Fresh Hits: Making an Impact with Scripted

Bertrand Villegas, co-founder of The WIT, closed out the TV Drama Festival with a snapshot of the fiction market worldwide.

The WIT, known for its always jam-packed Fresh TV sessions at MIPTV and MIPCOM, tracks audience habits around the world. In this exclusive presentation for the TV Drama Festival, which you can view here, Villegas spotlighted some of the scripted trends from across the globe.

“Fiction amounts to one-third of all new shows launched around the world” in the last year, just behind factual in terms of volume, Villegas said. Fiction is about a quarter of all new shows launched on linear but almost half of new shows on VOD.

“I’ve heard that fiction is plateauing, that the number of new products is slowing, but according to our data, we have 3,700 new fiction shows launched over the last 12 months. That’s versus 3,500 the year before.” Indeed, fiction is the fastest-growing genre, with a 5.4 percent gain, notably on-demand, which was up 15.2 percent. Villegas also pointed out that 41 percent of new fiction is VOD-exclusive, up from 38 percent.

Ranking the top ten services with new fiction, Netflix is on top with 400-plus new titles last year, ahead of Prime Video’s 130. Only two of the top ten are linear channels: Lifetime and Hallmark Channel, due to their rollout of TV movies. The top ten also includes Disney+, China’s IQIYI, Vqq and Youku, Shahid in the Middle East and the AVOD service Tubi.

Villegas also showcased the scripted formats market in his presentation, noting they accounted for 4.3 percent of new fiction shows in the last 12 months, down from a high of 5 to 6 percent a decade ago. In the first six months of this year, the top scripted formats were BBC Studios’ Doctor Foster and the Argentine format Dear Daddies. Other key scripted formats this year include HPI from France, All3Media International’s Liar and Global Agency’s Istanbul Bride.

The top exporting countries for scripted formats are the U.K., the U.S., South Korea, Israel, France and Turkey. The key importing clients, after the global SVODs, include Turkey, the U.S., Poland, Slovakia, India, Mexico and Germany.

Villegas also spotlighted the continued interest in book adaptations and series based on true stories amid the need for recognizable IP. Series based on books accounted for 12.2 percent of all new fiction launched last year, Villegas said. True stories inspired 7.1 percent of new fiction. About 100 of new fiction launches were inspired by true crimes, Villegas said, a 40-percent gain.