant Video is licensing a range of content for its European services, including the MTV series Awkward.

“By bundling its SVOD service with Amazon Prime, Amazon is using content to drive e-commerce,” says Bernd Riefler, chief marketing officer at Munich-based research company veed analytics. “This is scary for broadcasters.”

And it presents a real challenge to Netflix.

INTO THE AMAZON “The stand-alone model faces an uphill battle,” Riefler says.

“Netflix has a superior product, but it does not have the crossselling potential of the competition. Perhaps its new [marketing alliance] with Deutsche Telekom will improve the prospects.”

Analysis from veed also says that Amazon Prime offers the largest catalogue of current movies and TV shows in Germany, and the biggest selection of recent movies and TV shows, with a very low price point. “Netflix has a superior product in terms of technology and user-friendliness, but ultimately the user decides based on price and content.”

“Amazon is in a strong position because the video offer fits so well into the existing e-commerce business,” says Arthur D. Little’s Schwaiger. “It already has customers and is earning revenue from other sources. It has massive cash flow and pricing power and can bundle video with other offers. Netflix, on the other hand, is investing cash flow and debt-financing and making investment rounds. The picture would change immediately if Netflix were to be acquired by a big player like Google.”

Schwaiger sees Apple, which dominates online music, as a big disappointment in the OTT space. “They don’t seem to have a new strategy. The music model is a transaction model, and that will be hard to move into the video space. Video will be a subscription business. Competition will focus on the size of catalogues. Having a big catalogue is important.”

That’s because video content is “not easily substitutable,” he says. His explanation goes like this: “If you look at music, there are a few big labels. Let’s say three. You could have deals with

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two of the three, but if the consumer wants Madonna and she belongs to the one you don’t have, that consumer will not want you. The same is increasingly true of TV. For the platform it’s hard to have everything. It’s not affordable.”

That’s where the strong push by OTT players into original content comes in. “Original content offers differentiation and exclusivity,” Schwaiger says.

DRIVING SUBSCRIPTIONS Strategy Analytics sees stand-alone OTT as a proposition “addressing the holdouts—who will not be swayed by traditional premium-TV offerings—by promising high-quality content including, crucially, live sports, shorter commitment periods, a lower cost of entry and much simpler installation and hardware requirements than traditional pay-TV services.”

IMG’s Francini cites the example of TennisTV, which offers live ATP World Tour and WTA events for a subscription of $129.95 (€100) a year. “If you’re a tennis fan and you just want to watch tennis and don’t care about anything else, then OTT in this case is a replacement for Sky in a more effective way.

It’s much cheaper than any Sky package. Maybe you want to get Netflix too for £5.99 (€7.50) a month. You’re a happy boy.”

Pay-TV operators have moved to counter the stand-alone OTT challenge. They have the advantage of being able to add a Netflix-type OTT service on top of their TV offer. Comcast has done this in the U.S. BSkyB has Sky Go for higher-tier bundles.

In Germany, Sky Deutschland cut the subscription price for its OTT service, Snap, to €3.99 ($5), down from €9.99 ($13), ahead of Netflix’s launch in the territory.

MTG’s Mejlhede sees SVOD as an extension of pay TV that can reach new audiences. “Cable and satellite pay TV is largely a family product,” he says. “We are finding success with a new group of consumers, young males for instance, who want premium sports but would not subscribe to traditional pay TV.”

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Watchever in Germany has built up a strong subscriber base with a mix of imported and local shows, among them ZDF Enterprises’ Krupp: A Family Between War and Peace.

Viasat is offering live sports via OTT in a premium package costing about €25 ($32) per month compared with the usual €10 ($12) for the lower-tier offer. That has helped its Viaplay keep pace with regional OTT rivals.

OTT is by no means only an opportunity for pay-TV companies. Ad-supported linear channels can benefit too, as Viacom International Media Networks (VIMN) has found as both a channel provider and a source of programs.

“OTT is another distribution opportunity for the content from Viacom’s iconic global entertainment brands, including Comedy Central, MTV and Nickelodeon,” says Arran Tindall, senior VP of commercial and content distribution at VIMN. “We already make multiple rights windows for our content available. At the moment most of VIMN’s OTT activity is for third-party SVOD services.

There are some linear OTT players, and we are engaging with these operators too for distribution of our linear services. In some markets we have done deals with OTT operators for the rights to individual titles owned by Viacom or packages of content. Both SVOD and linear OTT offer opportunities for a return on the content investments that we continue to make. Viacom’s annual content spend of $3 billion (€2.2 billion) is still geared towards our own branded networks and digital properties in the first instance. Viacom controls the IP to the vast majority of its content. Where we do buy content from third parties, the OTT rights would be taken into consideration as part of the acquisition. We are open to the idea of partnering with OTT providers on content initiatives.”

FAMILIAR FACES “The same players who are big in TV will be the big players in OTT,” predicts Leonard Fertig, the CEO of Motive Television, which develops software for delivering ondemand TV across any network. “Major broadcasters have deep relationships with the advertising business and with content providers, and they have a brand relationship with consumers. They know how to create pro-

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gramming and curate channels. And they have their own distribution assets.”

Motive Television is developing the ability to deliver programming that normally requires broadband infrastructure, such as OTT channels, over the air. “Terrestrial distribution is cheaper,” he says. “The networks are already in place.

With fairly cheap software they can do the same things as broadband.” In other words, in the future OTT might not be confined to the Internet.

Fertig says he sees consolidation coming in OTT. “Even Netflix is doing deals and forming joint ventures with broadcasters in order to emulate assets they don’t have. The old players will be the new players.”

THE HEART OF THE MATTER And content will remain king. “A lot of tendencies favor rights’ owners and content producers,” says Schwaiger. “We have analyzed the trends in revenue from consumer and advertising spending, and we see that there has been significant growth in what rights’ owners and producers pull out of the market. At the same time there has been an increase in the volume of production.”

He says that if he were a content producer looking at OTT, he would focus on two things. “First, I would make tacit attempts to cut out the middleman and go direct to the consumer. HBO is doing this in the Nordics. Second, I would try to create and preserve healthy competition, between pay TV and OTT and between OTT players. You don’t want consolidation under Amazon and Netflix. You don’t want a repeat of the music scenario where iTunes became allpowerful as the only competitor. The rights’ owner has plenty of leverage and plenty of opportunity to play buyers off against each other. The business is all about negotiation.”

That negotiation might mean a growing value for OTTonly rights. “You can differentiate rights for OTT,” says Riefler. “It is becoming more complicated, but at the end of the day there could be more money in the market and programmers will probably benefit.”

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By Anna Carugati

The terms “game changer” and “disruptor” are bandied about so often these days. We take for granted that updated versions of our mobile phones or tablets will be released every year and that platforms will constantly innovate. We may not remember that 30 years ago, one of the first major disruptors hit the television landscape in France, altering it forever.

It was the premium pay service CANAL+, which launched in November 1984. It was way ahead of its time. It developed a revolutionary philosophy: put customers first and offer them the type of programming that they couldn’t find on any other TV channel. This was back in the days when on the dial of French TV sets there were only three channels. Via a scrambled over-the-air signal, CANAL+ established a successful formula—films, sports and documentaries—that served as a model for pay-TV services in other countries.

CANAL+ also offered more than made-in-France programming, including Hollywood blockbusters and TV series from the U.S. and other countries. Viewers embraced the service, and some 1 million subscribers had signed up by 1986. The 1990s saw the launch of a bouquet of channels in France, and subsequently the company began launching pay channels in other countries.

Today, parent company CANAL+ Group boasts a total of 14.7 million subscribers, of which 9.5 million are in France. The rest are in Poland, through the nc+ platform; in Vietnam, with K+; and in French-speaking territories around the world.

In France, CANAL+ produces its own channels and also offers a package of some 150 channels through CANALSAT. In recent years, the pay-TV group has also launched three national free-TV channels: the general-entertainment D8, the all-news service i>TELE and the youth-targeted music channel D17.

CANAL+ has always been committed to offering its customers the latest technological innovations and the easiest and most convenient ways to watch movies and TV programming. CANALPLAY offers unlimited on-demand viewing by subscription. The myCANAL portal gives CANAL+ and CANALSAT subscribers access to all the programs and on-demand content available to them as part of their plan, on whatever devices they want, in addition to personalized TV and recommendations, remote recording and tablet remote-control capability. A bouquet of YouTube channels rounds out the CANAL+ digital offerings.

From its earliest years, CANAL+ has been a strong supporter of the French feature-film industry. STUDIOCANAL, a subsidiary of the CANAL+ Group, is a leading European co-producer, producer, acquirer and distributor of international feature films and TV series. It releases more than 50 films a year and in 2012 acquired a majority stake in Tandem, which specializes in high-quality TV miniseries and series, to boost its production of original fare for television.

The chairman of CANAL+ Group, Bertrand Meheut, talks to TV Europe about the impact CANAL+ has had on the French media industry and his plans for the company’s future—while always maintaining a commitment to quality and innovation.

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Stalwarts on the CANAL+ schedule include Les Guignols de l’info (left), on air since the late ‘80s, and Le Grand Journal (right), a nightly news and talk show.

TV EUROPE: Since its launch in 1984, how has CANAL+ changed and improved the TV landscape in France?

MEHEUT: That’s a broad question that calls for an elaborate answer.

CANAL+ has been a pioneer in television from the day it launched on November 4, 1984, when it became the first privately owned TV channel in France. At that time, there were only three channels in France, all state-owned and run. Since then, CANAL+ has been at the forefront of many developments in the industry, starting with content.

Over the years, CANAL+ has played a crucial role in building up the popularity of sports that had very little airtime, including French premiership soccer, rugby and golf.

The channel quickly became [synonymous with] offbeat entertainment shows and recently released movies.

CANAL+ is also well known for world-class TV series after moving into original programming with shows that have since aired in prime time in many countries, including the U.S. As the first media group in France to introduce set-top boxes in people’s living rooms, CANAL+ has always been a driving force in implementing new technology. We were the first company to launch digital satellite TV in Europe.

We pioneered HD, as well as high-end, IP-enabled settop boxes. In 2007, we triggered consolidation of the French pay-TV market when we acquired rival DTH platform TPS. Today, our pay-TV business reaches 6.1 million French households.

We have recently expanded into free-to-air TV, broadening the market. In just two years, our main channel, D8, has reached fifth place nationally in overall ratings, and it’s the first-place alternative channel behind the four historic networks [TF1, M6, France 2 and France 3].

At the same time, we moved aggressively into the Internet video business with CANALPLAY, a fast-growing market leader in SVOD. Our channels on YouTube are among the top entertainment channels in France.

We are by far the largest and most profitable media group in the country.

TV EUROPE: How has CANAL+ supported the French film industry?

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MEHEUT: The story between CANAL+ and the French movie industry goes back 30 years. In 1984, we committed to investing roughly 10 percent of our revenues in French movie production in return for the right to broadcast those movies just one year after theatrical release. This system has helped France build one of the leading and most dynamic movie industries in Europe and even the world.

In 2013, we invested a total of €150 million ($193 million) in just over 110 movies, which represents half of all the movies produced that year in France.

TV EUROPE: You have said that one of the priorities this year is to strengthen the group’s program offering.

MEHEUT: Strengthening our program offering is part of our everyday job. Competition in this business is tough and, as a premium channel, we want to ensure that our subscribers always get the best content. Obviously, sports are key. We have already been pretty successful this year in this domain after winning key soccer rights, which allow us to secure top French championship and European UEFA Champions League games for several more years. We also won exclusive rights to the French rugby league, and rugby is the second-biggest sport in France. We have a strong lineup of original series, which have become essential in attracting new subscribers—almost as essential as movies, of which we air more than 400 first runs every year.

TV EUROPE: Tell us about the importance of original productions and STUDIOCANAL’s role in providing them.

MEHEUT: Over the years, original production has become an important reason why people subscribe to pay TV. This is fairly new in France, where for a long time pay TV was driven essentially by movies and sports. But these are not programs we always have great control over. Sports rights can be lost. This is why we decided to move aggressively into original programming and give the public another good reason to pick us over anyone else. Since then, we have been able to produce exciting, high-quality drama with production values way above the French average.

Some of them, like Spiral, The Returned or Borgia, sold in many countries and aired in prime time on leading networks. But we feel there is still room for improvement in

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CANAL+ has become known for its distinctive original dramas, including the recent global hit Les Revenants (The Returned).

order to eventually reach U.S. production standards. Most of the previous projects were initiated and developed by CANAL+. But it makes sense to rely more heavily on our affiliate STUDIOCANAL, already a European leader in movie production, which has recently expanded into TV series production by acquiring Tandem, a German company behind the success of The Pillars of the Earth and Crossing Lines, and the U.K.-based RED Production Company (Queer As Folk).

TV EUROPE: Viewers no longer watch movies and programming only on linear channels. In what ways are you offering films and TV shows online and on video on demand?

MEHEUT: TV is still very popular in France, which has many differences from the U.S. market. Most people here get their TV over DTT, which carries 25 free channels, or as part of broadband triple-play packages, which cost less than €30 ($39) per month and include up to 200 basic TV channels. So this “cord-cutting” phenomenon that is much talked-about in the U.S. is not something that we see at all here in France. This doesn’t mean that online video watching is not growing. In fact, there are many services available, most of them through the [Internet service provider’s] set-top boxes. CANAL+ launched its own SVOD offer two years ago, CANALPLAY, which is now one of the market leaders with more than 450,000 subscribers. This figure has more than doubled in a year. In addition, CANAL+ has developed a service called myCANAL, which gives subscribers access to all the shows that are part of their packages, including sports events, live or on-demand on

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any IP-enabled device (PC, smartphone, tablet, etc.). This is pretty much like TV Everywhere without any kind of restriction and at no extra charge (myCANAL is included in the subscription fee).

TV EUROPE: What other innovations are you offering to make sure your subscribers enjoy a unique experience?

MEHEUT: At a time when video offers are proliferating, fuelled by the boom in online services, we believe that brand is key. We find that customers faced with almost infinite choice will tend to turn to familiar brands that can help them decide. This is why we have put some efforts in designing a recommendation engine, Eureka, which we are constantly improving. When it launched a few years ago, it was the first of its kind to suggest programs based on what people watch on TV. Providing high-end set-top boxes is also a way to ensure that subscribers get the best service available, which is only normal for a premium channel. Our set-top boxes typically feature DVR capabilities that can be remotely controlled via the Internet to access on-demand services, the EPG, HD and, of course, Eureka. Last but not least, myCANAL is a one-stop-shop app giving our customers access to all the content included in their subscription packages, live or on-demand, on any device with an Internet connection.

TV EUROPE: Tell us about the free-TV channel D8. What factors have been contributing to its success?

MEHEUT: D8 was relaunched in September 2012 after we acquired the channel, then called Direct8, from Bolloré

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Engrenages is a longrunning success for CANAL+ and has been exported widely, including to the U.S. and the U.K., where it aired as Spiral.

MĂŠdia. Two years later, D8 ranks number one among nonlegacy channels, and fifth overall. The success is due to a mix of clever investment in content and bringing in the right talent.

TV EUROPE: Has the sluggish French economy negatively impacted your subscriber base or does pay television remain a strong value proposition?

MEHEUT: Since the beginning of the economic downturn, our overall subscriber base has been growing continuously. This growth was mainly driven by overseas performances, particularly in developing countries. In France, things have been more difficult. When the economy is depressed, people tend to refrain from committing to new subscription contracts, which obviously has an impact on gross additions. But we did not see a big impact on churn, which actually is on a downward trend. I think a lot of subscribers realized that premium TV is one of the cheapest ways to be entertained, providing unbeatable dollar-for-dollar value when compared to the cost of taking a whole family to the movies or to a sports game. This is why CANAL+ proved pretty resilient overall, whereas CANALSAT, which is also facing tougher competition from free or nearfree TV packages (over DTT or IPTV), struggled a bit more.

TV EUROPE: How is the CANAL+ Group increasing and diversifying revenues?

MEHEUT: Pay TV in France is still our core business, representing about

three-quarters of total revenues. But in recent years we have expanded into other areas, starting with pay TV outside of France, where we have built up on existing businesses and, in some cases, started new ones. Our largest market outside of France is now Poland, after we acquired a rival DTH platform and merged it with our own to form nc+, which has about 2.2 million subscribers.

In Africa, where we now have operations in over 30 countries, we have had tremendous growth. Our subscriber base there has nearly tripled in three years to reach 1.1 million at the end of 2013. In Vietnam, where we launched a few years back in partnership with state-owned broadcasting company VTV, K+ is starting to pick up with over

The CANAL+ Group subsidiary STUDIOCANAL fully financed the Liam Neeson action thriller Non-Stop, which was released worldwide this year.

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CANAL+ is home to an array of top-flight sporting events, including Formula 1.

600,000 subscribers. All in all, we now have 4.4 million subscribers outside mainland France, which is nearly one-third of the group’s total subscriber base.

Advertising is obviously another area of growth. We now own three national channels, all available over the air on DTT and on all existing broadcasting platforms.

Apart from D8, we have an all-news channel, i>TELE, with an audience share of just under 1 percent, and a music channel [D17] aimed at young audiences with around a 1.5-percent audience share. Our goal is for our ad-sales division to become the market leader among the much-sought-after AB consumers.

1984 On November 4 at 8 a.m., CANAL+, France’s first private television channel, launches with 186,000 founding subscribers paying 140 francs per month (€21).

1985 In September, the 500,000-subscriber mark is reached.

1986 CANAL+ reaches 1 million subscribers.

By December, its base has grown to 1.5 million customers.

1987 The co-production film company CANAL+ Productions, which will later become STUDIOCANAL, is founded.

In October, CANAL+ is listed on the second market of the Paris Bourse with 1.4 million shares at 275 francs (€42), representing 8 percent of its capital.

1988 The documentary channel now known as PLANETE+ launches.

1989 The CANAL+ pay-TV concept is exported for the first time to a foreign country: Belgium.

1990 CANAL+ approaches the European sports broadcaster TESN to acquire significant holdings in three channels: TV SPORT, Sportkanal and Sportnet. This represents the first step toward an all-sports channel (Eurosport).

The creation of CANAL+ Horizons enables the export of the CANAL+ concept to the African continent.

1991 The group launches the JIMMY and Ciné Cinéfil channels on cable platforms.

CANAL+ sets up CANALSATELLITE. 1992 CANAL+ passes the 1-million mark in subscribers outside of France.

CANALSATELLITE distributes a package of seven special-interest channels, aimed at households without a cable connection.

1993 CANAL+ becomes a shareholder in Eurosport.

1994 Compagnie Générale des Eaux and Havas sign a shareholders pact for a 49percent stake in CANAL+.

Content production and distribution is also a key growth area for us. We want to turn STUDIOCANAL, today a European major, into a global player. STUDIOCANAL operates directly in the three main European markets, as we acquired distribution businesses in the U.K. and Germany.

We recently moved into Australia and New Zealand as well.

The company produces a dozen movies a year and also manages one of the largest film catalogues in Europe, which can now be leveraged with fast-growing Internet video providers, in addition to regular broadcasters. As mentioned previously, STUDIOCANAL is moving aggressively in the production of high-quality TV series at a time when demand for such shows is soaring all over the globe.

Finally, as mentioned before, we have stepped up our presence on the Internet by creating a new division responsible for designing and marketing new offers, either ad-funded or paid for by customers. Already in charge of developing CANALPLAY and running our YouTube venture, this division is behind the launch of an Internet-only CANAL+ offer in Canada in partnership with Dailymotion.

2002 Jean-Marie Messier, the CEO of Vivendi Universal, reorganizes CANAL+ Group. Pierre Lescure leaves the group and Xavier Couture takes over as president.

Bertrand Meheut joins CANAL+ Group as VP.

Pierre Lescure replaces André Rousselet as chairman.

2003 Bertrand Meheut becomes CEO of CANAL+ Group.

1995 CANAL+ launches in Poland.

CANAL+ refocuses on its French pay-TV business and announces a corporate restructuring.

1996 CANALSATELLITE Digital launches in France.

CANAL+ merges with the Dutch group Nethold.

1997 The CANALSATELLITE concept expands to Spain.

TELE+ and D+, the Italian versions of CANAL+ and CANALSATELLITE, launch. This year also sees the birth of CANAL+ Denmark, CANAL+ Norway, CANAL+ Sweden and CANAL+ Finland.

1998 A fourth multiplex channel is added to the network’s bouquet, CANAL+ VERT (later renamed CANAL+ SPORT).

By the end of the year, CANAL+ Group passes the 8-million subscriber mark.

Rodolphe Belmer is appointed delegate CEO of CANAL+.

2005 CANALSATELLITE surpasses 3 million subscribers and later rebrands as CANALSAT. CANAL+ LE BOUQUET, the first premium multichannel offer in France, launches with CANAL+, CANAL+ CINÉMA, CANAL+ SPORT, CANAL+ DÉCALE and CANAL+ HI-TECH. CANALPLAY launches.

CANAL+ reaches 5 million subscribers.

CANAL+ groups its film, TV, music and videoproduction activities under CANAL+ Image, which becomes STUDIOCANAL in 2000.

1999 STUDIOCANAL signs a partnership with the U.K.’s Working Title Films.

CANALSATELLITE crosses the 1.2-million subscriber mark and breaks even.

CANAL+ launches i>television, a 24-hour news channel later renamed i>TELE. 2000 Lagardère acquires 34 percent of CANALSATELLITE and 27.4 percent of Multithématiques.

The merger of CANAL+, Seagram and Vivendi creates Vivendi Universal.

2009 CANAL+ Group rolls out a package of satellite channels in Maghreb with Arabsat.

LE BOUQUET DE CANAL+ offers more than 25 channels in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.

2006 CANAL+ HD feed launches.

French regulators clear the merger of TPS and CANALSAT. 2007 Launch of the new CANALSAT offering, which combines the best of CANALSAT and TPS under one brand.

2008 STUDIOCANAL acquires Kinowelt and becomes the European leader in film distribution.

CANAL+ Group’s mobile platforms, CANAL+ MOBILE and CANALSAT MOBILE, reach more than 250,000 customers.

CANAL+ A LA DEMANDE launches.

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CANAL+ Group and VTV in Vietnam announce the launch of a local pay-TV platform.

CANALSAT A LA DEMANDE becomes available on TV. An agreement between CANAL+ Group and MultiChoice enables CANAL+ Overseas Africa to extend its presence in various Central African countries.

2010 The K+ pay-TV platform begins service in Vietnam.

2011 CANAL+ Group reaches a deal to acquire the Bolloré free-TV channels Direct8 and Direct Star.

2012 CANAL+ Group obtains regulatory approval for the acquisition of Direct8 and Direct Star. The channels are rebranded under the names of D8 and D17.

2013 CANAL+ Group launches the video portal myCANAL, which allows CANAL+ and CANALSAT subscribers to find all the programs and on-demand content available to them as part of their subscription.

2014 As it marks its 30th anniversary, CANAL+ Group boasts 14.7 million subscribers, including 9.5 million in France.

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@30 Anke Schäferkordt

By Anna Carugati As deregulation of the broadcast industry in Europe began in the 1980s, privately owned stations mushroomed across several countries. Few, if any, were as successful as what started as RTL Plus.

With its tagline of “refreshingly different” programming, it offered the type of entertainment, news and sports that weren’t available on the public broadcasters ARD and ZDF. From its launch in 1984, RTL Plus, now known as RTL Television, has always had as its target the 14-to-59 demo.

In the ’90s and into the new millennium, what had become the RTL Group either launched more channels or acquired them. As the audience started to fragment, the group developed its family of channels philosophy: in order to cumulatively reach the greatest number of viewers, it was best to own a bouquet of services, each targeting a different segment of the audience. Today the German family of channels includes RTL Television, Vox, N-TV, RTL II, SUPER RTL and a bouquet of digital channels. This strategy was so successful that the RTL Group replicated it in a number of other countries, including France, the Netherlands and Hungary.

Anke Schäferkordt’s career has followed the growth trajectory of the group. She started at Bertelsmann, parent company of the RTL Group, in 1988. She then worked at RTL Television and Vox, and in 2005 was named CEO of RTL Television. In 2007, the German family of channels, the revenue engine of the RTL Group, was re-branded Mediengruppe RTL Deutschland, of which Schäferkordt is CEO. She is also co-CEO of the entire RTL Group alongside Guillaume de Posch. Schäferkordt recounts RTL Television’s impressive success story and outlines the ways the RTL Group as a whole is serving advertisers and viewers in today’s multichannel, multiscreen world.

TV EUROPE: This year marks the 30th anniversary of RTL Television. What did RTL offer viewers that they couldn’t get from the public broadcasters ARD or ZDF? SCHÄFERKORDT: RTL Television—or RTL Plus as the channel was called at its launch in January 1984—revived the German TV landscape.

Since its beginnings, RTL Television has always been an innovation leader in all genres: we showed live transmissions of Formula 1 races as early as 1984; we were the first German channel to start broadcasting a morning show in 1987; we introduced daily series to German viewers with Gute Zeiten, schlechte Zeiten in 1992. The daily series has been on air ever since, and celebrated its 5,555th episode this year. Boxing became big with RTL Television—first with Henry Maske, later with the Klitschko brothers. In 1999, RTL Television launched Wer wird Millionär?, reviving the quiz/game show

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Gute Zeiten, schlechte Zeiten is a daily drama that has been on the air since 1992, delivering more than 5,555 episodes.

genre. And in 2002, we introduced Deutschland sucht den Superstar, the German version of Idols. With shows such as Tutti Frutti or Ich bin ein Star—Holt mich hier raus!, RTL Television has always been a bit cheeky, and has dared to go ahead with more unconventional programs than the public broadcasters have. If you take a look at the latter’s programming, you can clearly see that they regularly try to copy our formats.

TV EUROPE: How were RTL’s newscasts different, and what audience segment did they target?

SCHÄFERKORDT: In news, our goal has always been to focus on our viewers’ needs and explain how certain developments affect their daily lives. We try to explain events and correlations in an easy way without being misleading. We call this philosophy “news to use.” The target group for our flagship news show RTL Aktuell is the same as for our channel flagship RTL Television: viewers aged 14 to 59. For 18 years now, RTL Aktuell has been the clear number one in this target group. For example, our coverage of the 9/11 attacks in 2001 were highly acclaimed—RTL Television was the first German channel to suspend its regular programming for breaking news, then continued the live coverage for several hours. Anchorman Peter Kloeppel later received several awards for the live coverage.

TV EUROPE: Today, what are RTL Television’s main strengths?

SCHÄFERKORDT: RTL Television has been the clear market leader in the commercial target group for 21 consecutive

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years. The channel offers a well-balanced programming grid consisting of entertainment, news, fiction and [magazine] shows; 87 percent of RTL Television’s grid is locally produced and almost 30 percent is produced inhouse. On a given weekday, more than five hours of inhouse news and magazines form the backbone of our programming. This unmatched know-how across all genres enables us to react quickly to changes in TV consumption habits.

Our daily magazines give us unique promotional power to establish new formats by creating buzz about them. This also enables us to keep viewers on our channel, enhancing the socalled audience flow.

To sum it up: RTL Television’s leadership is not based on a few isolated “over-performers.” Neither are our ratings built only on output deals or sports rights. RTL Television has a solid structural leadership across most slots and throughout the whole week, based on a variety of genres.

TV EUROPE: Since its launch, what impact has RTL Television, as an advertising vehicle, had on the German businesses and the economy at the time?

SCHÄFERKORDT: Our flagship channel RTL Television covers demographics associated with high TV consumption and high ad expenditure. The most important impact of the launch of commercial TV in Germany was that advertisers were finally able to reach the audiences they wanted to reach.

Previously, demand was much higher than the airtime actually available for commercials. Television is the only medium

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can see there is significant potential for TV to expand its share of the total advertising market—especially in Germany.

TV EUROPE: How did the concept of RTL’s family of channels come about?

SCHÄFERKORDT: The rationale behind the family-of-channels approach is simple. First, high audience shares will continue to form the basis of our success. Second, it is clearly the best response to increasing audience fragmentation in a digital, multichannel world. Or, as we say, “Fragment yourself before someone else does.”

Reality series have been a key element in RTL’s success, with shows like Ich bin ein Star—Holt mich hier raus! (I’m a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here!)

to reach a mass audience within a short period of time and this will not change in the foreseeable future. Today, more than 90 percent of the highest-reach commercial breaks in all of German television are on RTL and Vox. TV EUROPE: And today, what is the state of television advertising in Germany? How does the advertising market in Germany compare to the other markets where the RTL Group is present?

SCHÄFERKORDT: First of all, we operate in a robust environment in Germany—regarding both developments in the advertising market and the underlying macro-economic trends. In this environment, the German advertising market has increased slightly over the past years with TV proving highly resilient.

The Internet continues to expand its share of total advertising spend, mainly at the expense of print media. However, TV is still under-represented in Germany in terms of advertising market share when compared to its usage. And print represents a significantly higher share of the German ad market in comparison to many other European countries.

Looking across Europe and even into the United States, you

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TV EUROPE: How is Mediengruppe RTL’s family of channels serving viewers today? Does each channel serve a different segment of the audience?

SCHÄFERKORDT: Yes, exactly. Let me briefly elaborate on the complementary positioning of our various channels, which cover all relevant commercial demographics. RTL Television is our flagship channel in Germany; as described before, it’s a classic generalinterest channel. Vox has continually grown its ratings over the past years. It relies on quality entertainment to target female viewers and has a commercially attractive upmarket viewership.

RTL II is a young and powerful, slightly more male-skewed channel. SUPER RTL is the market leader in children’s demographics. N-TV, our news channel, is the benchmark within the German news landscape, and RTL Nitro targets male audiences and is the number one newcomer—it rounds out our portfolio. This year, we launched a fourth pay-TV channel, GEO TV, which shows high-quality documentaries, to complement our existing portfolio consisting of RTL Crime, RTL Living and Passion.

TV EUROPE: What role does imported programming play on the various channels?

SCHÄFERKORDT: In the case of our big flagship channels like RTL Television in Germany and M6 in France, we’ve developed a certain degree of independence with locally commissioned productions—in-house and with partners, as I said earlier. Yes, U.S. series are an important part of our programming, but they are not the foremost or only component. We have our own strong fiction productions in Germany, and the relative importance and audience shares of the U.S. series have actually fallen a little in recent years. This is because of two factors. First, many of the highly acclaimed series are high-quality series and best-in-class television but are made for niche audiences and thus do not attract a large number of viewers on a big free-to-air channel. Second, German viewers still love procedurals, and at the moment there are not a lot of those in the market.

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That’s why we continue to broaden and deepen our on-demand offerings serving all screens: TV sets, PCs, tablets and smartphones. As long ago as 2007, we started building catch-up services around our family of channels with the start of RTL Now. Today, all six of Mediengruppe RTL Deutschland’s free-to-air channels have their own “Now” services. RTL Now generates as many as 37 million video views per month.

The RTL family of channels in Germany includes Vox, which skews slightly female with shows like Sing meinen Song (Sing My Song).

TV EUROPE: How has the family-of-channels strategy been working in other countries where RTL is present?

SCHÄFERKORDT: Fragmentation continues across all markets. We have built our families of channels across Europe with complementary positioning and shared know-how.

This has enabled us to grow share and strengthen our market position despite the increase in numbers of channels across the market. We increased audience share by more than three percentage points in Germany, France and the Netherlands over the past ten years.

TV EUROPE: How have you been diversifying revenues in Germany and in other countries?

SCHÄFERKORDT: In total, RTL Group has the highest percentage of non-TV advertising revenue, and is also the most geographically spread-out group when compared to our competitors. We generate 43 percent of our revenue from non-TV advertising sources. Our content-production arm, FremantleMedia, accounts for 26 percent. There are further opportunities around digital pay TV and HD to drive up retransmission fees from platform operators.

Additionally, we are actively working on investing in diversification businesses—for example, through RTL Ventures in the Netherlands—and use our strong broadcast brands to promote these.

TV EUROPE: How have you been serving viewers on screens and devices other than the traditional TV set?

SCHÄFERKORDT: TV remains the most powerful media platform, and nonlinear consumption has not changed this.

Nowadays, we know that our viewers expect to watch whatever they want, wherever and whenever they want.

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TV EUROPE: Across the countries where the RTL Group operates stations, how much is catch-up, VOD or online viewing increasing?

SCHÄFERKORDT: We expect that nonlinear viewing will make up some 15 percent of total video consumption in our core markets by 2018. Each year we see substantial growth rates in video views. In the first half of 2014, RTL Group achieved a combined 15.7 billion video views. I am confident that by the end of this year we will have reached a threshold of 40 billion video views. We are the only European broadcaster with a leading multichannel network presence on YouTube.

TV EUROPE: What has been the RTL Group’s digital strategy?

SCHÄFERKORDT: Online video is at the heart of RTL Group’s digital strategy. We aim to have a strong presence in all segments of online video. First of all, we are constantly expanding our advertising-funded catch-up TV services to make them available on all devices. In addition, we’ve started to create original or native content for digital platforms such as StyleHaul in the U.S., Golden Moustache in France, and Munchies, a joint venture of FremantleMedia and VICE. For the future, it is important that we expand our production capabilities and learn how to spend far less producing for the web. And finally, RTL Group aims for a strong short-form video presence via our own platforms or our multichannel networks, like BroadbandTV. More than 80 percent of our 2.4 billion monthly video views are already outside our core broadcasting territories, and we expect substantial further growth. We want to be where our audiences are; that’s why we want to be a leader in online video. And we know that advertising budgets will follow the eyeballs. Today, billions of video views only translate into millions of advertising dollars, but online video advertising is on the rise.

That’s why we also made a structural move to improve digital monetization and to enhance our skills by adding data- and technology-based competencies. The acquisition of SpotXchange represents a cornerstone investment opportunity in this area. SpotXchange technology will strengthen and expand RTL Group’s ability to retain control of inventory, revenue streams and advertiser rela-

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FremantleMedia has seen a number of its formats adapted by RTL, including Got Talent as Das Supertalent.

tionships, also reducing dependency on third-party providers. In other words: the acquisition brings technology and margins in-house.

TV EUROPE: Amazon Instant Video is already present in Germany, as is Vivendi’s Watchever, and Netflix has launched in Germany and in other countries. What kind of disruption can these OTT services bring, not only in attracting viewers, but also in acquiring rights to movies and TV series?

SCHÄFERKORDT: You are absolutely right, there are already some subscription-based video-on-demand offerings on the German market, but none of them are large enough to give the underlying business model a solid footing. The idea here is not just to be able to offer the audience such a service, but to do so with a sustainable business model. So far none of the existing players have managed to attain a truly relevant size that is comparable with what Netflix has achieved in the U.S.—despite massive advertising campaigns in some cases.

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—subscription-based 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.

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

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have to add a new skill set to our group: technology. We are great at producing content, and at scheduling and selling TV commercials, but state-of-the-art technology is a key driver for our digital businesses, from online advertising sales to audience measurement and video recommendations. And this is what we did with the recent acquisition of SpotXchange in the advertising space.

TV EUROPE: Looking ahead 12 to 24 months, in what areas do you see growth for RTL Germany and for the RTL Group?

SCHÄFERKORDT: We see growth opportunities across all three pillars of the RTL Group: broadcast, content and digital. We’ve already talked about digital and the underlying growth rates.

In broadcasting, whether in Germany or across our footprint, we’ve said that it’s our goal to optimize and develop our existing broadcasting business. We will always invest in top content, to secure and enhance our leading channel brands. We’re also focused on growing the new channels we have launched in Europe and in the high-growth Asian markets. Finally, we aim to further grow the “second revenue stream” from platform operators, created by the strength of our brands.

For content, as with our broadcasting business, the first priority is always to maintain our core business. Our job is to keep favorite formats such as Idols and Got Talent big and fresh while simultaneously keeping an eye on new viewing habits and investing in new formats. We believe very strongly in the future of the production business and see global growth opportunities for FremantleMedia, both organically and through acquisitions—because attractive content will continue to be crucial in the future. The constantly growing number of digital distribution platforms is increasing demand for top content.

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ZODIAK MEDIA’S

MARC-ANTOINE D’HALLUIN

By Anna Carugati

With some 45 production entities in 17 territories, Zodiak Media, majority owned by Italy’s De Agostini Group, has established itself as a leading independent producer of a broad range of genres: from scripted series Being Human and Millennium to entertainment formats Wife Swap and Secret Millionaire to children’s fare Totally Spies! and Waybuloo. The distribution arm Zodiak Rights not only sells content produced by Zodiak’s many companies—including RDF Television, Touchpaper, Yellow Bird, Mastiff, Marathon Media and Zodiak Americas—but also represents product from third-party producers. While building upon the company’s core competence in formats, Zodiak Media’s CEO, Marc-Antoine d’Halluin, also wants to boost production of what he calls premium scripted—high-quality drama co-produced with international partners that has the ability to travel. He shares his view of the company with TV Europe.

TV EUROPE: There have been a lot of mergers and acquisitions in the media business. Are you looking to acquire more companies? In today’s media landscape, how big is big enough?

D’HALLUIN: It seems that big is never big enough! It’s interesting to see that acquisition goes both ways. There has been an American invasion into the U.K. and Europe, but the reverse is also true; many U.S. production companies are being bought by European players. There is a lot of activity for sure.

Zodiak is one of the most recently formed super-indies. It was only four years ago that RDF joined us. Zodiak consists of about 45 different production companies, but four initial major acquisitions were made by De Agostini to create the group. Our focus is very much on organic growth and on making sure we have the right processes in place so that we leverage the value of local companies in spotting a few formats that have international potential. We have to make sure that these formats travel quickly inside the company. Since I joined, we have focused a lot on putting these processes in place. The focus is therefore essentially organic. It doesn’t mean that we are not looking at outside possible targets. We are looking at being as rational as possible and often we see deals where we think prices are very high.

TV EUROPE: How do you manage the companies in the group?

D’HALLUIN: When I came on board, I joined a company that was very much a federation, and it was a federation by design because it had literally just been put together. I saw an opportunity to move it a little bit away from that model and operate it more like a confederation, like a group: not distracting local producers from connecting with their local market and customers, and making sure they spent a little bit of their time, when relevant, sharing ideas. We created an International Development Board (IDB). It’s a forum where all our entertainment producers meet on a regular basis, every two months, to share ideas and select the few formats that can travel. Lots of our local successes remain local, but some of them have the capability to travel. We have to make sure that these formats have the opportunity to be brought early, in the best possible way, to every one of our markets. Our IDB has two chairmen. One was the chief creative officer of our Nordic business, Joel Karsberg, who recently relocated to Los Angeles to become the chief creative officer of Zodiak in the U.S. Joel is one of the guys who put together a new adventure game show that we think has a lot of format potential, called Dropped. Dropped was a big hit on TV4 in January and was recommissioned. We introduced it at MIPTV and we are going to make a stronger push at MIPCOM. We are in advanced discussions in six markets with key broadcasters. The other co-chairman of the IDB is Grant Ross, who just joined Zodiak in July. Grant was the head of global format acquisitions at Endemol. He now has a bigger role at Zodiak. He looks at formats outside the group but will also help select formats from inside the group. It’s a key role that these two guys have—they coordinate with the top creative production brains of this company, and select and fast-track the formats that we believe have international potential.

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Zodiak has historically been a leader in adventure game shows and is looking to extend that track record with the new series Dropped.

TV EUROPE: What has been the strategy for drama?

D’HALLUIN: Formats are key at Zodiak Media and we have a strong focus on the non-scripted, but what we call premium scripted is also essential to our strategy. This is a segment of our industry that is growing a lot faster than others with gradually more international co-productions. Prior to the last 18 months, Zodiak was focusing essentially on local scripted production, such as Being Human in the U.K. or Saint Tropez in France. We had met with some international success for sure with Millennium and Wallander, but it was essentially a local scripted business in three or four of our markets. Since then, we have put a big emphasis on bigger projects and we have three right now in production. One is called Occupied, produced by Yellow Bird for two primary customers, TV 2 Norway and ARTE. The second is a show called Versailles, a co-production between Zodiak, Capa Drama and Incendo.

The main client for the show is CANAL+. It’s the fascinating story of Louis XIV when he was about 30 years old. Versailles will be shot in English, even though it will be produced in France. Zodiak will be handling international distribution.

The third one, called Tatau, is a co-production at Touchpaper in the U.K., with BBC Three and BBC America as primary clients. We are actively engaged in that dimension and we believe that we have the right talent on board to play a key role in that space.

TV EUROPE: What trends are you seeing in entertainment or factual entertainment?

D’HALLUIN: We see evolutions of genres and genres blending together. We have great expertise in property shows. Storage shows is another trend we see developing well. At RDF we have a series on BBC One, Wheelers, Dealers and Del Boys, which did really well. Storage: Flog The Lot! is on Channel 5, for which we have very high hopes. Auction-type shows cross over well with game shows. In that category we have very high hopes for a show called Trash to Treasure that will air on TV4 in Sweden. Tipping Point is another game-show success from RDF that is about to travel. We also see strong demand for

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dance shows. So You Think You Can Dance is still doing really well. We’re launching Beyond Dance on MTV in the U.S., which mixes challenging innovative dance with a reality show. We have a show on [Life OK] in India called Dare 2 Dance from our local Zodiak company, Sol Productions.

Finally, we see strong demand for, and have strong expertise in, big adventure game shows.

And we now have Dropped, which is a very innovative format. It’s an adventure reality game show. The pitch is simple: two teams are dropped into a remote location and they have to survive and find their way back to civilization.

TV EUROPE: In what genres do you see potential for growth?

D’HALLUIN: I mentioned premium scripted, which is in high demand, not only because Netflix and Amazon are very actively starting to compete in that space with the traditional pay-TV platforms but also because of the quality that is coming out of some European countries. It’s been quite incredible to see, over the last five years, series produced in Israel or Sweden like Bron or Hatufim become successful in their original versions, and then incredibly successful in their format versions.

Being French, I never thought I would see the day when original French series like Les Revenants would be broadcast on Channel 4 and do well. The concept that successes can come from many markets now, as opposed to mostly from the U.S., creates a very interesting opportunity for a company like Zodiak and for the market in general because it does diversify the stories that are told, and that is good. A story like Occupied is shot in Norway and it will travel extremely well around the world.

In terms of non-scripted programming, what everyone is looking for is that particular show that will bridge with social media. Zodiak will put a lot of effort in that area. In factual, every season we see things that are a bit trendy; they come and go. In the U.K., employment benefit shows were very big this year, but I’m not sure they will last for long. Long-lasting trends like big adventure game shows, big productions that engage big audiences, have a very strong future, which is why we hope Dropped will deliver.

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TELE MÜNCHEN’S

HERBERT L. KLOIBER TV EUROPE: What are some of the new dramas Tele München is involved with?

KLOIBER: With regard to our own productions, we are currently working on the miniseries Richard the Lionheart, The Last Christmas [based on the memoir by the eldest daughter of The Sound of Music’s Von Trapp family], the Rosamunde Pilcher miniseries Valentine’s Kiss and the Cecelia Ahern miniseries Thanks for the Memories. [We have] others through our various affiliated networks and affiliated companies, such as Odeon Film and Prisma Entertainment Production.

TV EUROPE: What qualities do you look for when deciding to become a co-production partner on a project?

KLOIBER: We are looking to partner with reliable producers who believe wholeheartedly in a project. We are usually looking for only one partner per project, from a significant market. Our partners share risk and bring credibility and access to talent.

We are looking at projects from two perspectives. One is the German-speaking territories, which are somewhat different than most other markets. It is essential that a project addresses a clear audience. That requires the right balance of story, cast and look and feel. It can’t be all things to all people. For a project to be interesting for us, we must have a good understanding of where we believe it can [have] its largest impact on the right audience and where we can be helpful for the show to achieve this.

Since we are engaged very early on in a project, we bet on great talent, top showrunners and partners who have a proven track record. And we are willing to take risks.

The other perspective [we evaluate is] the international potential we see in a particular show [for it to be sold by TM International].

By Mansha Daswani

For more than 40 years, Tele München Group (TMG) has been providing top-quality content across a range of genres to German-language markets and beyond. The company was an early pioneer in the business of multi-territory drama co-productions, and is looking to capitalize on that experience as the global market for high-quality scripted fare booms. Herbert L. Kloiber, TMG’s managing director, tells TV Europe about his priorities for the company’s drama business—which includes the very popular Rosamunde Pilcher romance franchise and hit crime procedurals like Hubert & Staller—and the trends he is seeing in the market today.

TV EUROPE: What are your overall goals for TMG’s drama business in the year ahead?

KLOIBER: We are actively looking at all new developments on a script or concept basis and are usually one of the first companies to discuss co-productions or acquisitions with various producers. We are able to quickly assess a project and make a decision on whether we want to get involved and, if so, to what degree. In this light we are looking to increase our commitments for 2015 in this area, specifically on the co-production side of international drama.

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TV EUROPE: What are some of the trends you’re seeing in the drama business at present?

KLOIBER: We are seeing a proliferation of product for niche audiences. A lot of times producers pitch IP they already own to networks or platforms, which will say, Let’s see if it sticks, since it’s cheap fare. These types of shows rarely make it to a second season. There is less and less product for a broad viewership—even from the major [Holly wood] studios. This has become problematic, particularly for German broadcasters, where there is still great demand for episodic crime or medical procedurals. On the other hand, different demographics consume media in different ways today. Targeted shows cater to these specific audiences and create added value.

We also see a lot of producers giving away flexibility in their business models by making multi-territory deals [with a single platform]. They’re not realizing how much potential they are giving up by granting long holdbacks and exclusivities. I believe this will change over time.

Interestingly, the so-called “limited series,” which we used to call miniseries, are back in full bloom, providing a wonderful canvas for in-depth storytelling.

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FORTITUDE’S

PATRICK SPENCE TV EUROPE: How were you able to re-create an Arctic backdrop?

SPENCE: You can’t film that far north in the Arctic Circle, where you’re in the middle of nowhere. We looked at filming in Canada and Norway and Iceland. We chose Iceland because the architecture and the scenery were closer to the real Arctic than we could find on the coasts of Canada and Norway. The story demands that it is set beside the sea as well as being in the Arctic. This one particular town in Iceland mirrored perfectly what we were looking for. It was a long, long search.

We shot all of our interiors in London in an enormous self-built studio out near Heathrow Airport.

TV EUROPE: What kind of production challenges did you encounter in Iceland?

SPENCE: It’s a very isolated part of the world. It was very hard to find accommodation. There wasn’t as much snow as we were hoping there would be, so that presented its own challenges. The weather was very hard to predict, and we had to fly a lot of crew over—and not just from London.

The brilliant Icelandic crew—we work with the same crew that has worked on Game of Thrones—had to fly over from Reykjavik, on the other side of the island. It’s hard to live in a place that is that far away from anything for any extended period of time. But an enormous family feel developed around the crew; it was lovely.

TV EUROPE: As you and Simon Donald mapped out the episodes, did you take into consideration those viewers who won’t watch it week to week, but will rather wait till it’s done and binge on the whole season?

SPENCE: We were making this show very specifically for Sky Atlantic, and we know it is being transmitted in its first instance across 12 consecutive weeks. One story spread across 12 weeks, highly serialized—you need it to feel hooky and involving on a number of different levels. But by the same token, many of the shows we now bingewatch are actually shows that were made for weekly viewing. So I’m going to say, yes and no. No, we didn’t make it for binge-viewing, because it’s made for a weekly view. On the other hand, yes, we hope that each episode ends in such a way that you don’t want to stop.

By Mansha Daswani

British screenwriter Simon Donald had wanted to make a film about a violent crime that takes place in an isolated community in the Arctic—until he told his friend Patrick Spence about the concept.

Spence, who heads up the drama outfit Fifty Fathoms, told Donald that the idea would make for a compelling TV show, and Fortitude soon landed a commission at Sky Atlantic. With an all-star cast that includes Stanley Tucci, Michael Gambon, Christopher Eccleston, Richard Dormer and Sofie Gråbøl, the 12-parter, sold by Sky Vision, has Pivot in the U.S. as a co-pro partner and has been presold to, among many others, CANAL+ in France and TV 2 in Denmark.

Spence, executive producer on Fortitude, tells TV Europe about re-creating an Arctic setting, finding his dream cast and managing happy and healthy co-production relationships.

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TV EUROPE: Twelve episodes is a big commitment for a British broadcaster. Was there a learning curve for you and the production team, adjusting to telling this story over a longer period of time?

SPENCE: Undoubtedly. I have exec produced big shows in this country that have been 12 episodes long, but never one story, and never with so many characters. The challenge that Simon set for himself and the team was to keep a number of different balls up in the air at the same time.

Storylining that many characters on that scale with that tone across 12 episodes was something none of us had ever done before. And it was exhilarating and frightening and

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Ahead of MIPCOM, Sky Vision notched up presales across Europe for Fortitude, which is a British-American co-production.

wonderful and eye-opening. We learned on the job. It’s quite an experience to sit in front of a whiteboard with 12 episodes with story beats across each episode. We were constantly fine-tuning all the way through the script process and the production process. One small change in one episode would affect two or three different strands three episodes later. It’s like a sound mixer in a recording studio, constantly twiddling the dial. It’s wonderful. I loved it. In post-production, we’re still in a way constantly evolving the story, as those performances bring different insights and different moments that you can use in different ways that you weren’t quite expecting. It’s a fantastic experience. I can’t wait to do it again.

TV EUROPE: From your perspective, what makes for a successful co-pro alliance that allows you to deliver the show you want—and your partners to get the show they want?

SPENCE: My answer is going to sound simplistic and possibly naïve, but it is the way we operated on Fortitude. We would not get into a relationship with anyone until they had read the script and signed up to a long conversation with Simon and signed up to his vision. When in doubt, if there was disagreement, Simon’s vision would have to hold sway. There are, I’m sure, some broadcasters who wouldn’t have been happy with that. It doesn’t mean you don’t have discussions about the best way to tell a story, but in the end, everyone is signed to one vision. And it works. It required that conviction up front and that confidence to say, This is the only way it will work for us. We found partners that [supported that].

TV EUROPE: Are you aiming for a second season, or do you see this as a limited-run event piece?

SPENCE: We’ve got story after story ready to come out of the Arctic setting. We set it in the Arctic for a very specific, clear reason that won’t become evident until later in the

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series. The setting and the world up there and what’s happening to the environment, the wealth of secrets metaphorically hidden under the ice, is just too good to be true. So we’ve created a community that we want to come back to year after year. The crime thriller in the first [season] will come to an end, but the world in which it’s set will be ripe for more stories of a very particular kind that only Fortitude could tell. That’s why we’re so proud of it. It’s a show not like any other.

TV EUROPE: Why do you think the show will resonate with audiences internationally?

SPENCE: It was created organically as an idea that came out of one writer’s head, and it was a very particular story he wanted to tell. But what it does beautifully is, because it’s true to one single idea, it allows for a world that is international. The Arctic Circle is not, emotionally or geographically, owned by anyone. So it feels like a place that you might want to live in if you were that way minded.

It’s one of the last frontier towns in the world. There are several of them up in the Arctic, where you are living in the middle of nowhere. The notion of community becomes incredibly important. So you are creating a world that anyone might want to be a part of, that at its heart is very warm and vibrant and cosmopolitan. At the same time, we’re running a thread of fear, an unsettling tone through that community, that hopefully will strike a chord and trigger some of the more deep-rooted fears that everyone feels around the world. The other wonderful thing about it is that, because it’s an international community, it means there are characters from all over the world. As you watch the show, it doesn’t feel odd that you have a Spanish character and a Norwegian character and a Swedish character and an American character and a Russian character and four or five British characters. It feels wonderfully, organically international.

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SHINE INTERNATIONAL’S

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NADINE NOHR Expanding Shine International’s drama portfolio has been one of CEO Nadine Nohr’s top priorities since taking the helm of the company last year. She tells TV Europe about the highlights of the slate and discusses key trends in the business, from scripted format adaptations to complex windowing strategies.

TV EUROPE: What have been the major developments in Shine International’s drama strategy over the last year?

NOHR: We are on a continued growth trajectory when it comes to drama. That probably reflects the huge drama resurgence in the market generally. Over the last 12 months, one of the headlines for us would be the continued success of some of our big adaptations. We’ve got three series of The Bridge (we’re responsible for distributing The Bridge U.S. and The Tunnel internationally). The interesting thing about The Bridge/Bron/The Tunnel is that by [season] two they diverge significantly from each other, so they each start to take on much more of an identity in their own right. It’s one of the challenges of adaptations— when they start there’s going to be a lot of comparison, and then as they evolve the choice editorially is either to stay quite close to the original or perhaps take a different direction. As the first seasons develop you see new plot lines coming in, and they could go in very different directions.

We’ve got Gracepoint, another big drama adaptation for us [based on Broadchurch]. Gracepoint, which is produced

by Shine America and Kudos, premiered in the U.S. in October on FOX and will also feature largely at MIPCOM. Real Humans is another significant and very exciting project from Kudos which is currently in development with Xbox and Channel 4. Earlier this year, we announced the [first-look] deal with Ecosse, another very significant scripted producer with a fantastic and proven track record.

We’ll be working with them for the next few years. We’re working with the BBC on Our Girl, and we also have the second series of the BAFTA-winning In the Flesh. From Shine Group companies, we’ve got The Third Eye from Rubicon (producers of Lilyhammer) and Shine Australia’s new miniseries Catching Milat, which is based on the true story of the police investigation into serial killer Ivan Milat, perpetrator of the infamous Backpacker Murders. We are also working on a number of other projects with a continued focus on quality and differentiated drama.

more appointment to view. We’re always looking for resonance and relevance. There’s an appetite for good ideas and strong storytelling, and that can come from any number of markets, which is really refreshing to see.

The increasingly complex management of rights windows is transforming how drama is distributed and consumed. There is an evolving business model which is about very carefully choreographing the rollout of a drama across multiple markets, across multiple versions, across holdbacks and rights windows. The way we sell and the way we maximize value has changed and is continuing to do so.

We work very hard to offer as much commercial flexibility as possible and also get involved at a very early stage, so we can broker partnerships, we can deficit finance ourselves and we can help fund development. There isn’t a one-sizefits-all approach, both in terms of the way in which we work with our partners and the content itself.

TV EUROPE: Are there any particular trends you’re seeing in drama at present?

NOHR: One of the obvious ones is the increased number of platforms buying drama. There are twice as many now as there were seven years ago. Particularly in the States, there’s a lot of demand, a lot of competition and a need to stand out. Heavily serialized shorter-run drama has come into its own because of viewing habits around stacking and binge-viewing. Social media has enabled broadcasters to harness live audiences in a way that previously wasn’t the case. There’s the rise of on-demand services, and yet at the same time a lot of drama has become so event-led that it’s consumed live. On some titles we might see much more consolidated viewing, and then on other dramas it’s much

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By Mansha Daswani

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THE RED BAND SOCIETY ’S

PAU FREIXAS TV EUROPE: The American version on FOX is executive produced by Steven Spielberg.

What does this opportunity mean to you?

FREIXAS: I grew up with Spielberg’s movies. I’m really excited and fulfilled, and satisfied that the dreams I had as a child are becoming real. Professionally, Filmax and I will go hand in hand into the future looking for common projects; in fact, I actually took over the television department there. [The U.S. deal] confirms that we are on the right track, that we are doing things well. I hope it gives us credibility with buyers for the next series we’re developing.

By Jessica Rodríguez

The Red Band Society (Polseres vermelles) is one of the most successful TV shows to come out of Spain in recent years.

Produced by Filmax for Televisió de Catalunya, this dramedy is about a group of teens who are patients in a hospital. The series has notched up sales across the globe, and has been adapted for the U.S. The American version, from ABC Studios and Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Television, launched on FOX this fall. Pau Freixas, executive producer and director of the original Spanish series, tells TV Europe about his hit and its road to being re-versioned for American screens.

TV EUROPE: How did The Red Band Society come about, and why do you think it’s been so successful?

FREIXAS: Televisió de Catalunya wanted to make a television series about children in a hospital. They called Filmax to handle the production aspects, and [asked] me to be the showrunner. The series became an instant success, especially with the teenage audience. It was a fan phenomenon, which is strange because ultimately [it’s about] children with cancer. Girls were even [decorating] their folders with [images of the stars]. Based on that success we started to move the show internationally, and it sold well everywhere. Adaptations have been made in Italy and in Chile, and Argentina aired the original series. There are about 25 to 30 countries that have aired either the original or the adapted version. The culmination of all this was that a pilot was made in the U.S., and FOX decided to go ahead with the series. We are super excited, elated and a little overwhelmed by the success.

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TV EUROPE: What are the similarities or differences between the original and the American version?

FREIXAS: I would say that the original version leans more toward drama and emotion. We never hid from striking emotional chords, from making the characters be thin-skinned and sensitive. The American version is much more [carefree], more politically incorrect, it’s probably a tad bit less emotional. They’ve added a biting humor that works very well, and they follow the adult [characters], while we left them aside to focus on the children.

They’ve given the adults more attention, with Octavia Spencer and other actors front and center.

TV EUROPE: Why do you think The Red Band Society has sold so well internationally as a finished product?

FREIXAS: It’s a story with depth, with meaning beyond just an interesting or entertaining plot—it has an emotional purpose.

Telling these stories is valuable, and they’re told in a universal way, so the emotions that were important for us in Catalonia, in Spain, the way we made the show, the language we used, could be understood everywhere. This combination of elements seems to have been the key to understanding what we were doing. There are places that have decided to put our [version] on air, and there are places that have said, “What you’ve done here is interesting; we will do our own version and add these cultural ingredients.”

TV EUROPE: Tell us about your new project, I Know Who You Are. FREIXAS: It’s a story about a disappearance, and then there’s an investigation around the disappearance. We don’t show the perspective of the detective who is investigating, but rather of the family who has lost a little girl—whose father is [a suspect]. It is a series that talks a lot about things that aren’t what they seem, and there is a game behind that, but there is also a philosophical theory about the society in which we live.

We hope it will be a series that can connect with a universal audience, and not be something that’s only local.

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