With new platforms rolling out every other day, the appetite for content variety is also reaching traditional media. At Mipcom, we asked buyers with different programing strategies to give us an insight into their approach to content acquisition.
*From Cannes, France
At the end of the event’s fist day, the search for new roads, both in production and distribution, has clearly become the most important focus point for today’s industry. For Ángel López Armendáriz, Head of Foreign Production Selection at Mediaset Spain for instance, considers that in the Mediaset channels “there is a gap within the international market for foreign fiction in small channels. We are interested in the world of Turkish series. And we’re not abandoning the world of American content, although the competition is tough and the prices are high. The market has reached its maturity and that means the nationality of the content isn’t really important. What matters is the quality of said content. We have worked with productions from Turkey, Germany, India or even Korea, which is a little bit harder, but we’ll be entering that market soon.”
For Jaime Boetsh Gillet, Programming Director of TVN in Chile, the search for content is focused on the acquisition of independent content, once again, regardless of where it comes from: “we look for good content regardless of its origin. What matters is if it’s good. The industry is ever changing and we have to be part of this change. We want to have good content, and to even find partners to create new content.”
In this sense, Boetsh Gillet explains that there’s also an appetite for factual entertainment formats: “talent shows like Rojo work very well in Chile, and that’s a format that has been very successful in access primetime.”
Meanwhile, for William von Heidenstam, International Acquisitions Executive for SVT, this is the time to experiment: “we’ve reached a point where we have to experiment with the acquisition of new content. This is what we see in Turkish dramas, for example. We’re open to fiction, dramas, children’s content, and factual, but looking specifically at Turkish content, we’re now going with Brave and Beautiful to see what are its results.”
