Herbert Kloiber

This interview originally appeared in the MIPCOM 2013 issue of World Screen.

When Herbert Kloiber acquired Tele München Gruppe (TMG) in 1977, his goal was to produce and distribute quality programming for German-speaking countries and beyond. Today, as chairman, he has kept true to his vision. TMG produces feature films, documentaries, TV series and movies, event mini-series and—Kloiber’s passion—opera and classical music concerts. It distributes its own product as well as Hollywood fare, and owns interests in TV stations and a number of traditional and new-media businesses.

WS: Germany has a tradition of producing long-running series. Is Germany still the European market with the best production of episodic television?
KLOIBER: Germany has traditionally been weak in creating sitcoms. Yes, they do produce quite a lot of soap operas, but their strength has always been in one-hour dramas and particularly in the crime genre. There are at least 20 titles that have generated 100 to 200 episodes. We, in fact, own a large stake in Odeon Film, a company that just did the 300th episode of Ein Fall Für Zwei, A Case for Two, a series about a lawyer and a detective. These series have sold really well, obviously outside the Anglo-Saxon world because they are shot in German. But they are well-crafted, well-written, and their budget is around $1 million an hour. We are also producing a comedy-crime series for ARD that has done 50 hours in less than two years, which is similar to the old U.S. broadcast network model of 22 episodes a year. I think you are right in saying that Germany has a track record with long-running series. The U.K. doesn’t do that number of hours. They do six or eight and then they do maybe a second season and then they stop. Usually when it’s really successful, they say, “This is actually too good. We should try our hand at something else!” We are often astounded by not having a third season of God knows what because the BBC decides that, “That’s just enough of that!”

WS: Are series like A Case for Two done with a German broadcaster?
KLOIBER: Yes, these are commissioned works. These are orders that the German networks are not always fully financing, but largely financing. A Case for Two just ended because one of the actors couldn’t stand up any more! So we had to find a new series to replace it. There was a pretty serious pitching phase with ZDF to fill that slot again and thank God the people who had done A Case for Two for 30 years have won the sequel rights. Much of that is due to the regional aspect of German television. The public broadcasters want to represent North Rhine Westphalia, Bavaria, the former East, the Frankfurt crowd, so a lot of these cop shows are very indigenous to certain regions, much like New York cops or Chicago cops or CSI: Miami in the U.S.

WS: And Tele München covers the rest of the budget by selling these series elsewhere.
KLOIBER: Yes, particularly to Austria and Switzerland as well as VOD and DVD, and certainly sales to Scandinavia. Italy and France have been good clients to a lot of the German cop series, Derrick and others like Komissar Rex have aired in access prime time on big networks, although a little less so now.

WS: Tele München also produces TV movies and mini-series.
KLOIBER: We do lots of movies, even more 2×90 minutes and 4×90 minutes. The budgets far exceed what one single territory like Germany can afford to pay. It’s your classic Sea Wolf or Moby Dick or Richard Lionheart or the story of the von Trapp family, where you’ve got $8-, $10-, $12-million budgets and more and maybe Germany will cover 25 percent. And then you go with your hat in hand and call on Hallmark or Showtime and from U.K. to Italian broadcasters and usually get it done.

WS: Are these mini-series always co-produced because of the amount of money involved?
KLOIBER: Yes, and it takes roughly a year and a half from the time you set them up till they actually get a green light. So they are much longer to put together. From the time you say we’re going to try to do this till the time you go to the market and sell some product, it’s probably three years.

WS: And these big event mini-series sell well internationally?
KLOIBER: Those have sold very well. They are universal subjects. We have been and are doing action adventure literature; that is where Tele München has its roots. From 1970 onwards, it was always Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London and in recent cases Moby-Dick and so on and so forth.

WS: Are there new ones coming up?
KLOIBER: We’re planning a new one starting early next year based on the von Trapp family, but no singing in The Sound of Music mode! It’s the story of Georg Johannes von Trapp when he came back as a Naval officer in 1918 at the end of World War I up to the point roundabout ten years later, when he and his eight children emigrated to the United States because they were very anti-Nazi and got bullied around a lot. It’s that early part of the story that lead to The Sound of Music. It will be largely shot in Austria and other locations. We want to start shooting in March of next year and we are having the second draft written. Richard Lionheart is also in the re-draft stage and hopefully will be ready by Christmas next year.

We are continuing to do a lot of Rosamunde Pilcher movies. Jane Seymour just had a wonderful part in our last one, called The Unknown Heart, which will air on Christmas on ZDF and ORF. The Pilcher movies sell in at least major 30 territories every time we announce one, including the U.S. We are doing another the next one in the summer of 2014, which will be called Valentine. Rosamunde Pilcher has become a brand. I believe we are on our 20th mini-series.

WS: All of them are produced in English?
KLOIBER: All the Pilchers we are producing are done between Cornwall and Scotland, in the U.K. and they are shot in English and written by English writers who are well seasoned and have done a lot of work for the big U.S. and U.K. broadcasters.

WS: What other productions is Tele München involved in?
KLOIBER: We continue to do a lot of opera and music. The productions of the Metropolitan Opera in New York are still a big seller for us in selected markets, but good ones like Japan and Asia. We do eight to ten of those a year. We continue to work on programming with the Cleveland Orchestra. We recorded the Verdi Requiem in Vienna with the Bayerischer Rundfunk. So the music side is still very active.

For the last couple of years we have also been doing a little more in the documentary area. We created a series called Cosmos that launched in 2011. We now have 18 hours that we are bringing to the market. We’re also selling our features. Some of them generated by the joint venture we used to have with Paramount and Universal called Mutual Film. We are doing two or three new features a year and are now selling them under the TM International label. Before we would give the distribution rights to whomever bought the films for France or Canada, because we really didn’t go to the theatrical markets, which were largely AFM, the Berlin Film Festival and the Cannes Film Festival. TM International was recently at the Toronto International Film Festival selling features.

WS: Is the DVD market holding up in Germany?
KLOIBER: Yes, 2013 has not been a bad year for DVD. Obviously, there is a slide in rentals but there is a big compensation of that slide in sell-through, largely driven by Blu-ray, where the numbers are double-digit growth compared to 2012. The home-video market, which I call the physical market as opposed to the digital market, has been stable with a small growth element. That doesn’t mean that we are looking at 2014 and 2015 with the hope that this trend would continue. We’re definitely waiting for somewhat of a heavy axe to come down as we had in our film print business, where by the end of 2013 there will be absolutely no more physical prints distributed to cinemas.

WS: Have you seen an increase in demand for product from digital platforms?
KLOIBER: Oh yes, we have heavy competition in the market now with Watchever [the streaming video subscription service from Vivendi] and with LOVEFiLM. This has triggered a healthy reaction from Sky Deutschland, which is in a much more aggressive mode now that they are breaking even. And we do a lot of business with the cable operators, like Unity Media, Kable Deutschland, or Telekom Austria for their on-demand offerings. The take-up rates are not really sensational. The disappointment is that there are thousands of titles on the on-demand platforms, but the revenue flow is still very small.