Patrick Elmendorff

TV Kids
Weekly, June 17, 2008

General
Manager

Studio100
Media

Studio100 is
already well established as a leading kids’ and family entertainment company in
the Benelux. Apart from producing a range of live-action and animated TV
series, the company has developed a business of building brands across
platforms, from feature films and DVDs to live stage shows, books, theme parks—three
in Belgium and a Dutch venue slated to launch in 2009—CDs and a vast
range of consumer products.

Last year, the
company set its sights on the international market when it appointed kids’ distribution
veteran Patrick Elmendorff to head up the new Studio100 Media division,
responsible for selling the company’s library of shows, which includes House of
Anubis and Mega Mindy, to broadcasters worldwide, as well as pursuing
co-production and third-party representation opportunities. Since its MIPCOM
2007 launch, the company has rapidly built a reputation on the worldwide kids’
content landscape. Its new puppetry series, Big and Small, is being produced by
Kindle Entertainment for BBC, in association with Treehouse TV and Studio100.
Studio100 is also co-producing Kerwhizz, a preschool quiz show, with CBeebies,
and entered into an alliance with Canada’s Amberwood Productions for the 2-D
combined with 3-D series Super Mega Hyper Pets. It also recently took on the
rights to represent three game shows from CBBC: The Slammer, Trapped and Beat
the Boss.

At the end of
last month, Studio100 Media’s catalogue received a significant boost, following
its parent company’s acquisition of EM.Entertainment. The move was a logical
one for Studio100, which clinched a distribution agreement with
EM.Entertainment earlier this year. Elmendorff, meanwhile, is a former managing
director of the German kids’ firm. “We strongly believe in the company,”
Elmendorff notes. “There are some very strong properties, some true classics
not only for the German-speaking territories, but also on a European scale and,
for certain properties, on a worldwide scale.

”EM.Entertainment
has about 17,000 half hours of kids’ fare available for German-speaking
markets, and rights to some 5,000 to 8,000 half hours are held for the global
market, including Maya the Bee and Pippi Longstocking, among others. The
addition of those titles to the existing Studio100 catalogue, Elmendorff says, “is
a huge step forward for our international expansion.”

The move,
Elmendorff continues, gives Studio100 the “critical mass” to expand beyond
traditional program sales into operating full-scale channels or blocks, tapping
into the combined company’s library of properties.

Looking ahead,
Elmendorff has high expectations for Studio100 Media’s activities in the next
12 to 18 months. “We hope that things will continue to go on the way they have
gone for us in the last couple of months! We strongly work on establishing ourselves
on an international scale, the way the company has established itself for the
last ten years in the Benelux. Studio100 has been extremely successful in
building brands and keeping brands interesting and alive.”

—By
Mansha Daswani