Making an Impact

RHI Entertainment’s Jeff Sagansky & Robert Halmi, Jr. on what’s ahead for the company.

It’s been a year of considerable change for RHI Entertainment. Early in the summer of 2008, the com­pany’s founders, Robert Halmi, Sr., and Robert Halmi, Jr., took RHI public after having reclaimed ownership from Hallmark Cards in January 2006. And earlier this year, Jeff Sagansky signed on as the company’s chairman. His career includes stints as co-president of Sony Pictures, president of CBS Enter­tainment and president and CEO of Paxson Com­munications (now ION Media Networks). More recently, he co-founded Electric Sky Entertainment, the producer of the online shows Afterworld and Gemini Division.

As he and Halmi, Jr., who is the president and CEO, plot the company’s big-picture strategy for the year, Sagansky is looking to take RHI’s expertise in big-event TV and expand that into the series-television production space. “We’ll use the existing production, distribution and financial infrastructure of the company to do that. So it’s really just leveraging off of what RHI already does better than any other independent company in the business.”

That process is now under way, with two back-door pilots at the SCI FI Channel: The Phantom, a new drama for the costumed superhero that kicks off with a four-hour mini-series premiering next year; and Riverworld, based on the series of novels by Philip José Farmer.

RHI is also working on a mini-series retelling of Alice in Wonderland for SCI FI, following the success of Tin Man. While RHI has certainly become a volume supplier of content to cable networks, it also continues brisk business with the U.S. broadcasters. NBC, for one, will air two RHI mini-series this summer, The Storm and Meteor.

“We’ve got a great slate, probably our best slate in years,” says Halmi. “It’s mainly because a lot of the big U.S. networks are getting back into big-event television as a way to give something special to their audiences and attract advertising when advertising is scarce.”

Halmi notes that networks across the globe are similarly maintaining their investments in RHI’s lavish productions, despite pressures on programming budgets. “In this climate, people want a little escapism in big events. They want fantasy, they want the kinds of things RHI is known for.”

To maintain this steady supply of programming to its clients, Halmi says that RHI looks to numerous sources for creative inspiration. “We read constantly, we get galleys from literary agents all over the world. We’re lucky to still have Robert Halmi, Sr., who every five minutes comes up with another brilliant idea! We’re constantly mining that resource, of course. There’s a wealth of really great product and people out there, so it’s letting them in the door, reading scripts, looking for books—that’s where [ideas] come from.”

To build on those efforts, Sagansky is placing an emphasis on boosting RHI’s presence in Los Angeles, “to increase our reach in the creative community,” he says.

Having worked both at a studio and at a broadcast network, Sagansky has spent much of his career dealing with the challenges of financing high-quality shows, witnessing the evolution of production models. “The networks are buying shows from Canada and they’re reconsidering their entire development process. They know that now, given the advertising downturn and the fact that eyeballs are migrating to cable and to new media, they can’t be producing at the level they’ve been producing at in the past. In the cable universe, they are probably paying roughly 60 percent in terms of what the networks are paying. These network shows are now about $3 million an hour, where the cable shows are anywhere from $1.5 million to $2 million.”

To ensure that RHI can continue to fund its content, Sagansky and Halmi are looking to find new ways of exploiting the company’s deep catalogue. In the U.S., RHI operates a branded block on ION Television, and Halmi says he hopes to replicate that internationally. “We have a library of 3,000 hours of programming, and it’s mostly movies and mini-series. We’d like to have a block of programming in some of the major territories outside of the U.S. It’s a great way for us to get weekly revenue from our product.”

The company is also pursuing opportunities on alternative distribution platforms. “We’re seeing money from new media, particularly from the VOD platforms around the world,” Sagansky says. Halmi adds, “When you have content, you have to look at every distribution platform to make sure you’re optimizing the revenue.”

In short, Halmi says, watch this space: “You’ll see a lot of exciting stuff from RHI in the near future. We’re excited that Jeff joined the company, and the two of us are really going to do some neat things to compete with some big players. We have pretty lofty ambitions.”