Autentic’s Patrick Hörl Talks Distribution Innovation, AI & AVOD

Germany’s Autentic operates across the factual content value chain, producing and distributing its own content, aligning with third-party distributors and operating its own suite of FAST channels. Patrick Hörl, managing director at Autentic, talks to TV Real about trends in documentary and how Autentic is approaching the challenges and opportunities in the business.

TV REAL: How do you see the overall health of the factual distribution business, against the backdrop of trends in other sectors?
HÖRL: Healthier than other industry sectors. Provided you are ready and able to adapt to the modified role of distributors in a predominantly digital environment. Volume has become more important. Your systems need to be prepared to handle both individual titles and large packages. You need to be able to track revenue-share deals in order to fully understand your customers’ needs. And you must be able to invest in content up front. All in all, it looks like smaller distributors are suffering under these requirements. The bigger ones adapt and benefit.

TV REAL: What are the biggest pressure points in the business right now? And how are you tackling them?
HÖRL: Prices are under pressure. The only answers here are to provide the best quality and to understand what the digital markets need. It is as simple as that.
But there’s something else going on that we pay a lot of attention to. Trade shows and sales markets are changing. Several biggies in that field have ceased to exist or become meaningless. Lots of new events emerge. For us, this evolution offers a great chance to rethink where and how we meet our clients. Autentic started participating in the London Screenings this year, offering buyers a much more intimate look at how we produce our content and what new shows we are working on. It was an all-out success.

TV REAL: What’s been your approach to aligning with producers? How early do you need to board projects?
HÖRL: Producers are our most important partners. We often co-develop series with them. Collaborating on how to tell stories from a very early stage of development proves to be key for us. Over time, we built relationships with several production companies with which we co-produce on a very regular basis, year after year.

TV REAL: What opportunities have AVOD platforms provided in terms of your library content?
HÖRL: Placing our content on AVOD platforms has become an important pillar of our business. We are constantly scanning the market for new opportunities to work with AVOD platforms. Beyond economic relevance, AVOD is always great if you want to find out more about what people really want to see.

TV REAL: What’s your approach to FAST?
HÖRL: Autentic operates seven FAST channels at the moment. And we won´t stop here. We are determined to grow this business alongside our existing sales business. As we entered the scene early, we can now benefit from a lot of valuable experiences. Growth in this field is not a straight road. You have to constantly monitor which feeds are actually worth investing in. But we are happy to see that FAST has grown into a real business opportunity with its own legitimate position in the market.

TV REAL: What’s your sense of what buyers and commissioners are looking for?
HÖRL: Buyers and commissioners are more focused on content that can thrive in a nonlinear environment, even if the show might still have its premiere on a linear channel.

TV REAL: How do you see AI impacting your business?
HÖRL: Literally on every level of the content lifecycle. From developing new ideas, all the way through production, scheduling, optimization of sales, to digesting performance data, helping us to better detect opportunities for future successes. One area that Autentic pays a lot of attention to is offering content owners a chance to monetize their content by making their shows available to AI learning engines. We want to provide a safe legal framework for such transactions that helps to protect the rights of factual content owners.

TV REAL: What are your goals for your company in the year ahead, amid an air of uncertainty in the business?

HÖRL: Economic resilience is key right now. That’s why our content investments are focused on returnable series, building brands and content that performs well regardless of its particular path to the viewer. We are determined to grow Autentic’s business. Autentic’s success has always been going hand in hand with lasting, successful partnerships with other companies in the global market—Curiosity Stream, Terra Mater Studios and Spiegel TV are some of them. We are convinced that this time of transition creates spaces for new partnerships.