The Siege of Mecca, now available on Australian Netflix, is a Sunny Side of the Doc / DocumentaryBusiness.com Case Study. Image: Henrik Sauer, Dirk K. van den Berg, and Ahmad Fouad in The Siege of Mecca (2018).
International documentary financing expert and consultant Peter Hamilton provided the first plenary for the MIPDoc International Co-pro Summit for April 2019. It was a small affair, based on forty international leaders drilling down on case studies and panel discussions.
Netflix hangs above everyone working internationally these days, though there is nothing permanent in the market swirl and may never be again.
This is what the summit concluded about the role of Netflix:
The Netflix factor?
- Netflix actually is not necessarily a competitor for the established public broadcasters and commercial networks.
- But it has opened up both the need and the possibility to offer higher-quality programmes.
- Now that Netflix has raised the bar for the quality and for the higher budgets that are needed, co-production is the natural solution and is more necessary than ever.
- On the other hand, Netflix and its new SVOD/OTT competitors like BBC/Discovery buy worldwide rights. This limits the availability of their catalogs, for example for the public broadcasters who for years have co-financed BBC Studios wildlife productions. This recent shift that has not yet been fully understood.
Hamilton’s analysis is so lucid precisely because he uses that simple dot point format; often they serve to demonstrate that the strong suspicions of working producers are actually correct.
This is really a shameless plug. The rest of his article goes much further, revealing that co-pros are actually too hard for most commissioning agencies, the pressure is on to buy much more cheaply in the retail market, but at the same time blue chip event series rely more and more on coproductions.
Read the rest of his many insights on his site.
