here<\/a>.<\/p>\nEroding pay-TV and ad revenues and slowing subscription revenues have caused \u201cmajor upheaval in the content marketplace,\u201d Black said. \u201cOver the past few years, streamers have been paying a very high price for their subscriber acquisition, both through the costs involved in rapid international expansion and also the high cost of their own original content. Now we\u2019re entering this period of reducing costs. It\u2019s fairly natural that these platforms are reducing their commissions. Extra income is also being sought through lower-priced advertising tiers on their SVOD services. Particularly at the studios, we\u2019re seeing them re-embrace licensing their content to third parties.\u201d<\/p>\n
Black then took a deep dive into how present market conditions are impacting unscripted in particular. Entertainment, reality and docs saw a decline in commissions last year, as all genres did, \u201cbut that fall wasn\u2019t as dramatic as the rise we saw in 2022.\u201d<\/p>\n
Black added, \u201cIn 2020 and 2021, scripted commissions outweighed documentary commissions in six of the eight quarters. In the eight quarters since the start of 2022, scripted commissions have actually only exceeded documentary commissions once. Reality commissions, meanwhile, are about level now with the number of scripted commissions. As these platforms start to cut back and look for more cost-effective ways to make content, unscripted\u2019s relative importance to the industry is on the rise even if we\u2019re seeing commission volumes start to stall.\u201d<\/p>\n
Spotlighting the documentary genre, Black explained that commissions in Western Europe remain relatively high but were down 17 percent in North America and 30 percent in Asia. \u201cThe key reason for this discrepancy is the stability offered by the strong public broadcasting tradition in Europe. Public broadcasters commissioned half of documentaries in Western Europe, compared to only 10 percent in North America; they really are the key to the region\u2019s stability. AsiaPac has a more similar profile to Western Europe, but the decline we\u2019ve seen in documentaries there recently has been led particularly by commercial free-to-air groups and also reflects relatively weak public broadcasters in Australia and New Zealand.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a similar story for reality content, Black said, with Western Europe and Asia relatively stable but North America down 16 percent. \u201cAgain, the difference here is related to the profile of who is making reality content. In Europe and Asia, free-to-air channels dominate, while in the U.S. and North America, it\u2019s the cable channels and the SVOD services. They have been cutting back extensively over the last couple of years.\u201d<\/p>\n
Drilling down further into the doc slates of platforms globally, for public broadcasters, the top three themes are arts and culture, travel, and nature and animals. \u201cBut there are also significant slates of historical, biographical, political and science documentaries in here as well,\u201d Black said. At pay-TV and SVOD services, meanwhile, \u201ccrime documentaries are emerging as the dominant force. They make up a full 25 percent of documentary commissions at the pay TV channels and the SVODs.\u201d Black added that 45 percent of documentary commissions at the SVODs are either true crime or sports-themed.<\/p>\n
Pubcasters continue to have fairly diverse doc slates overall, Black said, \u201cbut we are starting to see some clear strategic changes. In particular, public broadcasters are starting to focus on some of the themes that we might more typically associate with streaming services. In particular, true-crime content is really starting to creep up the leaderboard. It\u2019s risen from the seventh most popular theme to the fourth most popular in just a year. That has come at the cost of some of the public broadcasters\u2019 more traditional topics; things like arts and culture, historical, scientific and political documentaries were all in decline in the previous year. This strategy has two obvious advantages for the public broadcasters. Firstly, most are somewhere along the journey towards streaming-first business models, and they need to attract viewers to these new video-on-demand platforms. True crime has proven to be a very reliable, bingeable streaming hit elsewhere. Secondly, at a time when almost all public broadcasters are being threatened with cuts to their funding, they need to start making content with greater resale value. That\u2019s an easy way to make up for funding shortfalls. These crime and thriller commissions are not only for the benefit of their own video-on-demand platforms, they also have one eye on future distribution to other video-on-demand platforms as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s similar at the commercial free-to-airs, Black continued. \u201cTrue crime is the area where commissions are being maintained as everything else starts to be cut back. We\u2019re also seeing travel documentaries start to go slightly out of vogue. Pay-TV channels also cut back heavily, with around 150 fewer commissions last year. But again, the focus here is on crime and thriller. It was already the most popular theme, but it cemented its place in 2023. In fact, it was the only theme where the number of commissions from pay-TV channels rose last year compared to the previous one. Cutbacks particularly fell on travel documentaries.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the SVODs, \u201cit\u2019s really all about true crime and sports content. These two genres both grew their share significantly. The two of them together now make up a full 50 percent of SVOD documentary commissions over the last 12 months. What did change significantly here, however, is the volume of documentary content being ordered. There are pretty severe cutbacks for documentary commissions, down 23 percent year on year on a global basis. Not only are the SVODs making less of their own documentary content, they are reducing the amount of documentary content they are looking to acquire for their libraries as well. All of the major platforms added significantly less documentary content to their libraries in the previous year than in the last two years, and at discovery+ and Disney+, the amount of acquired documentary content being added to the platform is now less than the amount being removed. So these documentary libraries are shrinking. The opportunity to sell into them is falling.\u201d<\/p>\n
The only area that is growing for the SVODs is true crime, Black added. \u201cEverywhere other than Disney+ added at least 100 hours of acquired true crime content last year. Amazon remains a fairly fertile selling ground for biographical, sports, historical and travel content sold by third parties. But at most of the other streamers, we\u2019re beginning to see a bit of a zero-sum game where they\u2019re interested in acquiring true crime content but not much else. So while the documentary sector overall remains fairly strong, the threatened funding for public broadcasters and the difficult linear ad market means commissioners are increasingly making their decisions with one eye on streaming distribution, and that means that the shrinking scope and scale of what streamers want in terms of documentary is a particular problem for us; it is going to reduce the diversity of documentary output over the longer term.\u201d<\/p>\n
Black then explored the reality genre, where \u201cthe only area where commissions have been maintained is with public broadcasters. All of our commercial players are reducing the number of reality commissions they\u2019re making. That fall has come over the longer term from pay-TV and SVOD platforms. At the commercial free-to-air channels, we\u2019ve really only started to see that take effect in Q1 this year. Q1 is normally the peak for commercial free-to-air reality commissions. It didn\u2019t happen in 2024.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Black, the key trend in reality is around new versus returning brands. \u201cCommissioners are continuing to renew their established content while avoiding the risk of new reality shows. While that is a risk-averse strategy in the short term, in the long term, it starts to risk stagnation. We\u2019ve seen the average age of a reality commission from around 4.5 [seasons] in the middle of 2022 to 6.2 in Q1 this year. Broadcasters are sticking to established titles, even if they only prove middlingly successful, rather than taking a risk on something new. That creates this lack of space for new ideas and innovation. If that trend is allowed to continue, it\u2019s likely to lead to audience fatigue. That will lead to a further decline, and that\u2019s a phenomenon that we may already be starting to see close in on the commercial free-to-air channels.\u201d<\/p>\n
Focusing in on the format export business in Western Europe, Black explained, \u201cBack in 2021 and 2022, for every two formats that got renewed, it was likely that one format got the chance to launch itself in a brand-new market. Over the last year, year and a half, we see that start to change. That figure has moved first to around three renewals per new series launched.\u201d In Q1, it was up to five renewals for every new IP commissioned, Black said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fred Black, principal analyst at Ampere Analysis, showcased how unscripted content has fared over the last two years and looked at the challenges for the sector on the final day of the TV Real Festival.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":290,"featured_media":21612,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[9591,9592,9357],"class_list":["post-21611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-top-stories","tag-ampere-analysis","tag-fred-black","tag-tv-real-festival","pmpro-has-access"],"yoast_head":"\n
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