{"id":10987,"date":"2019-03-28T11:00:45","date_gmt":"2019-03-28T15:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev2.worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/tvdrama\/"},"modified":"2019-05-07T12:11:59","modified_gmt":"2019-05-07T16:11:59","slug":"walter-iuzzolino","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/walter-iuzzolino\/","title":{"rendered":"Walter Presents’ Walter Iuzzolino"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>In the U.K.\u2019s prolific scripted market, Walter Presents has steadily built a community of devoted lovers of foreign-language drama. Co-founded and personally curated by Walter Iuzzolino, the service, chock-full of subtitled shows from Spain, Germany, Scandinavia, Belgium and elsewhere, has been a phenomenon in the U.K., where it sits in the Channel 4 on-demand environment, All 4, with select series also airing on the linear schedule. On the heels of the British success, Iuzzolino and his team have been busy expanding internationally. Iuzzolino tells TV Drama<\/em> about bringing Walter Presents to more markets around the globe and weighs in on how his editorial curation strategy has evolved.<\/p>\n

TV DRAMA:<\/strong> It\u2019s been three years since the service launched in the U.K. What adjustments have you made as you\u2019ve expanded the platform internationally and learned more about how your users are engaging with the content?
\nIUZZOLINO:<\/strong> Some of it is more business and strategic, in the sense of our international launches, and some of it is content- and editorial-driven. The most notable thing for us has been our international growth. It\u2019s been quite brilliant, for a number of reasons. First of all, we\u2019ve established a lovely, happy cycle with broadcasters. Our reputation internationally in the drama space has grown. And the brilliant formula we established with Channel 4 has been a blueprint for many others. So now we\u2019re getting into a position where broadcasters ring us and say, How are you doing 30 million streams a year and can we joint venture together? We identify great shows, we help them shine, we make distributors happy, we make content producers happy and we make broadcasters happy! We realized as much as we love adventure, our role should always really be that of the pure curator. Our concentration and focus should be on watching and picking the best dramas, packaging them and branding them. Every time we can nestle our venture in the home of a broader broadcasting organization that already has relationships with millions of viewers, it\u2019s just better. They do what they do best and we do what we do best.<\/p>\n

TV DRAMA:<\/strong> Tell us about the international journey, beginning with the U.S.
\nIUZZOLINO:<\/strong> When we launched in America we were just direct to consumer [as an SVOD platform]. We have struck a deal with PBS Distribution whereby Walter Presents is now available on the PBS Masterpiece Amazon channel. That is significant because it means that our programming reaches many, many more viewers. As you know, when you launch SVOD direct to consumer, the challenges are money and marketing. How far can you go to make people aware that you even exist? We went quite far on our own with our small pockets, but [working with] PBS has been amazing and instrumental. What we lacked in the U.S. were the muscle, the money and the visibility in more households. PBS provided that through the Masterpiece experience on Amazon, but also through select runs on their regional stations. We recently transmitted a great show called Modus<\/em>, a Scandi noir, in L.A. on KLCS. We\u2019ve identified more titles with them. That means that effectively as more and more walls go up\u2014Brexit and Trump\u2014we\u2019re knocking other ones down! If politics isolate countries, the consumers do the exact opposite. We\u2019re bringing international drama into British and American living rooms! Also in the U.S., we\u2019ve announced our launch on Comcast Xfinity X1, so we\u2019ll be in even more households. There are more launches that we are finalizing now in the U.S.<\/p>\n

In Australia, we have an incredibly successful venture with Foxtel. Again we\u2019re replicating the Channel 4 prototype. They have a brilliant channel called Fox Showcase. They give us a fantastic Friday night slot on linear, and then we also live in their VOD environment.<\/p>\n

In Italy, we launched with Discovery. Discovery came to us and said they wanted us to live in their AVOD space, Dplay. It\u2019s a combination of AVOD and SVOD, and then some bespoke linear airings on two of their channels, NOVE and Giallo. Italy was interesting and challenging, as it\u2019s a market that dubs programming. It was important to do Italy, not just for scale\u2014it\u2019s still a very small operation\u2014but because we wanted to make a point that we can find a good audience in a country that normally wouldn\u2019t consider watching shows with subtitles. And now my mum and dad can finally understand what I do for a living. [Laughs<\/em>] We\u2019re starting a slow conquest of Europe!<\/p>\n

In April, we are very excited to be launching in Belgium. Walter Presents will be available on-demand, with some linear exposure. We have championed Belgium obsessively. Having done Scandi, having done Spain, having done Germany, we genuinely felt at the end of last year that Belgium had become a real hub of extraordinary creativity. I love the karma that we opened up the world to Belgium in some ways and made it aware of the extraordinary output, and then Belgium opened their arms to us! The Benelux audience is an increasingly sophisticated one. It is known for appreciating multi-language anyway because of their territorial makeup. I have every confidence that we\u2019ll be embraced there. That\u2019s an exciting chapter for us.<\/p>\n

In addition, there will be at least two more launches to come later this year. Broadcasters are coming to us, and that\u2019s an important message. Everybody that\u2019s involved in dealing with us is happy. They know we don\u2019t have much money to pay, but we do great stuff with their shows and we promote them. It\u2019s a positive business cycle that has meant global growth of unprecedented scale for a small company of eight people.<\/p>\n

TV DRAMA:<\/strong> Do some shows play better in a nonlinear, binge environment than on a week-to-week basis on linear?
\nIUZZOLINO:<\/strong> Our shows on linear have a good, solid, fairly modest audience\u2014they don\u2019t compete with The Great British Bake Off<\/em> or huge dramas\u2014but viewers come back again and again. And broadly speaking, what does well on linear does well on digital. However, there are very interesting exceptions. When we launched in the U.K., one of our minor digital-only releases was a vampire show called Heartless<\/em>. Without any press, any marketing push, it became one of our highest-rated shows. That trajectory was replicated in Italy. The one show that has really popped there is Heartless<\/em>. Some shows lend themselves to being more streaming phenomenons and they tend to be the younger or slightly cultier series.<\/p>\n

TV DRAMA:<\/strong> You mentioned championing Belgium. Are there other emerging hot spots for you?
\nIUZZOLINO:<\/strong> Denmark kickstarted the phenomenon of Scandi noir with The Killing<\/em>, The Bridge<\/em> and Borgen<\/em>. When we came on the scene, Scandi noir was almost a bit spent, which was why we concentrated on Deutschland 83<\/em> and Locked Up<\/em> and other shows. We thought, we\u2019ve seen the missing girls, it\u2019s all becoming a bit samey and it\u2019s just feeding the beast of market demand with slightly derivative propositions. We still bought the shows and they did well, but we were saying, Is [Denmark] still the place you would look for real originality? But in the second half of last year, they burst on the scene again. We bought three shows and we pitched them to the U.K. market as the renaissance of Danish drama. As Sweden and Norway and the other countries around Central and Northern Europe have heavily cloned the tropes and the language of Scandi noir, the Danes have shrugged them off. The writer of Borgen<\/em> [Adam Price] created an incredible show called Ride Upon the Storm<\/em>, which is about a family of priests. It is controversial and fantastic and intense. Lars Mikkelsen won an International Emmy for it recently. Liberty<\/em> from DR, about Danish expats in the \u201980s trying to exploit the aid system in Tanzania, is a compelling story about how good intentions in human beings go horribly wrong. Greyzone<\/em> is a Homeland<\/em>-style thriller co-produced by Denmark, Sweden [and Germany]. It takes the premise of what sounds like a tra\u00additional thriller but makes it very intimate. Denmark is back with a vengeance. We\u2019ve gone out of our way to highlight that.<\/p>\n

Germany is alive and kicking. Deutschland <\/em>is coming back for us. There\u2019s a brilliant new show called Bad Banks<\/em> about whistleblowers and industrial espionage. And I think Italy is in a fantastic place. HBO invested in the Elena Ferrante series [My Brilliant Friend<\/em>], which has been enormously successful all over the world. We acquired Maltese<\/em>, a Mafia show, last year. Some incredible, high-profile pieces are coming [out of Italy], like The Name of the Rose <\/em>and Gaddafi<\/em>, which is from the makers of Gomorrah<\/em>. Italy has learned the game of taking foreign money and putting it to good use to make the shows high-bar in terms of quality. I\u2019m delighted; after many years of being frustrated with the quality of my own country\u2019s output, now we can champion their productions!<\/p>\n

TV DRAMA:<\/strong> And you\u2019re sourcing content from outside Europe as well?
\nIUZZOLINO:<\/strong> Absolutely. Latin America is a core territory for us, in all its diversity. Brazil has always been a very strong piece for us, both from HBO and Globo. Argentina too\u2014we\u2019re about to buy another show from there. We\u2019ve gone even further afield. This past October we launched our first Japanese show, a young manga-style horror series called Crow\u2019s Blood<\/em>. It was co-produced by Hulu Japan. That was a great success for us and Film4. We had been looking at Japan for a long time. I\u2019m looking at a piece from Africa that is quite exciting. We saw a fantastic show from India that we wanted to bid on, but bigger and mightier forces than us came in and bought it!<\/p>\n

TV DRAMA:<\/strong> There is so much out there. Has your job become harder, having to sift through all these great series being created across the globe?
\nIUZZOLINO:<\/strong> When we started, we had bought 800 or 900 hours. There was always that slight concern of, is there going to be a feeding frenzy of such proportion that we\u2019d be left without programming to buy because more powerful forces than us came and swept up everything! That hasn\u2019t happened. The FAANGs have poured a lot of money into the business. That\u2019s amazing. They\u2019ve been championing their own originals. They\u2019re making lots of stuff. They\u2019re making lots of producers rich. It\u2019s been a great thing for the sector at large. With the big boys concentrating on their originals, and with terrestrial broadcasters competing to make glossy, sexy, good stuff, everyone has become better, so the quality of drama on the market is extraordinary. I used to have to watch 20 titles to find maybe two or three. Now, every five there are a couple I\u2019d like to buy. That means an embarrassment of riches. And we can raise our bar even higher. There\u2019s so much that is good, we can focus on the excellent. It\u2019s been wonderful, and long may it continue.<\/p>\n

TV DRAMA:<\/strong> When we last spoke two years ago you mentioned that your own originals were on the horizon. Where are you on that journey?
\nIUZZOLINO:<\/strong> We had said that would be our phase three. When we last spoke, we were in phase one of our life. Now we\u2019re in the second half of phase two. So phase three is coming ever closer! We are further down the line. We are buying more from script. Back then it was one or two projects from script. Now, more often than not, broadcasters or producers come to us and say, you bought three of our shows, take a look at this, which we\u2019re starting to make in six months. We read scripts, we chip in very early on. The time will come when we\u2019ll be able to contribute more meaningfully. As we scale up internationally, we\u2019ll be able to buy multiterritory in a way that we were not able to in the beginning.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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