MIPCOM Producers’ Hub: Execs Talk Financing Strategies

Serial Maven Studios’ Solange Attwood, Fremantle’s Rebecca Dundon and Czech producer Vratislav Šlajer discussed financing strategies in the current TV landscape today at MIPCOM, in conversation with World Screen’s Kristin Brzoznowski.

Attwood, CEO and co-founder of Serial Maven; Dundon, senior VP of scripted content of international at Fremantle; and Šlajer, head producer and managing director of Bionaut and chairman of the board of the Audiovisual Producers Association of the Czech Republic, took part in the session Go Bigger or Smaller? Adjusting Financing Strategy to Changing Times.

The streamers, and their battle for supremacy, had brought a lot of money into the marketplace, which has since been tapered back. “And Wall Street fueled that pretty massive growth,” said Attwood. “That was a fantastic experience for creative talent; there were lots of great stories that were made, told and shared all over the world. Wall Street really did dictate, and that business model had to change. So, there is and continues to be a contraction in the marketplace. All of us are trying to [navigate] this contraction in lots of different ways.”

“We are now in the mode of overcorrecting,” Dundon said. “That feels hard. We’re trying to bring those budgets down again and trying to compete and deliver the quality that audiences always expect. We have to work harder in production, distribution and financing to make sure we deliver the quality of the content and we have to be smarter, and it’s a direct reaction to the streamers and [inflated] budgets.”

“I talk about the current marketplace being a diversified market,” Attwood added. “That diversity means you’ve still got a lot of different ways to potentially work. Our business is global, and you’ve got to be connected. There’s lot of different things you have to educate yourself with in order to take advantage of the opportunities that exist. To be clear, there is a lot of pain in the market right now, but there is also a lot of opportunity.”

Attwood came up in the Canadian marketplace, which does not have the same financing power as its neighboring U.S. “I grew up in an environment where we had to be creative; we had to stitch together financing from all sorts of different places in the world. We had to collaborate with different producers and platform partners. Your VOD partners, your incumbent media players in your territories are just as valuable now as the international players.”

The point, Dundon said, is to lean into strategic relationships, whether it’s with regional VOD platforms or global players looking to acquire more regionally in select markets. “Everybody is open to innovative models, and if you are playing that way, whether that’s your financing partners, your production partners or creative incentives and finding new talent. There are so many different ways to do it.”

She gave as an example the crime procedural Costiera, starring Jesse Williams. It was a Prime Video commission, but rather than taking all the rights, they took key European territories. Fremantle came on board for rest of the world and has had much success in bringing the title out globally. “It shows that the very aggressive global push that we had two or three years ago and these partners that want content that compliments the output of the U.S. but they can’t necessarily afford and they have different voices from around the world, you can create great stuff that everybody wants to watch and be entertained by. It’s an interesting model that involved regional and global players to optimize what we do.”

Co-productions have also seen an uptick as the market recalibrates. “If you’re not participating in co-production/co-financing conversations, you’re missing the big opportunities. For those of the audience, certainly educate yourself on what those things look like. There are a lot of different ways to structure deals, whether it’s a treaty co-production, co-production, co-ventures, co-financing models—there are just literally tons and tons of ways to put content together. Everything always has to originate from your original story or IP. So, whatever the story is that you want to tell, the model you utilize to tell that story should be specific to that. Find people who have a track record, find people that are open, willing and transparent. This is the time to have those discussions and make those partnerships.

The CEE market, Šlajer said, has caught up with the quality of content and talent in the last 10 to 20 years. “We are still a ‘lower cost’ but, at the same time, able to deliver high production value. With the investment/budget cuts, all CEE countries are becoming valuable partners—but not only as cheaper service, also coming with talent, from concept to delivery. There are big co-production opportunities and huge audience demand (for example, our local platform Voyo has 650,000 subscribers from a 15 million market, soon to have 1 million subs). Also, the Czech Republic itself is rebooting its funding system with significant support for the small screen (TV and stream) from January 2025.”

He emphasized a need “to work together—creatively, in terms of financial co-pros or taking advantage of effective services and talent in CEE and the Czech Republic.”