Duccio Donati

World Screen Weekly, October 11, 2007

VP, International Sales

Comcast International Media Group

In November of last year, U.S. cable giant Comcast Corporation took full control of E! Networks from The Walt Disney Company. The deal brought two well-known international brands—E! Entertainment Television and Style Network—together with U.S. properties like The Golf Channel, Versus, G4, AZN Television and the VOD service Exercise TV. Properties from many of these services are on offer by the company at MIPCOM this week, led by the efforts of Duccio Donati, the VP of international sales at the newly formed Comcast International Media Group.

For Donati, the enlarged catalogue allows him to tap into his years of experience in lifestyle and entertainment programming. Indeed, for Donati, entertainment runs in the family.

As the son of Sergio Donati, who was the frequent screenwriting partner of Italian Spaghetti Westerns director Sergio Leone, “I grew up in this industry and was surrounded by it and always had a great interest in it,” Donati says. And it wasn’t just the film world that Donati was enchanted with—growing up in Italy in the 1980s, Donati quickly became a fan of big American series that Canale 5 was importing into the market. It was the business side of the entertainment industry, however, that Donati wanted to be a part of.

After getting his college degree in the U.S., Donati found work as a producer and distributor of animation in New York. “I worked with a lot of big public broadcasters, that’s how I got my feet wet. And I was really attracted to the international side of the business. It was such a natural fit with my background. I speak four languages, I went to international schools in Rome, I was right at home.”

At the height of the supermodel craze in the mid-90s, Donati went on to work for Videofashion Network, selling its catalogue of fashion programming worldwide. With some experience in lifestyle content under his belt, Donati jumped at the opportunity to join E! Networks and relocate to Los Angeles. “E! was such a cool, fun brand and it just looked like such a dynamic place. It was really in growth mode.”

International revenues, however, were a small piece of pie at the time. “We were barely on the radar [internationally]. It was a side business where we’d try and sell as much as we could and try to get the brand out there. It was definitely not a focus for the company.”

Donati cites the 101 countdown franchise and The Anna Nicole Show as E! properties that put the company on the map internationally. “Our production values at some point really jumped. There was a big investment in the quality of programming, which helped differentiate us from our competition. That was a big, big turning point for us. [Those shows] helped us get in the door with some of the bigger broadcasters.”

E!’s brand internationally is supported by the E! Entertainment Television channel, which will be the first-run home of all E! content from the U.S. Donati says his windowing strategies for selling E! content to other platforms varies from market to market. “As a general rule, everything premieres on the channel and has at least a six-month window. Then on a territory by territory basis, depending on our distribution, on where we are with the channel, we work out windows with respect to how we license to other people,” Donati says. “We do not sell to the channels that we consider directly competitive to E! and we keep signature series, things like E! News, True Hollywood Story, programs that are truly and highly identifiable with E! Where we don’t have a channel—and our interest is always to have a channel if we can—then we try to create branded blocks and grow the presence of the brand enough to make sure that it serves as a beachhead for eventually launching those channels.”

In addition to full 24-hour channel rollouts, Comcast has made VOD a priority for its international business. “We’re going to propose a turnkey VOD solution,” says Donati. “It’s going to include E!, Style, The Golf Channel and G4 content and Exercise TV. We feel that it is a very strong offering. Now we can offer a bouquet of VOD channels. We bring to it all the expertise that we’ve gained in the States out of basically trial and error. It’s exciting to really come out as the Comcast Group and have that backing behind us.”