Event Preview: Banff World Television Festival 2010

For more than three decades now, the Banff World Television Festival has positioned itself as a key date in the event calendar for producers and broadcasters—particularly from North America—to network, brainstorm and make deals against the lush backdrop of the Canadian Rockies. It will be business as usual this year, with one key difference; the event will be taking place alongside another Achilles Media-organized conference, nextMEDIA.

“The one important thing about events is that no matter how much technology changes, no matter what industry you’re referring to, people need to get together face to face,” says Robert Montgomery, the CEO of Achilles Media. “Banff and nextMEDIA will run concurrently so that we can connect all those forces and facilitate the relationships between those people. Never before has it been more important for the advertising world, interactive agencies, the broadcast networks and producers to be together, to be able to collaborate and work together. We see a big opportunity to be the facilitators. That gives us huge excitement and optimism about Banff this year, because notwithstanding changing forces in the business, content is actually becoming even more important.”

Peter Vamos, Banff’s executive director, tells World Screen Weekly that the timing for this partnership between the two events is ideal, given this month’s launch of the Canada Media Fund, formed from the merger of the Canadian Television Fund and the Canada New Media Fund. “You need to have a digital media platform” attached to a project to access Canada Media Fund’s coffers, Vamos notes. “There’s not a lot of this kind of public funding going on anywhere in the world. You have traditional producers saying, What does this mean for my business? How do I actually create these platforms? At Banff, they can literally turn to the person to their left and say, Do you know what this is about? And hopefully they’ll say, yes!”

Vamos adds that the partnership between Banff and nextMEDIA will also be of interest to international broadcasters and producers. “We’re at the vanguard of this. People want to see how these kinds of deals can be structured, how business can be done when you’re thinking about content at multiple levels, and how to successfully roll this out and monetize it. I think we’re going to be one of the first events where this sort of thing is happening.”

Vamos lists a number of other highlights for Banff this year, including the renewal of its Kids & Animation focus, launched in 2009. Speakers on the schedule include David Levine, the VP of worldwide programming strategy, acquisitions and co-productions at Disney Channels Worldwide; Joe Godwin, the director of BBC Children’s; and Vince Commisso, the president and CEO of 9 Story Entertainment. New for this year is a nonfiction strand, with a lineup that includes Roy Ackerman, who heads up Jamie Oliver’s Fresh One Productions; Cineflix’s co-CEO, Glen Salzman; and a session on formats.

The main Banff schedule, meanwhile, features a top-notch list of creators, celebrities and executives. James Manos, executive producer of Showtime’s Dexter, will feature in the Showrunner Series, which also includes David Zucker of CBS’s hit The Good Wife, Bill Prady of the comedy The Big Bang Theory, and Vince Gilligan of AMC’s Breaking Bad. Star power will be provided by Ricky Gervais, the recipient of the Sir Peter Ustinov Comedy Award; and William Shatner, discussing his six decades in entertainment. Also on the roster are Nigel Lythgoe, executive producer of So You Think You Can Dance?; Tom Rogers, the president and CEO of TiVo; and Andrew Whitaker, the executive VP of international at World Wrestling Entertainment.

“There’s a lot of buzz about Banff,” notes Montgomery about this year’s lineup. “It’s got its fan club in terms of people who love to come. It’s an annual date for an interesting group of people. It’s incredibly productive, so much business is done, so many deals are done. Banff has remained very healthy—now with nextMEDIA, that adds more texture to the return on investment that people will get from attending.”