Sky Vision’s Barnaby Shingleton

Barnaby Shingleton, the director of entertainment and factual at Sky Vision, talks to TV Formats about the company’s format catalog, trends he’s noticing and the strategy for this part of the business looking ahead.

While formats are just one part of the diversified Sky Vision catalog, it’s an area that’s growing, albeit with a carefully curated approach. At any given time, the company is “actively pushing” some 35 to 40 formats, with current highlights including Duck Quacks Don’t Echo, 50 Ways to Kill Your Mammy, The Great Pottery Throw Down, The Secret Life of the Zoo, Revolution, BattleBots, And They’re Off and I Don’t Like Mondays.

***Image***TV FORMATS: How much of Sky Vision’s catalog is devoted to formats, and what percent of that comes from in-house production companies?
SHINGLETON: We’ve got somewhere in the region of 35 to 40 formats that we’re actively pushing at any one time, which is relatively modest. We don’t have an enormous catalog of content because we’re a relatively young company. We’re about five years old now; we were established by Sky via the acquisition of a production and distribution company called Parthenon. Since then, we’ve been really growing exponentially in terms of the scale of what we’re doing and also the genres that we are distributing. In addition to building our catalog from what was quite specialist factual-focused into popular factual, factual entertainment, entertainment formats as well as drama and comedy, we have a number of production companies in the U.K. and in the U.S. as well. Sky Vision is not just a distribution entity, it’s also a production entity as well as a broadcaster and a network and a platform in Europe. When you look at our formats catalog, it is what I would call relatively modest but growing in terms of its scale.

Maybe 10, 20 percent [of our formats are produced in-house]. Some of our formats come via our channel, and a good example of that would be something like Duck Quacks Don’t Echo or 50 Ways to Kill Your Mammy. Some are coming from our own production companies, so something like The Great Pottery Throw Down from Love Productions. We’re starting to sell the format rights to The Secret Life of the Zoo, which is from Blast! Films, and Znak & Co has Revolution. But I’d say the vast majority of our formats are actually third-party and acquired directly by us either as part of a bigger development deal or on an ad hoc basis. For example, BattleBots is a format that we’ve acquired from a third-party company…. Our big launches from last MIPCOM are And They’re Off and I Don’t Like Mondays, both of which are third-party formats. So we are acquiring content in lots of different ways.

TV FORMATS: What trends are you noticing in the formats arena?
SHINGLETON: Simple concepts are what really cut through to our buyers and audiences. When we’re thinking about formats and we’re selling them, we’re always trying to think of, What is the top line that really cuts through? We have a format called My Wonderful Life, which is produced for our channel Sky 1 in the U.K. It’s effectively [about] individuals at the end of their life who want to leave special gifts and experiences for people after they’ve gone; they record messages and then they’re delivered after they’ve passed away. It sounds quite morbid and it’s very emotional, but it can be funny, uplifting and positive at the same time. It’s a really simple idea—quite hard to execute but simple—and it cuts through pretty quickly and clearly.

In terms of some of the challenges, more so in entertainment than in lifestyle and factual entertainment, it is [increasingly] difficult to grab an audience with something new. You can’t expect to throw something new onto a schedule and hope it’ll stick without some heavy marketing and some real thought into what will make it sticky with that audience. That might be a piece of talent, that might be a format point that extends beyond the program to add a stickiness to it, but you’ve got to give audiences a reason to stay. One of the challenges that we’re seeing in the entertainment market in particular with broadcasters trying new things is that at the end of the day, formats need an opportunity to become familiar to audiences, and the quicker you can do that, the better. One way of doing that is simply by repeating it a lot…. You’ve got to keep pushing it out there. This idea of, We’ll do a single episode a week and rest it—I just don’t think that works anymore, at least not with new entertainment shows. So keeping audiences engaged with entertainment is really hard and it’s one of the reasons why I think revivals are proving popular, particularly in the States, and we’ve seen some in the U.K. and elsewhere because you’ve got built-in stickiness already [since] your audience knows it. The challenge for us is we’ve got a new catalog, so we’re pushing new content out there. But talent can definitely make it sticky, there are other formatting techniques to make it sticky and social media can make it sticky.

TV FORMATS: Where is Sky Vision having the most success with format sales, and what territories are you still looking to enter?
SHINGLETON: Western Europe is working well for us; we’ve had productions in France, we’re doing well in Italy, Germany is developing well for us. In Scandinavia, we’re doing well particularly on factual entertainment. We’re really looking to push entertainment in Scandinavia a little bit more; they do a lot of their own development, but we’re hoping that our strategy there will bear fruit. And Australia is always very attractive…. That’s a market we are definitely targeting.

We’re very aware that formats grow in time. Gone are the days when you’d go to a market and you’d walk away with five commissions and 14 or 15 option agreements and you’d be on air in the next 12 months. That doesn’t really happen anymore. So you’ve got to be quite focused on specific opportunities in specific territories.

TV FORMATS: What are Sky Vision’s format plans for the future?
SHINGLETON: We’re not looking to develop a telephone directory of formats; we want our formats to be quite curated. Most of the formats we are acquiring because we think there’s an opportunity for them, so we’re being quite picky about what we do. We’re not looking to take on lots of new ones. We always want to offer buyers new things to look at, but we’re also aware that there are great shows in [the catalog] already and sometimes you just don’t want to distract from working on the ones you’ve got. So we will keep it curated and we’ll keep it relatively modest in size, but we’ll always want to have provocative, strong top lines so that people will be interested and genuinely excited about the formats that we’re offering. And we’re particularly interested in strengthening factual entertainment; not to say that we wouldn’t be picking up regular entertainment, shiny-floor entertainment, but factual entertainment is an area that we’re particularly focused on.