Content Television & Digital’s Greg Phillips

The president talks about the company’s strategy for aligning with independent producers, filling gaps in the market and maximizing the long-tail value of its properties.

Content Television & Digital is serving its clients across the globe with a diverse range of product, from acclaimed, brand-defining drama to top-notch documentaries and more. A division of Content Media Corporation, the business, run by Greg Phillips as president, has a catalogue of more than 5,200 hours of programming to offer the market.

WS: Drama is one of your key offerings. What has been the overarching drama strategy at Content Television?
PHILLIPS: It’s been to capitalize on what we’ve done for so many years, which is bring the best drama we can grab hold of from independent producers who are unaffiliated with networks or larger companies—those who have the need of our expertise in handling their products on a tailor-made basis. So we go out to the likes of Shaftesbury in Canada or World Productions in the U.K., independent producers with great projects, great creative feel and understanding and an ability to execute, who are not tied up elsewhere. That has been increasingly challenging—so many companies have been subsumed into larger organizations. That’s been offset by a larger pool of drama [projects] necessary to feed a growing appetite in the marketplace, and by the bar being raised all the time in quality. We feel we can lend [our expertise] to individuals who frankly want to keep hold of their IP and take the lion’s share of the benefits and have more control, more input, into how their shows are distributed and where they are placed. You have to be smarter and more aggressive and more wide-thinking as to how you set these things up. If a producer has settled a show in say North America, that gives you an opportunity to license it around the world. If they only need a certain type of service from you and they don’t need money, then your distribution fees are lower. If they do need money, then we’re positioned to go not only to the broadcast and pay and cable guys, as we always have done, but we also have excellent relationships with the VOD and digital outlets. We try and weigh up what is the best way to pull the financing together and still leave us the opportunity to distribute a property on a long-term basis and help it grow, market it aggressively and do what we have to. The windowing strategy is very important. We’ll obviously go out to linear TV and to those kinds of customers as early as possible. But now we also go to the SVOD platforms to see what they’re up to, certainly for first window and absolutely for second window. Sometimes they’ll want to have something established before they take it on. They’ll take it on the basis that they know it will have had some initial push and promotion and platforming by the terrestrial or pay entity. Increasingly, people are saying, We want exclusivity for what we do and then we’ll control when we let it out elsewhere, if we let it out elsewhere. It’s really according to the different needs of each project, particularly the financing.

WS: How early do you need to come on board a show?
PHILLIPS: We’re a full-service distribution operation looking to take advantage of acquiring strong programming at whatever point it can be made available to us. Absolutely we like to get involved as early as possible, from the idea on the page or a treatment or outline through to when there’s a host broadcaster already aboard but there’s a requirement for some foreign [sales] or financing or both and we can help do that. We do pick up completed programming, and we do a lot of that on the documentary side. We’ll do it all the way through whenever there’s a possibility for us to do some business.

WS: What are your thoughts on the lack of procedurals in the market?
PHILLIPS: A lack of procedurals is a fact, but it can be rectified by all the guys around the world who complain that the Americans aren’t providing them—they can step up more vigorously to create their own. We’re seeing the opportunity to do that. Our own Jack Taylor series, financed in Ireland and by ZDF and ZDFE in Germany and ourselves, is an example. We’ll have another three movies, so we’ll now have nine of those. If the foreign buyers want procedurals, either hours or movies, that’s one way to do it.

WS: What are some of your upcoming drama highlights?
PHILLIPS: We’re starting the third season of Line of Duty, the BBC one hour that has been such a smash success. World Productions makes it with writer Jed Mercurio. The fourth season will be swiftly behind. We’re getting delivery on episodes of Slasher, which is our mystery/suspense/horror eight-hour series from Shaftesbury in Canada. Another big show will be The Secret Agent, which is four hours, based on the Joseph Conrad novel about the threat of terrorism and insurrection in London at the beginning of the last century. It’s from writer Tony Marchant.

WS: How’s your documentary business been?
PHILLIPS: We’ve capitalized on the good fortune we had to tie up with Alex Gibney on his feature-length documentaries. His Sinatra series for HBO, which came to us from Alcon, did extremely well. His signature two-hour movies such as Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God and Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief have done exceptionally well. And we’ve been able to expand on the feature-length documentary area and become a go-to distributor for all sorts of independents. It’s a big piece of our business now. We’re moving on to do signature series in that area as well. Drama may be our main calling card, but close behind it now is feature-length and series documentaries.

WS: In this crowded market with so many distributors vying for product, what can Content offer indie producers?
PHILLIPS: We continue to fight our corner and do well against some pretty stiff competition. We find attractive, promotable, well-made product. We’re relatively choosy and we hope we can devote the time and energy to making something of someone’s work, where by sheer volume it may be difficult for others to do so over a medium- to long-term period of time. We’d like to do more and we’d like to expand and we’re working towards that.