AETN UK Plans for Further European Expansion of Channel Brands

July 5, 2011 World Screen
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PREMIUM: On the heels of the Crime & Investigation Network launching in the Netherlands, Tom Davidson, the managing director of AETN UK, and Adam MacDonald, the VP of programming, discuss with World Screen plans for expanding this and other channel brands in the European market.

WS: How are you positioning Crime & Investigation in the Netherlands?
DAVIDSON: We’re really using our U.K. channel as the model. It’s very much a full graphic on-air package. It has a very clean look; it’s white with strong spots of red and a bit of black. It’s a forensic approach. It doesn’t have a fast-paced feel to it. It’s very much that kind of psychological in-depth approach to the subject matter and a clinical sense to the look and feel of it—that blood-work-laboratory-testing-type of a feel about it.
 
WS: What do you think is going to give the channel an edge over the competition?
MACDONALD: It’s the look of the channel. The channel looks very classy, very high quality and clean, so I think it looks really good. The other thing is the content. We get a regular, long pipe-work of the really high-quality programming that’s coming down from the States. We commissioned additional stuff also. For instance, another series that we’re about to launch is one that’s doing really well in America, Beyond Scared Straight, which is a documentary series where you take young juvenile delinquents that are on the road to crime and you give them an experience inside a prison where essentially they have to be inmates and are mentored by murderers. It’s a high-energy gut-wrenching experience. You see these problematic, aggressive children becoming kids again and scared inside a real state penitentiary. That’s one example of the kind of quality of the work that’s coming from the States.
 
On top of that, we commission shows ourselves; we’ve recently been doing one called Crimes That Shook Britain, which are access pieces where we interview friends and relatives and police of some of the major crimes in Britain, which is extraordinarily heart-wrenching stories of mothers of kids who have been killed; stories that were in the headlines of police doggedly pursuing the criminals and getting convictions. It’s really high-quality context that I think sets us apart.
 
DAVIDSON: I think the confidence we have against the competition is that we have some of that competition already in the U.K. I’m talking particularly about Investigation Discovery in that sense. We go head-to-head with them in the U.K. and we typically out-perform them on any given night about three to four times over, so we’re confident that being able to bring the content that we use in the U.K. over to the Dutch market will continue to be head and shoulders above the competition.
 
WS: Do you see launching CI in other European territories down the road?
DAVIDSON: We’ve actually already launched it in Poland and we’ve launched in Bulgaria now, in Croatia, Serbia. Holland is that next stop on our European map, but certainly we’ll be looking for further rollouts, looking at Romania next and some of the other Central European territories.
 
WS: Do you plan to commission local productions for Netherlands?
DAVIDSON: Absolutely. That’s something we’re always looking at for all of our channels. We’ve already been speaking to Polish producers, both on the crime side and on the history side, about certain series not maybe just for Poland but maybe that have more of a European feel to them. The Scandinavian market and the Dutch market, we’re always seeing what’s possible out there. I think the quality of the production in European territories has improved quite a bit over the years. That’s something we also kind of struggle with—we get such a high quality from our output deal from the U.S., we want to make sure we can match that quality with our local productions, which takes a certain amount of budget. The plan would certainly be to, as we’ve done in the U.K., to start doing local commissioning for all of our portfolio channels across Europe.
 
MACDONALD: We look quite intently at acquiring programs from all the territories. With Crime & Investigation, possibly more than any of the other channels, it’s interesting that in the U.K. there’s no kind of resistance to watching programs about serial killers and criminals from territories outside of the U.K. Fortunately or unfortunately crime stories do travel beyond borders.
 
WS: Is expanding the HISTORY brand a priority as well?
DAVIDSON: Our continued growth of HISTORY across all of our regions is certainly a priority as well. We have HISTORY in all of our territories but that’s a channel we continue to increase our distribution of and have big plans for local productions as well. The overall ambition is to get all of our popular channels across all of our territories. We’re very much still in a growth phase and will be for the next couple years. That’s an exciting time for us to be able to expand our portfolio and our brand.
 
WS: Is Lifetime one of the channels that you’re looking to grow outside of the U.S.?
DAVIDSON: With Lifetime, currently, we’re looking to bring that over to the U.K. That’s usually our first stop, although it doesn’t have to be; traditionally that’s how we’ve done it with all the previous brands, so we’re having those discussions now. Lifetime is not currently under our control as of yet for Europe, those are conversations we are having, but yes, our aspirations would be to bring Lifetime over as well.
 
WS: What characteristics does a market have to have for you to consider launching a channel there?
DAVIDSON: What we’ve seen with all of the online viewing, the digital, is actually television viewing hasn’t gone down, which is a great thing in many ways. It’s been augmented by all these other services. When you ask what are we looking for in a particular market, that really comes down to: is it a market that we’re currently in, and does it make sense to increase the exposure of our portfolio in that market? If it’s a new market that doesn’t have a brand, then that’s interesting as well.
 
There’s really no restriction, to be totally honest. I think we’re always looking for the opportunity to grow and expand, and even with all of the changes that have gone on, that has not put up any further barriers for us. If anything, it’s allowed good opportunities for us because we have probably more control over the rights. VOD and online and what you can do with a show, we have more control than many of our competitors because we do most of our own productions and our parent does most of the productions that we’ve got on the channels and they have control over those rights, whereas a lot of the bigger GE channels who are acquiring much of their content from other studios, etc. are not able to access those rights. It’s difficult for them to go in and do a heavy VOD deal that’s necessary to get onto Sky Deutschland or something like that where the top one’s looking for a particular type of value from a channel. You want to get your channels out there to the wider audience, then you can deliver value to both sides. That’s something we have as a value to us that we can use over our competition.


 

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