World Screen

LOS ANGELES: HBO Nordic has scored the exclusive rights for a first run of all new Showtime original series in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland, thanks to a deal with CBS Studios International. This includes Penny Dreadful, Ray Donovan and The Affair. The first of the new series to premiere …

LONDON: The U.K.’s ITV2 is bringing in Cockroaches, commissioning the post-apocalyptic comedy from Big Talk Productions. The 6×30-minute scripted series is set to star Daniel Lawrence Taylor as Tom and Esther Smith as Suze, two teens who survive a nuclear war strike and emerge from a basement ten years later. …

LONDON: Liz Lewin has joined Channel 4's comedy commissioning team, filling in for Nerys Evans, the deputy head of comedy, until February 2015. Evans is on maternity leave. Lewin joins from Company Pictures, where she was series producer on the recent comedy London Irish for Channel 4 and both seasons …

LOS GATOS: Netflix is gearing up to increase its footprint across Europe this year, with launches planned for Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Belgium and Luxembourg. Subscribers in these countries will be able to instantly watch a curated selection of Hollywood, local and global TV series and movies, including Netflix original …

LOS ANGELES/MUNICH: A number of producers, showrunners and executives from networks and production companies are lined up for the international co-production summit being hosted by NATPE and Tandem Communications in Prague. Rola Bauer, the president and partner at Tandem, is part of the panel. Joining Bauer are Caroline Benjo, the …

OSLO: The cable operator Altibox, which reaches some 250,000 customers in Norway and Denmark, has struck two separate agreements that add to its content lineup, one with Disney Nordic and one with NBCUniversal International Television Distribution. The service can now offer Disney Channel, Disney XD, Disney Junior and Disney Channel …

LONDON: Channel 4 has put in place a new team to manage the commercial distribution of its channels, VOD services and programs, appointing Carl Pfeiffer as the head of distribution. Pfeiffer will lead a new team that oversees Channel 4's secondary sales business and syndication relationships with partners such as …

LONDON: Rather than cord-cutting, British pay-TV subscribers are 50 percent more likely than free-TV homes to subscribe to an additional streaming video service, Deloitte says in its new Media Consumer survey. "Far from thinning or cutting the cord, demand for new content suppliers are thickening it," the new report says. …

LONDON: Passion Distribution has finalized multiple deals in Italy for more than 100 hours of its content. The pay-TV platform Sky Italia picked up The Diamond Collar, a show from OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network that follows a reformed mafia street enforcer as he runs a New York dog-grooming parlor. Mediaset …

LONDON: New research from Voxburner investigating young people in the U.K. and their media-consumption habits during major sporting events reveals that more than half of the 16- to 24-year-olds surveyed plan to watch World Cup matches "all the time" or "regularly" on their PCs or laptops.  An investigation into how …