Market in Motion MIPTV is reinventing itself amid contractions in the smallscreen biz
MIPTV and the wider TV business are at an inflection point: Times are tight for producers, as the total pay-tv revenue pool continues to diminish, while streaming growth decelerates and consumers hit their subscription thresholds, altogether making for a pinched economic climate.
Now, against these headwinds — and against competition from other showcases and fonts of info made available and up-to-date all-year long — MIPTV must redefine itself.
MIPTV, taking place April 8-10 in Cannes, is itself in flux. After 2023’s more streamlined experiment, this upcoming edition will once again return the Mipdoc and Mipformats sessions to a premarket perch on April 6-7, hosting a keynote from powerhouse documentary filmmaker Dawn Porter alongside presentations on the state of the unscripted nation and reports on commissioning trends.
Some 130 exhibitors — among them Federation, Paramount Global and Warner Bros. International — will be on the market floor, where Nbcuniversal will showcase the Tom Hanks-narrated event series “The Americas” before offering a case study of the travel-reality competition “Destination X,” which NBC co-commissioned alongside BBC.
Of course, the two broadcasters’ previous co-commission, “The Traitors,” will cast a long shadow over proceedings. It should come as no surprise that the flamboyant competition was the past year’s top exported format — and will no doubt come up early and often throughout this year’s many conferences. At the same time, the format’s irresistible mix of gamesmanship and gloss has helped reshape the landscape, fueling both streamers and linear broadcasters’ hunger for high-verve, premium fare.
Programs like “The Traitors” and BBC’S recently revived “Gladiators” “reminded people that it’s not impossible to have multigenerational moments,” says analyst Clare Thompson of consulting firm K7 Media. “Those shows become part of the national conversation, getting people of different ages to sit together. As that kind of appointment viewing becomes more precious, the shows that can make that happen become more valuable than almost anything else.”
Still, with that greater value comes a commensurate rise in cost. Ever the market drivers, streamers might have turned toward formats to counter the rising price of scripted, but they still require a level of production value that befits a premium service. And where streamers go, linear broadcasters soon follow.
Thompson has seen a pronounced uptick in formats that blur the lines between scripted and reality, citing All3media’s “The Underdog,” TBS’S rebooted “The Joe Schmo Show,” Nippon TV’S “Suspects on the Set,” and ITV’S “A Party to Die For” and “The Fortune Hotel” as examples. Trendlines converge around celebrity casts, elements of mystery and deceit, and glamorous, luxury locales that evoke “The White Lotus.” This type of programming calls for investment — though not wholly from the commissioning broadcaster.
“Buyers want high production values at a lower cost,” says Thompson. “Broadcasters and streamers are looking for fewer, bigger, better shows that can create a lot of impact, and they want producers to bring money with them.”
“Increasingly, the unscripted world is facing the same concerns as film and drama, where it falls to the producer to piece together bits of money,” she con
tinues. “If you’re creating non-scripted with such high production value, then eventually you’re going to have to start finding quite a few people to come in and pay, because it’s going to be too much for any one buyer.”
Here, both Thompson and Dawn Porter see a new and major role for MIPTV to play.
“Just getting something made has become more complicated,” says Thompson, who says markets like MIPTV “are no longer showcases for new formats. People attend to look for money and potential partners; it’s more about doing deals, making those relationships, and perhaps coming in earlier on projects. There’s a lot more to be done in facilitating co-production.”
“We have to work harder, smarter, and with less money than before,” says Porter. These events “must serve their audiences with concrete information, advice and networking. We have to educate our buyers, and we need to better understand these other markets, how to access and engage with them. Because with decreased budgets, that’s where the last 25% of our financing may come from.”
The acute sense of instability in the television world will inform much of the content bought and sold on the MIPTV floor, though here, the symptoms might manifest themselves in rather unexpected ways. If docs and factual offerings will always reflect the wider world, an unrelenting remit of climate anxieties and global unrest has left no genre untouched.
“Obviously the world in which we live is quite dramatic at the moment, and that has created an appetite for stories that offer solutions,” explains international distribution expert Beatrice Rossmanith. As managing director of consulting firm Glance (formerly known as TAPE Consultancy), Rossmanith monitors content across hundreds of channels in 45 territories worldwide. And lately she has noticed a pervasive trend.
“There’s obviously a thirst for truth nowadays,” Rossmanith says, plus a thirst “to tackle modern anxieties by asking what more can we do?”
In the lifestyle space, celebrity profiles are increasingly linked to some sort of activism and political engagement. “It’s not just about a celebrity,” says Rossmanith. “It has to say something more.” Sports docs now emphasize physical and mental health. While true-crime points toward dramatic resolutions, high-end science docs accent hopefulness and positive reinforcement, stressing what we’re getting right. “If we’re going to protect the environment, we need to fall in love with it,” Rossmanith adds.
Thompson echoes those findings, pointing towards ITV’S galvanizing civic activism drama “Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office” in the scripted space, and — perhaps most surprising of all — BBC’S factual entertainment format “Sort Your Life Out,” which simply finds people clearing out their household clutter, and has already traveled to 11 additional territories.
“Whereas 15-20 years ago it would have followed some kind of expert, now it’s much more about mental health and making you feel better,” says Thompson. “When the world feels big and scary, the format says I can’t fix everything, but I can fix this, my own little corner.”
Porter sees this new tendency as anything but escapist.
“You can’t say the world is ending and there’s nothing you can do,” says Porter. “You can’t just scare the bejesus out of people and expect them to like it, because who wants to watch that? People want to feel like they are still grounded, that they have some control, some way to positively affect their futures.”
If anything, Porter has given these concerns real consideration when developing new projects. “I’m now looking for stories that make you feel like you can handle this tough news while doing something about it, stories that don’t just dump a new problem in your lap along with everything else to worry about.”
The filmmaker is currently working on an MSNBC series about wrongful incarceration and a doc about Nelson and Winnie Mandela. Both will tackle their subjects from unconventional angles. While the series follows an investigative producer who teamed with law-enforcement to spring innocent inmates from custody, the Mandela portrait will counter previous efforts that veered too fa into hagiography.
“It’s not enough to call out mass incarceration and wrongful convictions,” says Porter. “Instead, we could pay attention and help.”
Mandela “didn’t start as anything special,” she observes. “He wasn’t the genius of his class, and he wasn’t this super athlete. If we tell our next generation of leaders that they need to be saints, then who would want to do that job? Instead, let’s say that change is hard, it’s complicated, it requires sacrifices, but it’s possible.”
“Obviously the world in which we live is quite dramatic at the moment, and that has created an appetite for stories that offer solutions.” Beatrice Rossmanith
Questions about the free ad-supported streaming TV services model and concerns about AI will take the foreground at many sessions and keynotes at MIPTV. If both are familiar subjects at the market — there was a standing-room only FAST summit last year, while the Mipcom “Unlocking AI” summit drew similar attention this past October — both remain hot-button topics for the television industry.
This year’s Global FAST & AVOD Summit on April 8 will explore ad-supported models from a more international perspective. Whereas 2023’s inaugural version focused primarily on the U.S. market, the returning focus now looks further afield with a focus on growth sectors overseas. TVREV analyst (and coiner of the FAST acronym) Alan Wolk will moderate a cosmopolitan panel bringing together David Salmon (Tubi); Kasia Kieli (Warner Bros. Discovery Poland and TVN); Natalie Gabathuler-scully (Vevo); Peyton Lombardo (3Vision); Robert Andrae (Google); Jennifer Batty (Samsung Tvplus EMEA); and Jordan Warkol (Ottera).
On the tech front, Google TV’S Faz Aftab and Vitrina AI CEO Atul Phadnis will present a content business strategies AI & Data session on April 9, ahead of the following day’s Tech and AI Innovation Summit, set to spotlight analysts Peter Robinson (Gone With) and Guy Bisson (Ampere Analysis) alongside media execs Tom Bowers (Hypothesis Media), Arash Pendari (Vionlabs AB), and Craig Peters (Getty Images).
AI will be “an important theme and motif of everything that happens in Cannes,” says Alixpartners managing director Mark Endemaño.
A Disney exec turned industry transformation expert, Endemaño will express concerns about AI in his MIPTV opening keynote on April 8. “There’s no doubt that AI will take people’s jobs,” he says. “We’re seeing that already. The disruptive effect on the creative industries will be enormous.”
Openai’s recent introduction of the Sora text-to-video model — and CEO Sam Altman’s promise of a $7 trillion chipset investment — might account for change in tone between last October’s more genteelly-labeled summit and Endemaño’s upcoming address.
“Broadcasters and pay-tv platforms are already using machine learning for subtitling, audio descriptions, metadata, continuity announcements, multi-channel content distribution, ingesting and output formats,” Endemaño explains. “In all such cases, AI can cut costs and make those processes more efficient. Only Sora is going to kick things up to the next level.
“Up until now, the impact has mostly been on entry-level jobs and on junior levels of productions,” he says. “Only Sora can take on things like stop motion, particularly in TV advertising. Those cheap and cheerful first uses will become more and more sophisticated over time.”
Endemaño sees cause for optimism about the FAST model as the wider industry dusts off older approaches and gives them a fresh coat of paint. Though he predicts widespread consolidation of most studio-backed streaming services, such a development could be to the benefit of both consumers and producers further down the line.
“Consolidation will leave us with four or five key players,” Endemaño predicts. Leaving the “studios to revert back to a way of getting their great content out in the most economically possible way, priced across windows, working with different distribution partners, whether that’s Netflix or Apple or Prime or Disney, or any pay-tv, free-tv or digital platform from around the world.”
“The truth of the matter is, content creators want their work to be seen by the biggest audience possible, and they like to be paid,” he continues. “And here, both the ad-supported model and bundling can help reach a much wider audience — and a scaled one at that.” Given this future forecast of more bundling, windowing and ads, the industry transformation expert has titled his opening address, “Back to the Future.”
“There’s no doubt that AI will take people’s jobs. We’re seeing that already. The disruptive effect on the creative industries will be enormous.” Mark Endemaño