SVT’s Karolina Stallwood

Karolina Stallwood is responsible for the acquisition strategy for all genres (kids, factual, fiction and feature films) at SVT, the public-service broadcaster in Sweden. This remit sees her buying content for a discerning audience, one that also has a lot of choices, and working to stall a decline in linear while strengthening the offering on SVT Play. Stallwood, head of SVT International, tells TV Drama about the strategy for acquiring scripted product accordingly.

TV DRAMA: How much of SVT’s slate is drama, and of that, how much is acquired product?
STALLWOOD: SVT commissions a lot of different genres. We have sports, news, non-scripted, drama, etc. When it comes to acquisitions, we also buy a lot, and we always have an appetite for new content. On the drama side, we tend to do around six commission projects a year, and on the acquired side, we buy around 500 hours. It varies from year to year, depending on how much we had from the previous year. We buy from all over the world, although we don’t have that much U.S. content at the moment; the U.K. is our biggest provider. But we also buy from the whole of Europe, Australia—the whole world, really. Pitch me projects! We always have a lot of need for new, acquired drama.

TV DRAMA: What are some of the attributes that you have to keep top of mind when acquiring dramas to suit the channel but also to reflect your audience?
STALLWOOD: At SVT, there are a lot of things to keep in mind. The first thing that we do when we look at new shows and content is focus on fulfilling the public-service remit. I always have those glasses on when I evaluate a show. The other thing we do is that we always look at the commissioned drama slate to make sure that we complement that, along with the rest of the content on all our platforms. Third, we spend a lot of time trying to understand our audience. It’s been like this for quite a long time now, but the Nordics are quite far ahead with how the audience behaves. It’s a very picky audience, there’s a lot of content, and there’s also a high willingness to pay for content. So, we need to try to understand which need we fill for them as public-service.

The strategy for us is twofold. We have the linear channel, which is declining (which is happening all over the world). The focus here is to keep that decline to a minimum because our acquired drama still works really well in linear. But the main focus for the whole company is to increase the audience on SVT Play, which is our free-to-air streaming platform. There, the biggest challenge we have is under-40s. We always say we’re going to go younger. And when I say younger, I don’t mean young adults or kids; I mean the 20 to 40 target group. They’re really elusive; they’re difficult to catch. And that’s our main focus going forward for the next few years: to get them to become loyal viewers and loyal users of SVT Play.

TV DRAMA: What are you on the lookout for concerning drama acquisitions?
STALLWOOD: It sounds so cliche to say, but it has to be must-see television. That’s what we look for all the time. We need big, high-quality shows with great talent. But being public-service, we also have the luxury to try new and innovative formats with new talent.

To be more sort of specific in what we’re looking for, it goes back to what I mentioned before, that we have a twofold strategy. We have the decline in linear that acquisitions play a big part in stalling, and then we have the SVT Play development. We need to grow SVT Play. We’ve had great successes in what we call Brit crime (British crime)—Happy Valley, Sherwood, Shetland, Vera, all of those shows. Even though the target audience is a little bit older, the great thing about those shows is that they work both on linear and on SVT Play. I call Brit crime our “bread and butter.” We’re always on the lookout for the next big, long-running Brit crime series.

We also bought Colin from Accounts, and that’s a perfect example of what we need to do on the SVT player. We don’t have a lot of content like that, and we don’t have that audience.And we got them by word of mouth—we were talked about. It was a fantastic success in that sense. Colin from Accounts didn’t work on linear, but I didn’t expect it to. It worked well on the player.

We’re getting fewer and fewer slots in broadcast and a greater demand on SVT Play. So, when we buy a show, it has to stand on its own on SVT Play. We take that into consideration with every single show that we look at. If it’s not strong enough to stand on its own, we won’t necessarily pick it up.

TV DRAMA: When it comes to rights, what’s your stance on exclusivity?
STALLWOOD: Exclusivity is key to us. We need to justify every single penny of the taxpayers’ money. I’m not opposed to second windows, but when we do choose second windows, we do so with great care. There has to be a strategic purpose for us to choose them.