Sunnyside rang our belle for conviviality, access and solid new business
- Much has been written about a tide of Anglo-Saxons flowing from La Rochelle to South Yorkshire after Sheffield Doc/Fest rescheduled from autumn to late spring
- But the seats of any non-attending Americans and Brits were taken by an impressive wave of delegates from Sunnyside’s target markets in Asia and Latin America
- And many key Anglo-Saxons channels and prodco’s were well represented
3D Where is the Money?
Here’s Variety‘s setup of our panel
- Two 3D Takeaways
1. Ghislaine Le Rhun-Gautier is head of Orange’s 3D project. She described how distributors worldwide are partnering to populate the emerging 3D market with documentaries
- Orange, DirecTV, Sky and other players are not co-producing 3D projects
- But they are ‘actively facilitating’ projects by jointly pre-buying programs
- Budgets range from E20,000 to E100,000 / hour for exceptional projects
2. Laurent Dondey is a 3D evangelist who heads the La Géode 3D cinema in Paris
- He described an insatiable demand for high-budget factual programs in 3D
- His screen are constantly sold out
- Several projects have earned huge windfall profits
- Budgets of several millions are not uncommon
- (Watch out for our upcoming report: ‘Docs on the Big Screen’)
Our apologies for lacking the space to report the contributions of all our expert panelists:
- Masaru Ikeo, NHK’s 3D Center; Dong-Joon Kim, Korea Educational Broadcasting System; and Baptiste Heynemann, CNC France.
- Thanks also to session producer Veronique Legendre
Trends in U.S. Television
For commercial channels:
- Series rule
- Demand continues to evaporate for limited series and specials
- Series must satisfy four key criteria:
- Strong characters
- Risk / Jeopardy
- Unique access
- And resolution in each episode
- Pitch with video
- Either a character reel or sizzle tape
- Paper rarely cuts it any more
- The development process is shifting
- The cost of program development is shifting from channels to producers
- Producers are being squeezed: their ‘cost of sales’ is rising while margins are flat
- (See our reflections on the economics of the Super-producer system)
- Production budgets are steady
- U.S. programmers focus on minute-by-minute ratings
- This condition is spreading to U.K. and other markets, even for public broadcasters
Melanie Wallace shifted the discussion to PBS’s flagship Nova strand of science programs
- Nova’s audience of 5 million weekly viewers is huge
- Even compared to current cable hits like History’s Pawn Stars
- Watch out for our upcoming profile of Nova’s commissioning process
Thanks to Melanie, Steve Burns and A&E’s Stephen Harris for their contributions
And more
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