The opening session on the second day of Series Mania 2023 was starred by Avril Blondelot, head of global content & marketing insights at Glance / Mediametrie, where she talked about the most viewed content in the last year and detailed the most exported genres.
‘The combined window strategy gave much success to British dramas like Death in Paradise and its sequel Beyond The Paradise. At the same time, the most watched series in the UK was Call the Midwife, the BBC drama had more than 6 million free-to-air viewers’, detailed the exec, who highlighted the USA market as one of the countries that are exporting the most series based on TV, literary and video game IPs.
She especially remarked the BBC‘s combined screen strategy, which has allowed it to have successful shows in the country. ‘More and more public channels encourage new viewing habits by pushing for a high level of time-shifted viewing’, she pointed out. Happy Valley was the pubcaster’s most-watched series in the UK, due to a multi-screen strategy that included open TV and streaming, with 11.8 million viewers.
While with the BBC series, The Tourist, another of the prominent series on the list, the chain’s strategy included online pre-broadcasts, before free-to-air, which gave it a sustained success over time. of 10.2 million viewers in 2022.
Meanwhile, among the international titles released in 2022, NCIS Hawaii was one of the most exportable in the world. Blondelot said that ‘the USA is the market that mostly follows the trend of series based on IPs’, a segment in which the country doubled its international presence. As an example, she mentioned The Walking Dead, Yellowstone and Dexter, whose IPs were renewed with new series based on these universes. To this, she also added series based on literary IPs and video games such as the Marvel series or HBO‘s The Last Of Us.
In this section, the crime/thriller genre series were also present, with Black Sands, the Icelandic drama that premiered on Stöð 2, whose first season was acquired by All3media International for its commercialization. Also the British drama Payback, launched on ITV1 at the beginning of this year and which has already been acquired in Ireland and the Netherlands.
The list is completed by series whose themes include human dramas, and period series were also the most exported in 2022 to countries such as Spain and Finland.
