Nicely’s Vanessa Shapiro on the Demand for Festive Programming

With the Christmas season within sight, fans of the festive period are ready to indulge their love for holiday TV movies—full of warm feelings, good cheer and often romance, the perfect antidote to today’s stressful world. With its development, production and distribution businesses, Nicely Entertainment is well-positioned to offer worldwide audiences Christmas and other TV movies, as well as series. CEO and founder, Vanessa Shapiro, talks to TV Drama about the magic of Christmas movies, maintaining quality while managing increased production costs and finding new fans on linear, digital and the Nicely YouTube channel.

TV DRAMA: Christmas is upon us! And Christmas movies are a significant part of your catalog, aren’t they?
SHAPIRO: Christmas movies are evergreen, and every year we see a very high demand from the audience worldwide for the genre. Our catalog now has over 140 titles, and Christmas movies represent more than half our total offering. This year alone, we have 15 new Christmas movies premiering in the U.S., with titles such as Christmas in Amish Country on UPtv, A Royal Icing Christmas on Great American Family or A Scottish Christmas Secret releasing across all AVOD platforms from Tubi to Roku. You can say we’re all about Christmas this year, especially since we see a major performance bump during “Christmas in July” stunts as well.

TV DRAMA: To what do you attribute the ongoing popularity of these movies?
SHAPIRO: At the end of the day, Christmas films—especially Christmas romance films—are comfort food. They work year over year because they’re ideal for family co-viewing, they’re ad safe so broadcasters love them and they deliver what the audience wants. There is a very large and loyal audience. As a company, we never take that audience for granted, and it’s important for me as the CEO and founder of Nicely Entertainment to ensure we reliably deliver what our audiences expect. Some may call it escapism, but Christmas movies capture the magic of the season and offer a chance for families to watch a lighthearted film together. We have 15 great new Christmas movies this year that are releasing across broadcast and digital in the U.S.

Across the whole industry, more than 100 Christmas movies premiere every year in America—100 Christmas movies across platforms and broadcast means the genre is not losing its popularity. There’s a huge appetite. And the huge appetite is also translating into how early those movies are being released. Most broadcasters, from Great American Family to UPtv and Hallmark Channel, have been premiering Christmas movies as early as October 18. So, now the Christmas season is actually starting before Halloween!

TV DRAMA: What elements do Christmas movies need to satisfy today’s viewers?
SHAPIRO: The two elements we always say we need are lots of snow and lots of Christmas decor. “Christmas in every shot” is something we emphasize. Sometimes, due to production schedules or budget cycles with our partners, we have to shoot our movies in warmer months. Not only does it not snow in the summer, but the trees and exteriors look much too green. So, we take that into account and prioritize innovative production approaches. We have amazing VFX partners who’ve done incredible work turning summer-produced Christmas movies into crisp, snowy landscapes. Our brand new UPtv original Christmas in Amish Country,with Ella Cannon and Jason Tobias, broadcasts this Christmas season; we shot it in June in Missouri. Clearly, no snow there in June. But with a skilled VFX team and well-managed production, audiences would never know. It was unbelievable. Technology is really helping there, and I’ve seen improvement even from three years ago. Now we can really do wonders. The quality of a movie will increase with a lower production cost. And in this economy, where everyone is affected since ad revenues are down, we need to be very conscious of production costs.

TV DRAMA: How are you dealing with rising production costs?
SHAPIRO: We have to be super creative, very nimble and very lean. We are a very lean organization overall, so we’ve learned to each wear multiple hats. Unfortunately, people are paying less because ad revenues are going down on the broadcast side and even on AVOD, which provides us with an ad revenue share. Ad revenues have been going down since 2023, so we have to be very creative. We have not used AI in our movies yet. But we’re seeing that the advanced technology is helping to reduce costs and are certainly exploring pathways. We’re also decreasing the number of production days, getting creative with financing and really targeting specific types of content. The challenge is to reduce production costs while maintaining the same quality, so that on screen, viewers will never see the difference.

Also, since margins are lower, we have started to increase our volume to keep the same level of revenue for the company—which is something we’re seeing even at the studio level. But we really want to maintain the same quality for our audience. We want to produce great films for our audience, and we’re very open to finding ways to get there, regardless of the macroeconomics.

TV DRAMA: That’s challenging.
SHAPIRO: But we are still growing. We’re going to be six years old in January. We have a catalog of 140 titles. In 2025 alone, we released 25 movies, so the company is thriving. We’re very blessed, but we have to make tough decisions and change our production strategy depending on the overall demand. We are very much in tune with what the audience and market mandate. This is why we have been focusing on genres that work best: the Christmas and romance movies. We know that space very well and can produce at a price point that is very competitive for our clients, which allows us to be profitable.

TV DRAMA: You’re selling across platforms, linear and digital.
SHAPIRO: Yes, at Nicely, we cover the entire process. We’re a 360-degree company in terms of scope. We do our own development, production and worldwide distribution. We are aggregating content. We produce our own movies and series, we do co-productions and are also a U.S. and worldwide distributor and a VOD aggregator. We have deals with all the major AVOD platforms, including Tubi, Vizio, Roku, Xumo TV and all the players. We are also pushing on the scripted series side and just launched our fourth television series this fall. This was an instant success, and we announced at MIPCOM season two of the new Great American Family hit series Crossroads Springs, with season two going into production in 2026.

TV DRAMA: Going back to TV movies, as viewership fragments, you’re still finding an audience for them?
SHAPIRO: In the U.S., AVOD has really replaced the lost revenue from broadcast and linear. We’re seeing that, in general, digital is a major source of revenue in the U.S. Internationally, digital has not replaced the loss of revenue from broadcasters, unfortunately, because digital revenues are still very small. We still have major clients that are very steady, such as 5 in the U.K., ITV and Sky. But France and Spain have been very challenging for everybody. But again, our strength is that we are a 360-degree organization. We go from development to production to owning our own distribution, so we know very well what we can get for each movie internationally. I’ve been doing this for over 25 years, and so has Scott [Kirkpatrick], who works as Nicely’s executive VP of co-productions and distribution. This allows us to make decisions internally. We can greenlight projects because we instinctively know the market.

The other development from this year that has become so important for us is the Nicely YouTube channel. It has been amazingly successful. We launched it a year ago. We have over 232,000 subscribers, which in just one year, is pretty good. But more important than the subscriber numbers, we’ve seen our movies exceeding expectations. For instance, for A Royal in Paradise, we released a U.S. version and another translated into LatAm Spanish on our YouTube channel, and between both versions, we got over 14 million views in just a few months. We are now able to get so much data and see where the movies are working and where they are not, and which genres are working, etc. We can now make great decisions. For instance, we released A Royal in Paradise 2: A Christmas Castle Proposal (which had premiered last year on Great American Family) over the weekend, and in three days, we did over 500,000 views! So, now we’re thinking, based on the franchise’s success, we need to make the third one!

TV DRAMA: Just a few years ago, the fragmentation of the market was so daunting. And yet, you’re finding opportunities.
SHAPIRO: The business is not like ten years ago when we had our output deals and could say, We will make this movie and it will go to Lifetime in the U.S., then to TF1 in France. Those days are over. The larger studios have output deals, but for the rest of us, it’s more complicated. We’re in a non-exclusive world now, so you can make 20 different deals non-exclusively. It takes 20 deals instead of just two. But that’s business, that’s life. The only constant is change.

We need to come up with new ways to stay on top of the new trends. For instance, we’re developing our first movie/vertical series as a hybrid production model. We’ve been keeping our eye on micro-dramas and don’t see them as a fad; we sense they’ll be an important component of our industry moving forward. But we’re respectful that it’s a different audience and therefore we must approach it with an audience-first approach (as we do with our Christmas movies). We are in development and hopefully will start shooting in January 2026.

We’re always prepared to pivot. We need to keep looking at data and at what the audience wants to watch. One advantage we have is that the digital AVOD platforms provide us with so much data that we can ingest it and use it to make decisions. Before, we could have a movie on Sky Italia, but we did not know exactly how many people viewed it or what people wanted to watch. But now, when you release a title on YouTube, for instance, you can drill down the data to the country, the town, the age group, if it’s a female or male watching. In the U.S., I get data from major cities—Chicago, Los Angeles, New York—where people watch this, and the percentage of females versus males—you get data that is unbelievable! This is so helpful for us greenlighting our next project.

TV DRAMA: Are there new titles you want to mention?
SHAPIRO: We have many new titles that launched this fall, starting with our brand-new TV series Crossroad Springs with Jonathan Stoddard, Kate Drummond, Emily Alatalo, Jesse Hutch and Shaun Johnston. On the romance side, we have a beautiful new movie entirely shot on the island of Ibiza, A Royal Romance in Ibiza, with U.K. star Caprice Bourret.

And, of course, we have our very big slate of Christmas movies launching this holiday season across U.S. linear and digital platforms. To name a few: Christmas in the Ballroom with Dancing with the Stars’ Kym Johnson-Herjavec and Gilles Marini, Once Upon a Christmas Crown, A Scottish Christmas Secret, The Christmas Bookshop, The Spirit of Christmas Station, Christmas at Fields Ranch, A Cherry Pie Christmas, Exes of Christmas Past, Christmas at the Amish Country. Wishing everyone a wonderful holiday season from the team at Nicely Entertainment!