ALL3MEDIA’s Louise Pedersen Talks Drama, Digital & U.S. Market

NEW YORK: Louise Pedersen, the managing director of ALL3MEDIA International, talks to TV Europe about the company’s increased focus on drama, digital media and the U.S. market.

TV EUROPE: ALL3MEDIA has always had a strong drama slate, but recently it has gotten even bigger. What has been your drama strategy?
PEDERSEN: ALL3MEDIA is lucky because we have a very strong relationship with the drama companies in our group. They provide us with a great selection of drama and have been responsible for Midsomer Murders, for Inspector George Gently, for Skins, which have been some of the iconic dramas we have had in the past few years. Looking at our slate 18 months ago, we thought, These shows are selling fantastically well, so how do we add to them, what’s the plan? As well as working with Company Pictures to develop and distribute the dramas that they have got commissioned—The White Queen and The Village are two that we are selling now—we thought, How do we complement those with dramas that we are acquiring from other producers outside the group, dramas that we are working on at a development stage and hope we are going to get commissioned, or catalogues of drama that we can acquire? It was a conscious strategy and we are lucky that it is bearing fruit.

We [have] Foyle’s War—we have acquired the entire library, eight series. It’s an iconic British detective show. There is Hinterland, which we are preselling—it’s our Welsh detective, man of mystery, we don’t know his past—and we are really excited about that. We’ve got those two strong [acquisitions]. We also have Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, our female detective from Australia, which has done very, very well. This is possibly our strongest drama lineup since we’ve started, which is really exciting.

TV EUROPE: ALL3MEDIA is one of the major suppliers of drama to the BBC.
PEDERSEN: At the moment we have three major series with the BBC: The White Queen, which will launch [this summer]; The Village, which recently launched; and George Gently, which is [returning] later this year. Having three big BBC dramas is fantastically exciting.

TV EUROPE: Having placed these shows on the BBC must boost your international sales efforts.
PEDERSEN: It does. Both The Village and Foyle’s War [have aired] in the U.K., and to be able to show buyers the ratings when we are selling the shows just gives an extra boost because everyone is talking about them. Everyone reads the U.K. ratings and that is fantastic. For me, it feels like drama is having a real resurgence. It felt like everyone was talking about it [at MIPTV]. Perhaps the last few markets had been about the big entertainment shows, but it feels like drama is having a very good moment.

It used to be very tough for us to sell drama into the major European dubbing territories. But Midsomer Murders is very successful in Germany, Italy and France. Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries was just sold into France; hopefully we will sell it into Italy as well. It’s our ambition to sell Foyle’s War into those territories.

TV EUROPE: Tell us about the other sizeable portion of your catalogue, which consists of factual and factual entertainment.
PEDERSEN: We have a great lineup of factual as well, including more series of Undercover Boss. We launched ALL3MEDIA America earlier this year, which is a hub for our ALL3MEDIA companies to develop their business in the U.S., led by Stephen Lambert (Wife Swap, Undercover Boss) and Eli Holzman (Project Runway, Undercover Boss). We are beginning to see shows coming from that operation. The Insider is a great show for us; it’s another version of people going undercover to try and get a job, which has worked very well. Gogglebox, from Stephen Lambert, is a good show for us.

Factual, factual entertainment, reality—there is still a market for them. We have a major new entertainment show that launched in May on BBC One in prime time called Reflex. We’re really excited about that. Big Saturday night entertainment shows for BBC One don’t come along often, so that is a big focus for us.

TV EUROPE: You mentioned America. It offers so many more opportunities than it did ten years ago.
PEDERSEN: I think the key thing is being part of an organization that understands how that market works and can give advice and help to all our creatives as they try to make the most of the opportunities in America. Creatively, all the ALL3MEDIA companies are incredibly strong, but to have that under the umbrella of Eli and Stephen, who have got this great track record, is really exciting. As a result of that we’ll get more shows. Secret Princes is another one that we are launching, which Objective, one of our companies, did for TLC in the U.S. It’s British creativity meets American commerciality and glossiness.

TV EUROPE: ALL3MEDIA has been somewhat of a pioneer when distributing to digital platforms.
PEDERSEN: Yes, it has, in distributing to digital platforms and also in developing our app, which is a way for us to get direct to the consumer via an ALL3MEDIA app. It works with connected televisions and allows audiences to access our content directly. That was a fairly pioneering move.

My colleagues Andy Taylor and Selma Turajlic have just set up Little Dot Studios to exploit YouTube channel opportunities, and that is an exciting venture for the ALL3MEDIA group. We’ve been suppliers to Netflix, to Hulu, and we really appreciate that business with them. It’s been a really good relationship. For us the question is, How do we develop that relationship further and how do we take advantage of any commissioning opportunities that exist with those big platforms? And also, how to work with local video-on-demand platforms in emerging markets—Russia is a big area for this; so is China—and that is a new way of rolling out our content. That is a really exciting opportunity we are seeing: the [SVOD] market is moving a bit. It’s perhaps moving from a nonexclusive model towards a more exclusive model. And what are the economics of that? What do the license fees look like in that space? That will be a focus for us for the next six months.

TV EUROPE: Many distributors are saying that if they can’t sell a show to free TV in a given market, they go to the SVOD players first, develop some awareness for the show, then sell to the major broadcasters.
PEDERSEN: Absolutely, I totally agree with that. In terms of getting your programs some awareness, the subscription video-on-demand area is really helpful. Particularly in emerging markets—we would say the Far East and parts of Central and Eastern Europe have led the way in that. The interesting thing as well is that they want to go very, very quickly. So quite often it’s about delivering the shows the day after the British premiere, which is a different model and a different challenge in terms of us being ready to supply it. But it’s a very immediate market and it’s really catering to a global viewing audience and they are constantly aware of what is going on internationally. They know what the new hot show is in the States, and they know what the new hot show is in Britain and they want to see it immediately. And that is a huge opportunity for us.

TV EUROPE: How has business been for you in Central and Eastern Europe?
PEDERSEN: It’s been a really fantastic market for us in terms of our constructed reality and scripted reality shows. We are probably coming up to 1,000 episodes of the German scripted reality shows—Families at the Crossroads, Cases of Doubt, Berlin: Day & Night—in production in Central and Eastern Europe. So for us it’s been all about the format business. There is a very real demand for programming; probably 80 percent of our business has been in formats in that territory, as opposed to the finished-program sales business. It’s been good for us. We’ve had 90-episode renewals on scripted reality in Hungary, 50 episodes more in Russia. You’ve got volume deals; that is extremely valuable. The license fees might be a bit lower, but since you get volume, it’s helpful.