How Hollywood Did It (Part 2)

In my post on November 23rd, I wrote about the way Hollywood studios had coped with both the recession and a collapse in DVD sales in 2009. They did it by boosting international sales.

For the Westminster Media Forum on Monday Nov 23, I tried to think about what we could learn from this. It was especially useful to hear from David Moody, Head of Strategy at BBC Worldwide, before I spoke. BBC Worldwide is the nearest thing we have to a Hollywood studio. 

(Where the Hollywood studios are concerned, we are talking about the big-selling international genres of Drama and Comedy. We are very good, in the UK, at natural history and other high-end factual content. And of course we have been very successful at creating reality formats, but drama remains the most valuable item  in a distributor’s catalogue.)

What are the lessons?

Compared with the UK, the US has found more funding sources for valuable new content. In the UK most commissioning comes from the four traditional broadcasters, BBC, ITV, C4 and Five. In the US it is coming from the networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox (Desperate Housewives, House), basic cable like AMC (Mad Men, Breaking Bad) and premium cable, like HBO or Starz (Spartacus, The Wire). We need more diversity in the commissioning base.

Second, in the US, subscription revenue is funding a lot of new content. In Europe, too, subscription is TV's fastest growing revenue stream. But in the UK  it is not, yet, driving very much content production -- though it is growing on Sky.

Again, more diversity needed. 

Los Simuladores, originating in  Argentina and remade by Sony and Televisa

The US studios have gone into production in other key languages, for example Sony’s involvement with Los Simuladores. That’s a remake of an Argentinian drama, made in Spanish by Sony and Televisa of Mexico, now being distributed all over Latin America, and reaching some other markets that have acquired a taste for Spanish content. 

The UK’s creative industries have some competitive advantages. But we need to break out of the European habit of thinking --  that TV is a domestic affair and you just sell off the programmes where you can. It is true that people favour content made in their own countries, but is also true that no country makes enough good content.  We need to think wider than that and give them what they want.

The studios do that and have been doing it for years. 

So how to drive that process forward? It needs some new thinking on UK media policy. That is where I am going next in this series.

 If you want to get more of a flavour of the WMF session there is a transcript available for those who attended.

 

I have recorded a commentary of my own presentation. It is the first time I have done this and there are a couple of things I just could not fix.