The Week at MIPCOM

Mansha Daswani, the editor of World Screen, recaps the biggest news stories out of MIPCOM last week.

From packed beachside restaurants to heavy foot traffic across the Palais, a bevy of celebrity sightings and positively heaving late-night parties, last week’s MIPCOM was the closest the “mother of all entertainment markets” has come to normal since before the pandemic. Indeed, with mask-wearing at a minimum and the nearly 11,000 delegates seemingly unconcerned about social distancing after, for many, three years away from the Croisette, Covid felt like a bit of an afterthought last week as media execs busied themselves with other concerns.

Rising production costs, the ongoing ramifications of the war in Europe, a potential recession, political instability in the U.K. and elsewhere and the very future of the international distribution business itself as the streamers—and their quest for global rights—continue to disrupt were crucial points of conversation during the week. But the international distribution business did appear to be in excellent health, despite the macroeconomic woes and broad industry shifts that execs are keeping top of mind as they figure out how best to navigate the challenges looming in 2023.

Attendance beat expectations, as RX France’s Lucy Smith revealed at a wrap press conference as the market began to wind down on Wednesday. As of the end of day Tuesday, 10,896 participants had collected their badges for the market, Smith said, attending from 108 countries. There were 3,100 buyers on site, with the biggest numbers coming from the U.S., U.K., France, Germany and Spain. The market hosted 321 stands—“tents, double deckers, anything from small structures to hundreds of square meters,” Smith said. “It’s been great to be back with a full-strength MIPCOM Cannes. Our ambition was to come back with a bang and live up to the true billing of this being the mother of all entertainment content markets, which I believe we have delivered.”

Smith noted that over the last few years, “the importance of the markets has sometimes been questioned.” The return of MIPCOM, she said, proved the value of these events, highlighting the fact that the Hollywood studios—which, for the last few years, have been evolving their approaches to how much to sell and how much to keep for their own services—were back in force on the Croisette.

The importance of IP retention was a key theme of Banijay CEO Marco Bassetti’s Media Mastermind Keynote, one of several sessions moderated by World Screen’s group editorial director, Anna Carugati. In a packed Grand Auditorium, Bassetti updated delegates on the Banijay story since the company’s milestone acquisition of Endemol Shine Group amid the pandemic. “Scale is the real reason we believe that production companies can be in front of the change and give value to the creative people, the producers,” Bassetti said. “To have scale means also to have leverage. It means to have legacy IP. It means to connect that all together. It means having opportunities in all the territories we are working in, with all the new changes that the media landscape offers us. To be a group like we are now, [we] are in the best position to offer the best content either with new platforms, with the traditional broadcasters, with the public broadcasters. The vision is pretty simple. You can give them what they need to produce new pilots and retain talent, and you can invest. That’s another important part of having leverage: retaining IP. Today you need to invest more. In order to invest more, you need to have a company that is backing you on this. Scale is super important. It doesn’t mean an independent producer can’t do a very good job. For instance, we are trying to help as much as possible independent producers, giving them what they need in order to produce.”

FOX Entertainment marked its MIPCOM debut with a lush beachside stand and a Media Mastermind Keynote delivered by Rob Wade, the new company’s recently installed CEO; Michael Thorn, president of entertainment; and Fernando Szew, CEO of FOX Entertainment Global and MarVista Entertainment. The sale of the bulk of the Twentieth Century Fox assets to Disney “gave us an opportunity to focus on rebuilding the company,” said Wade, who previously served as the head of alternative entertainment at FOX before succeeding Charlie Collier. “We looked to content partnerships and low-cost production models as a way that we felt was the path to the future of ad-supported television. We made great acquisitions like Bento Box, TMZ, Studio Ramsay Global, MarVista. We also did some builds with Fox Alternative Entertainment, our unscripted studio, and FOX Entertainment, our scripted studio. We are here in this market to be great partners, to be buyers, to be sellers.”

Wade added that he thinks markets like MIPCOM will become even more critical “as nimble, smart commercial deals focused on content are going to become more and more necessary.”

Ad-supported television also took center stage with the presentation of this year’s World Screen Trendsetter Award in association with RX France to Adam Lewinson, the chief content officer at Tubi. Speaking with Carugati on the Grand Auditorium stage on Wednesday, Lewinson articulated Tubi’s advancements in the booming AVOD space. “Television predominantly has always been a free, ad-supported model,” Lewinson said. “In the past few years, thanks to the investment of billions by SVOD services, the perception has been that the future of television, which is the future of streaming, would be behind a paywall. But ultimately, historical trends hold. My belief and the belief of the executive team at Tubi is that the future of television is free, ad-supported and specifically video on demand.”

Tubi continues to see usage gains, now reaching 56 million monthly active users. “Last year, we had 3.6 billion hours streamed, and it’ll be even more this year,” Lewinson said. Those gains are being driven in part by viewers becoming increasingly cost-conscious as the number of their subscriptions proliferates. “Subscription fatigue, as we call it, is real. In the U.S. this year, we’re pretty much at the inflection point where AVOD viewership is surpassing SVOD viewership for the first time. That trend is going to continue into the future. So we’ve been able to draft on that and be a leader in what we believe is the future of streaming.”

Valuing content in the streaming age was the subject of a Grand Auditorium session moderated by Carugati and featuring acclaimed producer Caryn Mandabach and Parrot Analytics’ Julia Alexander. “We are still trying to operate in an apples-to-apples environment, where you could look at five shows at 8 p.m. on Tuesday and say, Here’s where the share of the audience is,” Alexander said. “We are in an apples-to-bananas world where you really can’t do that, especially if we take into account the fact that there is this giant walled garden that producers and production companies and networks and studios are operating in. They don’t know what the value of their title is to a streamer like Netflix or HBO Max because that information is held so close to their chest.”

Mandabach added, “What does the value mean? How deeply do people feel [about a show]? Peaky Blinders has a wide audience, but it’s a deep one,” with strong engagement across Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. Parrot Analytics, she said, “is helping not just to monetize, you’re helping to impact the way people feel. My job is to make you think, and my job is to make you feel. What connects us is more than what divides us. We need the feedback because we have no idea who’s watching it.”

The roster of heavy hitters speaking at MIPCOM last week also included BBC Director–General Tim Davie and BBC Studios CEO Tom Fussell, in town to receive the inaugural Studio of Distinction Award. BBC Studios returned to MIPCOM with a “new global ambition,” Fussell said. “Our commercial ambition is to double again in size in the next five years, growing not just our scale but our development spend, our content investment and our creative ambition. This is ambitious given the current economic conditions, but the success of our production studio gives us absolute confidence. We have the investment capacity to fuel opportunities, both organic and by acquisition. Our ownership structure means we can take long-term views of our prospects. And because of that long-term thinking, we can invest and commit with confidence. We can only achieve this ambition alongside our international partners. You all help us create those bold stories and bring them to audiences everywhere.”

As the market came to a close, RX France’s Smith previewed some of the plans for MIPTV, which will mark its milestone 60th anniversary in 2023. “MIPTV is not about being the biggest market of the year,” Smith said. “It is about being the most relevant at the right time in the industry calendar.” The three-day event, from April 17 to 19, will encompass MIPDoc, MIPFormats, MIPDrama and a Future of Kids summit: “One badge, four markets,” Smith noted. MIPCOM 2023 is set to run from October 16 to 19, 2023.

You can see all of our MIPCOM news here and catch up on our deal recaps for formats, factual and drama. Stay tuned for my recap of MIPJunior and MIPCOM kids’ news tomorrow.