Amazon’s Georgia Brown Named Edinburgh TV Festival Advisory Chair

The Edinburgh TV Festival, brought to you by YouTube and Freeview, has tapped Georgia Brown, director of European originals for Amazon Studios, to be the advisory chair for the 2021 festival.

Brown will be the first advisory chair from a streaming service.

The theme of this year’s festival is Accelerating Change, playing out across the various events and sessions, focussing on what and how change is happening in the TV business at every level, what can and does happen as a result of the issues being highlighted and discussed at the festival and the need to make positive change happen.

“I am completely thrilled to be taking on the advisory chair role,” commented Brown. “Our industry has faced one of its most challenging years ever and we have proven what we can overcome when we unite around a common goal. I’m looking forward to working with the ETF team and my friends, colleagues and partners to put together a program to talk frankly about the challenges ahead; confronting our shared responsibility in order to accelerate the change needed to re-build, re-shape and future-proof our industry.”

The festival’s new executive chair, Fatima Salaria, said: “The TV community has had one of its toughest years on record. What will a post-pandemic, post-Brexit, diversity-aware industry look like? It’s an amazing and terrifying time to be making TV and at this year’s festival, we will continue to reflect upon and question our evolving industry.

“In Georgia, we don’t just have, for the first time, someone from a streamer as our advisory chair, but we have a champion of innovative creativity and someone who recognizes the opportunities for change in TV. The festival in 2020 was our most attended and accessible ever. We want to build on that in 2021; to celebrate what has been achieved in such trying times, and to hold ourselves as an industry to account to ensure we are accelerating change for the better.”