Germaine Deagan Sweet

The National Geographic bouquet, including the flagship National Geographic Channel (NGC), NGC HD, Nat Geo Wild, Nat Geo Adventure and Nat Geo Music, has been rolling out worldwide for many years. The company has recently increased its focus on providing original programming for these various international services, putting more emphasis on deals negotiated at the regional level. The company can then leverage these locally produced programs to bring them to a wider audience through other Nat Geo international channels, as well as to third-party broadcasters. Germaine Deagan Sweet, the VP of content syndication for National Geographic Channels (NGC), discusses the company’s global growth plans, and windowing strategy, with TV Real Weekly.

TV REAL: Tell us about your strategy for local original programming around the world.
DEAGAN SWEET: NGC recognizes the best programming strategy as one that includes locally produced stories in terms of delivering consistent and engaged audiences. NGC has been producing locally in key regions for many years—the U.K. and Asia are good examples that speak to the success of this approach. Our ongoing strategy is a simple one: growth. To maintain our growing market share around the world, NGC has been developing local producer/partner relationships across Europe and in Latin America to quickly turn around productions that are not only relevant to a local market, but may also resonate around the world. The Chilean miners’ story is a great example; a story that has been produced by local production company Fox Telecolombia to be broadcast on NGC around the world.

TV REAL: What is your overall windowing strategy at Nat Geo, in terms of keeping the content for your channel but also licensing it to third-party broadcasters?
DEAGAN SWEET: Our business is driven by our channel brands: National Geographic Channel, Nat Geo Wild, NGC HD, Nat Geo Adventure and Nat Geo Music. National Geographic content always premieres on one of the channels in the first instance. We do, however, recognize that some big event programming requires multiple partners to afford the higher cost of production and in various territories we work very closely with third-party broadcasters to manage windowing. With the size and variety of our expanding content catalogue, we are in a position to license content to key partners and, on a region-by-region basis, ensure there is maximum benefit to all parties.

TV REAL: How have you been expanding business opportunities with VOD, mobile and broadband?
DEAGAN SWEET: Our business has been focused on extending the Nat Geo channel experience. Audiences come to these platforms to interact with a brand and content they immediately recognize as relevant, entertaining and credible so we have focused on creating packages specifically for these markets. It’s a 360-degree approach that audiences expect and our partners look to us to deliver.

TV REAL: What territories have been a particular focus for you as of late?
DEAGAN SWEET: We’ve seen a definite increase in our business across Eastern Europe and in Asia. It has been a combination of focused resources and market demand.

TV REAL: What are your overall goals for Nat Geo’s syndication business?
DEAGAN SWEET: Strategic growth is an ongoing goal for our business. We’re managing this growth by placing more emphasis on deals negotiated at the regional level, recognizing that partnerships are always going to be best managed locally. We have the ability to create partnerships involving a dual stream of benefit—programming as well as co-productions—and our goal is to maximize these opportunities.

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