Forecasters focus on broadcast funding in a post-crunch world
Friday 10 April 2009
This is an extract from the April 1 edition of the MIPTV daily News. Consult the full edition here!
Broadcasters are reducing overheads, paying less, and avoiding risk as the crunch intensifies, but it’s useful to hear funding gurus predicting what this means for the future.
At Tuesday’s conference TV Financing: The Big Picture, European media consultant Guillaume de Posch listed the ways in which broadcasters were slashing their budgets. But when asked how many bankruptcies he anticipated among European broadcasters, he robustly answered “Zero”.
He qualified this by saying that he expected some broadcasters would be “massively re-capitalised,” and further consolidation was inevitable.
The UK’s obsession with floating independent production companies is a thing of the past, according to Tom Manwaring, director, corporate finance at Ingenious Corporate Finance: “I can see the whole sector coming off the marketplace,” he said.
But as Robert Stapledon, senior commercial banker of Coutts’ media banking division said, these things are cyclical. “The pendulum will swing back again,” he declared.
Jimmy Mulville, managing director of Hat Trick argued that producers providing good content wouldn’t go out of business. He is developing highbudget shows with leading talent such as David Crane (Friends) and Jeffrey Klarik (Mad About You), and says he’s confident he can get the right budget.
Lee Bartlett, managing director, ITV Global Content, agreed that good content creators would prevail. But he expected to see television move to a financing model akin to that of theatrical release. “No studio ever makes money on the big screen release,” he said. “The revenue streams come later.”
Broadcasters are reducing overheads, paying less, and avoiding risk as the crunch intensifies, but it’s useful to hear funding gurus predicting what this means for the future.
At Tuesday’s conference TV Financing: The Big Picture, European media consultant Guillaume de Posch listed the ways in which broadcasters were slashing their budgets. But when asked how many bankruptcies he anticipated among European broadcasters, he robustly answered “Zero”.
He qualified this by saying that he expected some broadcasters would be “massively re-capitalised,” and further consolidation was inevitable.
The UK’s obsession with floating independent production companies is a thing of the past, according to Tom Manwaring, director, corporate finance at Ingenious Corporate Finance: “I can see the whole sector coming off the marketplace,” he said.
But as Robert Stapledon, senior commercial banker of Coutts’ media banking division said, these things are cyclical. “The pendulum will swing back again,” he declared.
Jimmy Mulville, managing director of Hat Trick argued that producers providing good content wouldn’t go out of business. He is developing highbudget shows with leading talent such as David Crane (Friends) and Jeffrey Klarik (Mad About You), and says he’s confident he can get the right budget.
Lee Bartlett, managing director, ITV Global Content, agreed that good content creators would prevail. But he expected to see television move to a financing model akin to that of theatrical release. “No studio ever makes money on the big screen release,” he said. “The revenue streams come later.”
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