ATF Buyer Profile: FOX International Channels’ Michael Dick

PREMIUM: Michael Dick, the head of acquisitions for the Asia Pacific at FOX International Channels, is on the lookout for a broad range of content, from female-skewing reality and drama for STAR World to event series and documentaries for Fox Movies Premium to male-targeted fare for FOX.

What is your overall buying strategy, and what have been some of your top-performing acquisitions recently?
Our strategy is constantly evolving as we keep adding channels; they’re becoming a bit more focused now. We’re settling into our stride more than we have before. With STAR World it seems that reality is really what’s working well. That’s what the target audience seems to want. The deals we’ve done with Shine have really worked well for us. MasterChef is one of the most popular shows and it continues to succeed. Going to ITV and getting Hell’s Kitchen has worked really well. They’re complementary shows. Both at their core are about cooking, but in very different ways. We’re keeping with some of the history of the channel with Desperate Housewives, Castle; strong U.S. dramas still work well. If you can go after the ones with multiple seasons, you can get audiences hooked. It’s getting these shows on the channels as quickly as we can. With the next version of Junior MasterChef, we’re getting that on air as soon as they can get tapes to us. Similarly with the U.S. dramas. That’s the direction FOX is going to go. Asian audiences are becoming much more aware of what’s happening globally, they know about the shows, so you can’t delay them 6 months or 9 months, as we used to. In an effort to stem piracy as much as possible, the sooner we get them on air, it gives consumers the product in an easier way than them having to go find [it online]. That will hopefully will help drive our business forward.

Is STAR World still more female-targeted, while FOX skews male?
The look and feel of STAR World is definitely a high-end female brand. That doesn’t make it inaccessible to male viewers. At its core are affluent female viewers. And then FOX is becoming an alternative.

What’s your strategy at FX?
FX is probably one of the most fun to buy for. A lot of our business is ratings driven or advertiser dollar driven. FX can be the quirky channel. It doesn’t have to have the highest ratings, but it has to have high-quality programming. Mad Men, that’s core to the channel. 30 Rock works very well. We’re trying to find quirky but mainstream shows.

At Fox Movies Premium, what are you looking for outside of feature films?
Who are the real cinephiles? What else would they want? So any sort of awards shows that can complement the Oscars. Things like the Screen Actors Guild Awards, BAFTAs, recognizable global awards ceremonies. That branches into other things: any sort of live events. [For documentaries we look at] what content out there is underutilized? One is Enron. It’s 6, 7 years old and still pretty relevant now. Documentaries like that, everyone has heard about, probably no one [in these markets] has seen. Making it available to people is something to add value. People might not have gone out and got it, but when you give it to them, they see the value in it. That’s the sort of content we’re going to find. And then we push to get it exclusively when we can.

How open are distributors to offering up nonlinear rights?
It’s becoming easier and easier but it’s been a battle. No one has cracked this new media conundrum yet. Or figured out yet what the end user wants. The studios are slowly dishing out the rights. If we don’t start attacking this now, we’re going to miss the boat and the windows are going to be gone and people will find this content elsewhere. Or the markets will become so fragmented that it’s difficult for anyone to succeed.

Do you have slots in particular you need to fill?
The movies are locked in 12 months in advance. We pick up a few things as we go. We are doing more and more deals now as we start to launch local feeds. We try to find small packages for the local feeds we launch to top them up and make them more locally relevant. Movies that we may not have bought because they weren’t going to work pan-regionally but they would work in one or two territories. Fox Movies Premium, being new, we’re constantly buying some of these extra additional programs. We’re looking at what’s out there. MIPCOM was one of the first times we went hell for leather to find what was out there. We’re following up with that now, that’s something else we’ll do at ATF—what are these other new extra value-add shows? For series, again we get a lot of content though output deals. That’s a wave that comes and goes and we’re learning now what we’ll have and what we won’t have. We’ve still got the mid-seasons coming. A few shows are already dropping out [like] The Playboy Club, so it’s finding shows to fill those slots.