Interview: Dori Media Group’s Nadav Palti

January 11, 2012 World Screen
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NEW YORK: Having scored select distribution rights for The Bold and the Beautiful and notching up format deals on Date Blind and In Treatment, Dori Media Group is intent on diversifying its catalogue as well as its businesses, CEO and president Nadav Palti tells World Screen Newsflash.

Dori Media Group (DMG) has built its reputation in the international television market on providing sophisticated telenovelas and daily dramas, such as Lalola, and cross-platform series like Amanda O. With a constant focus on quality, Palti has begun to diversify the company’s catalogue as well as its businesses, which already include production, distribution, channels and new media.
 

WS: Dori Media has been able to break into some very important markets.
PALTI: In Russia we have sold almost everything we have, finished product and scripts for local adaptations. We sold Cupid: The Business of Love; it was produced locally and is successful. Split is also on the air. We sold two seasons of In Treatment to Channel One in Russia. We also work with CTC and all the channels and all the production companies in Russia. After two years in a recession, when buyers didn’t even answer the phone, Russia is now coming back big time, their economy is good and that is having a positive impact on our business. The same is true in Poland.
 
In the U.S. we sold the format to Date Blind (Ciega a citas) to CBS Television Studios. They will produce it for The CW and are now working on the pilot. I hope Date Blind will be the same as Ugly Betty—the success in the U.S. will influence sales all around the world.
 
In China we are doing quite well. We sold Amanda O, which we produce in Argentina. It’s the first cross-platform format for the Internet, mobile and TV. We sold 120 episodes of Mannequins, a show we produce in Israel. We also sold the format for uMan, and it will air as a local production next spring. After it airs in China it will help us sell it in Asia and worldwide. In Brazil, we sold Wrong Number to SBT and we are working on other formats like uMan.
 
Our catalogue is very big and lucrative and focuses on quality content and we also produce a lot in Israel and in Argentina. We are starting to benefit from all the new-media formats we produced in the last two or three years and recently we diversified our catalogue to include game shows. This has helped us maintain our position in the market and break into new territories.
 
WS: Making deals in major territories must have enhanced your reputation and made it easier to open new doors.
PALTI: We just signed a deal with The Bold and the Beautiful. We will be their sales agents in a lot of territories: all of Latin America, most of Central and Eastern Europe and a few countries in Asia. It’s an honor that this company that has had a show on the air on CBS since 1987 wants us to help them. It’s an indication that the market understands that Dori Media knows how to distribute and is always associated with the best and most innovative stories that come to the market.
 
We also represent In Treatment, the most famous Israeli format, which aired on HBO for three seasons. We are the international distributor and sold it to more than 35 territories. We have taken In Treatment to the next level. We are producing it by ourselves in Argentina as Enterapia, which will air in the spring on the public broadcaster, Channel 7 TV Pública, and then we are going to distribute it in Latin America and Spain.
 
WS: Tell us about diversifying your catalogue.
PALTI: We came to the conclusion that since we are selling to more than 120 territories around the world and we have more than 700 clients, if we reach them with good drama, whether it’s daily, weekly or prime-time drama, then why not try to sell them new-media reality shows, which are both for Internet and TV, not just for TV. We also try to find new angles on the game-show genre. We have Wrong Number and The Money Pump, which are two innovative formats. We have more than 5,500 hours of drama, so why not offer other genres when we meet with buyers?
 
WS: Despite the difficult economies in several territories, what business opportunities are you seeing?
PALTI: I am actually seeing opportunities all over the world. We have learned from the last three years. The recession started in the last quarter of 2008 and we suffered two tough years in 2009 and 2010, even though we did very well. But because we are selling worldwide and because the Israeli economy was great, we were able to maintain good results. We cut costs, but when we cut we didn’t damage our revenue stream and part of that came from our TV channels, which during the recession proved to be very lucrative because we didn’t deal with advertising revenue, we only dealt with subscriber fees. We have 18 TV channels and we are launching another five HD channels to reach 23 channels. We try to maintain and constantly increase the fixed cash flow that we get every month, which allows us to then take risks and produce more new shows, because we know that we will regularly get a very good stream of revenue.
 
We are getting into a new business. We just invested in a company that deals with in-flight entertainment. Airplanes today offer touch-screen video on demand and there are 5.5 billion passengers a year and that number increases by 6 percent every year. So we combine our expertise in media, including our experience as buyers—[for the telenovela channel alone] we buy about 3,500 hours from our competitors and we buy a lot of movies and series from the majors for the TV channels that we operate in Israel—and our expertise with airlines, to build an in-flight entertainment business.   
 
We also provide dubbing and subtitling services to companies offering video on demand on the Internet and television.
 
WS: Tell us about Dori New Media.
PALTI: In new media we are doing several things. First, we have novebox.com and I believe we are going to use this operation to form a joint venture with a big company in China that really needs our structure and our technology.
 
Also, we produced the second season of First Love, we are now producing Checked In NY a very interesting new format. We tried to combine docu-reality and the LBS (Location Based Services) technology from Facebook. We continue to produce for the Internet and for mobile here in Israel and then offer these ideas around the world. It’s not easy to invent new things. You need time to convince the market that it the product is good that they should try it. We are working very hard on this and hope that in the future we’ll have more revenues from new media.