Peter Emerson

President
E1 Television International

With offices in Toronto, Los Angeles, Montreal, New York, London, Holland and Belgium, E1 Entertainment is a truly international company. The group also has a wide focus when it comes to content, housing the broad slate from the companies formerly known as Blueprint Entertainment, Barna Alpa Productions, Oasis International, Seville Pictures and Maximum Films in Canada, as well as Contender Entertainment and RCV Entertainment in Europe. "The point is to bring together all the complementary strengths so that we have every area covered—the drama, the children’s, the factual programming," explains Peter Emerson, the president of E1 Television International.

E1 Television International was formerly Oasis International, which Emerson started in 1991. Oasis was bought by E1 in 2008 and now functions as the group’s international sales and distribution arm. Now, Oasis is part of a larger overall picture, explains Emerson, noting that one of the benefits of joining E1 has been breaking into network television. "We were able to invest more money than we otherwise would have had to get on board with The Bridge, which is a one-hour drama for CBS in the U.S. That was the plan really, to join forces with like-minded individuals who had complementary strengths and take it to the next level. Oasis has been in the market for a long time, 17 years, and we’ve had one-hour dramas before, it was just hard to break the network ranks. More programming, bigger budgets, and the ground was ripe, certainly in Canada, for a bigger player. We hope to fill that space."

Having a strong distribution sector is something Emerson saw as a void in Canada. Thus, he considers E1 Television International to be of great service to producers in the country, who have been looking elsewhere for distribution since the demise of Alliance Atlantis. "Producers have gone to our competitors in the U.K. and Los Angeles for distribution. All things equal, I don’t they would prefer to do that. I think they’d rather stay here and have someone down the street answer to them, rather than someone in London. That’s certainly another benefit of building this."

Emerson explains that it was a big decision for him to join a company of E1’s size, after having spent the majority of his career with Oasis, which was a much smaller outfit. He says he was reluctant to "become that thing that I was always railing against…. But it’s consistent in the fact that the only reason we stayed small and didn’t try to take on a lot of debt and make Oasis into Alliance was that you had to go one way or the other—either be small and nimble or you need to be big. You can’t be in between, because when you get into tough times like this, the in-between guys get creamed—they have bank debt, they borrow to acquire programming and there are programs that aren’t selling. When you’re big, you cash flow those things out, you skate through and you can survive a couple of years easily without feeling it too badly. As a small company it’s the same, there’s no bank to pull the plug on you. You stay at one end or the other. When E1 came to us a year ago, we thought it was the right deal. As the year progressed, we KNEW it was the right deal."

Having moved up the international spectrum, from a boutique Canadian outfit to a company that is a global player, Emerson says his view of the industry has been re-energized. "I was operating in that equilibrium below the big players in North America and in the world we were a boutique player. It was still a great way to make a living, but it was beginning to lose some of its challenge. Joining E1, I have nothing but challenges. I’m building again. It sounds silly, because it’s a multi-million-dollar company, but it is a build. This is just the beginning. We’re not a dominant player in the market yet, but we’re keeping our eyes on Fremantle, Granada, BBC Worldwide—those are our competitors; that is our destination. This is a growth plan, and we intend to be a major player in this."