Programmer Profile: TV Nova’s Alex Ruzek

June 20, 2011 World Screen

PREMIUM: Alex Ruzek, the programming director of the leading commercial channel in the Czech Republic, TV Nova, talks about balancing the mix of local content and imported series to satisfy the audience’s taste.

What age groups do you target?
 
The TV Nova Group is the largest media brand in the Czech Republic, which consists of broadcast television, a portfolio of new-media assets and the leading content development and production firm in the market. It currently broadcasts four channels: two free-to-air and two on the pay-TV platform. We also have our online video-on-demand service Voyo, which screens a mixture of paid and free content from our channels.
 
The flagship channel, TV Nova, targets a general audience  of 15- to 54-year-olds and achieved an average prime time share in 2011 of 36.5 percent within that group. The schedule includes the best news programs in the country, led by the main nightly news (which has achieved over a 55 percent share year to date), and quality local scripted fiction, such as the medical drama series Ordinace v ruzove zahrade (Rose Garden Medical Center), the daily soap Ulice (The Street), crime procedural series Kriminalka Andel (CSI Andel), and the Czech Republic’s first sitcom, Comeback (Comeback).
 
Our second free-to-air channel, Nova Cinema, brings viewers the best Hollywood blockbuster films and independent world cinema, and on a year-to-date basis has achieved an average 5.5 percent share in prime time in the 15-to-54 target group.
 
Our broadcast portfolio is rounded out by the pay-TV channel Nova Sport, which owns licenses for the key sporting events in the country (Champions League, Formula 1, Czech hockey and football leagues, Wimbledon, etc.). We also broadcast the local version of the music and youth lifestyle station MTV under a programming and trademark agreement with MTV Networks International. We have plans to launch additional channels in the near future when the market allows.

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What are some of the acquired programs that have performed particularly well?
 
First of all, it’s important to say that in the Czech market, it is more and more difficult to find foreign programs that have the potential to deliver satisfactory audience results. For this reason, we are conservative in our acquisitions and generally we place our bets on the strongest series brands. We have selected key titles such as the CSI franchise, The Mentalist, House, German action series Alarm für Cobra 11 and others, all of which still perform [well] during prime time. We are most interested in closed episodes, as our viewers are only willing to commit to regular viewing of local product.
 
Premieres of Hollywood blockbusters still deliver good ratings. Overall, however, there has been a significant decrease in the performance of acquired product in the last 12 months, due to the fragmentation of the market and the introduction of new channels screening foreign series and movies, as well as the availability of content on the Internet.

What genres are you acquiring?
 
We buy across genres to provide our mainstream viewers with the diversity they need. TV Nova focuses more on the mainstream and family products, plus action and crime in the after 10 p.m. On Nova Cinema, we can be more experimental and show racier and more indie content. We try not to limit ourselves on genres, but pick the titles based on the actual appetite of our viewers.

Where do you look when buying for the channel?
 
For the bulk of our acquisitions, we look to U.S. studios, which obviously offer a volume of good brands for acceptable prices in this market. One of the largest investors in our parent company, CME, is Time Warner, so we are very happy to have a solid deal in place with one of the best content producers in the world! We then build around this and pick specific titles from independent distributors to suit the actual viewing trends.

However, we also have our own content division, MediaPro Entertainment, which produces hundreds of hours of local content each year across all our markets. It recently sold the format rights to a Czech crime series, Expozitura (Organised Crime Unit), to the U.S./Canadian market and we’ve also had success with several formats in Russia and other European countries.

What are you on the lookout for right now?
 
We look for mainly general-entertainment products, like romantic comedies and family-oriented movies. We are specifically interested in content free of violence and nudity, suitable for daytime and prime time, as we have a strict 10 p.m. watershed in the Czech Republic and we are finding that the market is overstocked with thrillers and rated-R programs suitable only for late evening.

We also look to buy strong non-fiction formats for local adaptation. We currently cooperate with FremantleMedia on the Idols franchise …and are negotiating several other suppliers. 

How is the market in general for acquisitions right now?
 
Depends on who you ask! Except for a few blockbuster products, we have to look at acquisitions as wholly a financial decision and calculate return on investment. We all know that the TV advertising markets have fallen significantly since 2008. This, combined with the entrance of new channels in the market, has meant that foreign product no longer has the same potential to generate audiences and revenues as it used to do. So, you’re getting a lot of push from buyers for reduced license fees. At the same time, producers and the studios that represent them expect prices to increase to reflect rising production costs driven by the need to create higher-production-value products for a more demanding worldwide audience. It’s a difficult crossroads right now, and I think the only way both sides can be satisfied is to look at cross-channel and cross-platform deals, which is the way the viewer watches content today.

Are there any overall trends that you’ve noticed?
 
The TV-viewing market has been impacted by the worldwide financial crisis. After a tough day at work, it seems people want to come home and escape to a world of love, happiness and harmony. They mainly just want to be entertained by television. We also see they don’t want to commit to any long-running foreign series. 

We currently see a strong taste for "retro" series—a return to what the viewer already knows. We’ve seen a significant decrease in interest in action-packed dramas. Comedies and light romances, especially if family-oriented, are quite popular as well.
 
The biggest trend, of course, is the new reality of television. It is no longer enough to be a television broadcaster. We must provide our viewers with the content they want in the time and format they want it. We can no longer look only at television ratings winners today, but we have to look instead at different ways of monetizing content. We need to schedule our products across a portfolio of channels and on a variety of different distribution platforms, and any new acquisitions need to reflect this new paradigm.