In early 2020, on the eve of the pandemic and at the height of the streaming wars, Herbert L. Kloiber unveiled Night Train Media, tapping into his experience at Tele München Group to develop scripted projects that would appeal to the then voracious appetite of SVOD services globally. Scaling up the business, Night Train Media acquired Eccho Rights to serve as its international distribution arm and diversified, acquiring a stake in Paul Heaney’s BossaNova Media and investing in factual indie Curve Media. Those investments have proven to be smart bets amid the challenges of the English-language scripted sector. BossaNova’s thriving commissioning and distribution business, Eccho Rights’ booming Turkish drama trade and increasing opportunities in film financing and digital are key growth areas for Night Train, Kloiber tells World Screen in this wide-ranging interview.
WS: How do you see the international distribution landscape today?
KLOIBER: On the distribution side, we have four buckets. We have the English-language scripted shows we gap finance through Night Train and then distribute through Eccho Rights. We have the Turkish dramas financed and distributed by Eccho. We have the non-scripted side with BossaNova Media. The fourth is film, where we always work with third-party distribution partners on a case-by-case basis because we only have one or two a year. They all behave quite differently from each other. They have different buyer groups. The Turkish side has been performing quite well. We are the biggest distributor of Turkish drama outside of Turkey, which benefits both producers and buyers and leverages our sales team into territories that usually don’t buy Turkish, like France, Scandinavia and Germany. The non-scripted side is doing very well—we’re happy with how that distribution business has been growing. We see the biggest challenge around English-language scripted drama. When I started Night Train, you had the streaming wars. So many platforms were trying to establish themselves and spending so much money on content. We were very successful in those first two or three years. With the pullback of the streamers and the reduction in ad revenue spending for linear channels, we have seen a shrinking market. A lot of our shows are being commissioned in the U.K., as well as in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. We always focused on bringing in a big chunk of what we estimated in terms of sales from the U.S. The U.S. has certainly become a smaller market for these types of shows. Some players just disappeared; others are focusing heavily on big talent and U.S.-centric shows. At the same time, we are seeing more willingness to co-produce, so we are going more toward that model. We want to have a partner in early from the U.S. who doesn’t necessarily need rights worldwide. That has been an adjustment in our strategy. We generally also focus on shows with bigger names that are more recognizable or valuable to U.S. buyers, as well as stand-out programs that are less run-of-the-mill crime shows in the low-budget bracket. Those tend to have a harder time. So, we’re pivoting in terms of what we’re investing in.
WS: Drama has a long lead time, and the market changes quickly. Given the uncertainty, how are you curating a slate of development projects?
KLOIBER: We’ve reduced the amount we are spending on development. We’re developing less in-house. We are looking for strong IPs with high-profile attachments or partners. We would co-develop with bigger production companies, showrunners from the U.S. or more high-profile writers. The package quality needs to be more compelling and better for us to come in on a development project. Three years ago, we were happy to spread a bit around in safe genres and see what emerges. Now, we’re scrutinizing more and are more selective.
WS: How will AI impact your business in the next few years?
KLOIBER: The most immediate impact we’ll see in two to three years is on the dubbing side. We’re looking at that closely because we’re dubbing so much of our Turkish- and English-language content. AI is not very competitive in that space yet. You still need to do a lot of manual labor adjustments. The lip-synching isn’t very good, but I can see how rapidly this is developing. In three years, we will have a different landscape on that front. That’s going to reduce costs for us and producers immediately. We often must absorb those costs upfront to bring shows into markets like France, Italy and Germany. So, that’s going to be meaningful. At the same time, AI will reduce some of our administrative and legal costs. On the creative side, I don’t see [an impact] that soon. We have used AI if we need to create images, for example, for a pitch deck to visualize what a screenplay or show should look like.
WS: You mentioned a shift toward more co-pros earlier. Are you seeing new financing models emerge?
KLOIBER: It’s less of a model than a jigsaw puzzle. It’s trial and error in trying to find matching partners. It’s matching people and projects together. On the non-scripted side, BossaNova successfully does that on Development Days, where we put producers in front of commissioners. These networks are rating the pitches and selecting what they’re interested in. You can see which shows have at least four interested buyers. Let’s finance them and get some of these people on board early. It gives you better intelligence on where to put your money. On the scripted side, it’s a lot harder to do that. But you can understand which partner is looking for which genre and what type of audience they are trying to serve, so you try to match them with a particular project.
WS: How are you leading your companies amid all the changes happening in the business? What priorities are you remaining focused on?
KLOIBER: I focus on risk assessment and trying to control risk across the group. Part of that is the diversification of our product mix and where we invest. You can’t put all your eggs in one basket in this environment. Part of that is finding more partners earlier on. Initially, we were taking riskier bets. We are still in a very choppy situation in the market. I said this a year ago, and it hasn’t dramatically improved, at least not on the scripted side. At the same time, we know things go through phases and waves. Scripted is a long game. Whatever we invest in now is going to monetize in two years. You want to stay slightly ahead of the curve but with caution. It’s hard! At the same time, we’re still looking to invest. It’s not only the product itself we’re investing in. We are constantly looking at companies. We’ve bought three over the last two years, which helped us in that diversification effort. We look at opportunities strategically in terms of where we have holes in our value chain and where we can grow adjacent areas like digital, building new channels and managing products for third parties. That is also part of managing risk and growth.
WS: Eccho Rights has scaled up its YouTube business. How do you see YouTube and AVOD as an additional monetization tool for your library?
KLOIBER: We have scaled that up. We hired Caitlin Meek-O’Connor from Little Dot Studios to lead that and rebranded it as Night Train Digital because we are now servicing third parties, not only monetizing our content. It grew out of our exploitation of Turkish drama series on YouTube. Last year alone, we had 4.5 billion views on YouTube. It’s substantial, even though a lot of the viewership for that comes from territories with low CPMs. We’re focusing on increasing our average CPM by adding English-language content and channels to the product mix. We’ve established a romantic movie channel. We have built various factual channels. We acquire content from partners to build those channels or manage theirs. We’ve partnered to produce the Michael Parkinson podcast in AI. Deep Fusion Films and Michael Parkinson’s son are working with us to bring him back to life as an AI interviewee with celebrities today. So, we’re managing the YouTube channel with all the old shows with him and, at the same time, building out the new podcast. There are also big studios with content their teams are not necessarily exploiting as much anymore because they have so much new stuff all the time, so we’re taking over some of these catalogs and monetizing for them.
WS: Are there other initiatives you’re working on across Night Train Media, Eccho Rights or BossaNova that you can share with us?
KLOIBER: Because we bought Eccho Rights and BossaNova, we spent quite a lot of time integrating them, building a new structure: one finance for everyone, one legal for everyone, etc., and we have appointed a new COO for the group, Charlotte Johnson, who is amazing.
We’re also shifting more toward film, given the difficulties we’re seeing in English-language scripted drama. Initially, we always deficit-financed a full film and found the right distributor to sell it. We are also now going into mezzanine financing on bigger films. We’re co-producing The Beast, a big Samuel L. Jackson action film that we would never finance by ourselves because it has a high budget, but we are coming in with other partners to finance the mezzanine loans. We are always on the lookout for other attractive spaces to deploy money, even if it’s not what we’ve done in the past.
