Presented by Jens Richter, Chief Executive Officer, Commercial and International, Fremantle hosted a special session during NEM Dubrovnik, to analyze what’s next in the content landscape, where stronger IP, evolving platform dynamics, and new technologies are redefining how value is created.
Produced by Luis Cabrera, from Croatia
During the second day at NEM Dubrovnik in Croatia, Fremantle took center stage with the panel “Then, Now and Next: How Content Platforms and Value Have Transformed”, aimed at tracing the market’s journey from the era of peak TV and high-volume commissioning to today’s more disciplined, profit-driven market.
Presented by Jens Richter, Chief Executive Officer, Commercial and International at Fremantle, the session traced that journey and looked ahead to what’s next, where stronger IP, evolving platform dynamics, and new technologies are redefining how value is created.
“Ten years ago, we were very much an entertainment company. Big entertainment shows, very much driven by talent shows,” Richter recalled. “Because when, when we launched talent shows around the year, beginning of the 2000s, they went ballistic. They were the biggest thing that happened to the TV market. “We had The Price is Right, Family Feud, Match Game… all of those, some of which are still very strong.”
“What happened since then is that we went into drama,” he explained. “So Fremantle was a drama company in the 80s and 90s. The early 2000s completely focused on entertainment. And then, around 2015, we went heavily into drama, starting with very premium drama.”
“And now, we still do premium, but we also love mainstream,” he noted, highlighting the new season of Sullivan’s Crossing, with Bell Media, a “super mainstream” show which turned into the first Canadian number one show on Netflix.
“We worked our way into mainstream on the drama side as well. And then also over the last 10 years, we went into factual, where we have a similar strategy,” he said. “And what you’ve probably also seen is over the last two years, we went into movies.”
All in all, the executive explained Fremantle tries to “cover all genres”, something that’s “not easy” to do. “It’s 2026 and you have different types of audiences, different age groups and different platforms, and you need to make everyone happy.”
So what’s the strategy to cover all bases? “Some shows work better than others, of course,” he said, mentioning the appeal of titles that are remakes or reinventions of known franchises.
“Shows from the 80s, 90s, early 2000s, they keep coming back. Because they make us feel good. For instance, when we think about Baywatch, and we think about that title song and we hear it, it makes us feel good. So is it our nostalgia or does the audience want more?”
“Baywatch was at its time the most successful TV drama. More than a billion people reach every week. So those are massive numbers. And so when you go back and revisit a show like that, you obviously build upon that brand name and the brand recognition, which is still very strong in the market. And so that’s one thing,” he explained.
“The other thing is what we love about it. It’s familiar and it’s past, it’s history. Like when we look back in time, you know, our childhood was always easy. School was always great. Homework was always simple. The grades were always fantastic. You look back in time and life was so easy. That’s how we think about the past in general. So it gives us this warm and fuzzy feeling, and we like it. It’s safety.”
“And in, in 2026, we have a couple of topics that might make us nervous. There’s wars going on in some parts of the world, there’s this and that. It’s the economy, it’s inflation, it’s AI and our future jobs… There is a world where a little bit of cocoon, a little bit of warm and fuzzy, is great. And the audience loves to escape, but ultimately the audience loves to be entertained.”
“It’s also easier when you have built on a big brand,” he added. “If you build something around big talent that helps. Or when you have a drama that’s based on a novel, or when you have something that is based on true events… Something we think very much in the inception is, ‘is this something that has the marketing built in’ and ‘what can we do to bring more of these ingredients to the table?'”
“But, there’s changes, constant changes, and how we reach our audience and how we build out our social media reach, how we build out our own video demand platforms, how we share rights with other people, that is always evolving pretty rapidly”, he said. “Our ambition always is to create that next story that can resonate with an audience. And ultimately, we are all storytellers or we are all communicators of stories. And that won’t change. And the recipients, our audience, they want to be entertained and they want to enjoy those stories.”
