Exclusive Interview: Sky Vision’s Jane Millichip

PREMIUM: Jane Millichip, managing director of Sky Vision, tells World Screen about the strategy for maintaining a curated slate for the company.

Sky Vision manages a catalog of some 6,000 hours of programming, consisting of shows commissioned by Sky as well as titles from third-party platforms. Sky Vision also owns stakes in production companies in the U.K. and the U.S. These entities allow Sky Vision to draw on ideas and IP from creators of a range of genres.

WS: Sky Vision has equity investments in several production companies. How did you build the portfolio?
MILLICHIP: The turning point was about three or four years ago, when we transformed Sky Vision into a dual economy—a business that accommodates both production and distribution revenues. I felt this move made us more future-proof. International exploitation and distribution are fundamental to our business, but I felt IP retention was becoming more challenging, and, therefore, we moved to a healthier and sustainable mix of production revenues (work for hire) and classic IP exploitation. We are a much more rounded, and, I hope, robust business as a result. So we set out to make investments in a number of production companies. We now have ten investments in production businesses in the U.K. and the U.S. This dual economy enabled us to open up to work with the SVODs, which, as you know, insist on retaining all rights. We still aim to retain rights wherever we can, but we have a nuanced approach to rights retention across the production portfolio. And we certainly don’t have a one-size-fits-all approach.

Our most recent production-company investment is Avanti Media, a Cardiff- and London-based factual-and-entertainment business that has great credentials in regions and nations. That’s a really important part of the landscape in the U.K. right now. Channel 4, ITV and BBC are all looking to commission outside of London much more.

I try to avoid overlap in the businesses we invest in. We are still bespoke scale. We are nothing like the big consolidators and have no intention to be right now. Love Productions is one of the first investments we made, along with Jupiter Entertainment in the U.S. Love Productions is best known for the international hit format The Great British Bake Off, but also credited for some very important social-action docs. At Jupiter, they are experts in real-life crime and run a first-rate production business in Knoxville, Tennessee. When we were investing in the U.S., it was really important that we didn’t just invest in great creatives, but in well-run businesses, particularly as an offshore investment. Love Productions, Jupiter and factual producer Blast! Films were the cornerstones of our production portfolio, and we’ve added to that. Last year, we made an investment in True North, which is a Leeds-based company, brilliant in volume factual. Then we have some small startup investments, including Znak & Co, which is making one of the biggest entertainment shows ever made for Sky 1, called Revolution, which we are pitching out in the U.S. right now. We also have an investment in the diverse business Sugar Films. These are companies that complement each other and fit well in the portfolio.

WS: How has the financing of drama changed?
MILLICHIP: On the big dramas, it’s evident that you need at least one big co-producing or financing partner. And that means that the management of risk is critical because if you don’t secure that co-production partner, that’s a significant portion of the budget that you have to carry. Most of our dramas assume a co-production or presale somewhere in the mix, particularly the Sky dramas.

It used to be the case that a presale was top-up funding; now it’s core to the funding, and you need two key broadcasters and a distributor. The distributor’s advance is now required as core funding rather than being pure profit for the stakeholders. That has changed our risk profile; a much greater portion of sales is now required to recover advances and deficits, which increases our risk. In some ways, we’ve never had it better in drama—the quality has never been higher and we will never run out of stories. But do we have too many dramas to be able to fund them according to conventional business models? Possibly, yes. And it’s cer­tainly the case that good is not good enough anymore. You have to be brilliant to break through. That adds to the risk management.

We have three strands within our drama slate: first, our own Sky shows, commissioned by Sky Atlantic, Sky 1 and Sky Arts. These are generally the biggest shows we handle, and we often make substantial investments to underwrite production deficits. Then we have third-party shows, which break down into English-language and non-English-language.

WS: How is Sky Vision increasing its presence in international markets?
MILLICHIP: We are a furiously outward-looking business. We’ve built up our credibility and our profile on the idea that we offer bespoke scale. So we can handle some of the biggest projects, like Britannia. We have the means to market those shows, but we don’t have a telephone-directory-style catalog, and we do not intend to. You need a certain amount of volume to give you the critical mass to make you an important distributor for buyers to engage with, and we do a lot of packaged deals, particularly in the factual area. But bespoke scale is very much our mission statement. And in terms of our global reach, we have a great and well-established sales team.