MIPCOM 2024 itself starts today with high expectations of the content industry, which faces a double process that seems contradictory but is truly real: while the market evolves strongly to digital, social media, on demand, live streaming and AI (the new big toy), at the same time needs to return to traditional tools to be profitable: free TV, advertisement, international distribution and genres as procedurals. During the weekend, MIPJUNIOR was too a proof of the new times: Youtube seems to take everything, but public broadcasters are more needed than ever for expanding content.

MIPJunior outcome? The kids weekend was full of ups & downs. On one side, there is a huge moment for cross media licensing, with the main toy and gaming brands going into content business to generate TV, OTT and social media products. There is more commissioned product than last year, according to Glance and Ampere Analytics, especially by public broadcasters and very big OTT platforms. And there are new emerging players as El Reino Infantil and Galinha Pintadinha, both from South America, which grow worldwide as free Youtube Kids’ channels platforms, for preschool audiences.

On the other side, this is a complicated time for medium kids content producers and distributors, because linear TV channels are losing ratings and ad incomes due to YouTube free irruption, and there are also so many coproduced material, that finished products are very hard to place. Bigger players are taking smaller ones. So, MIPJUNIOR hasn’t had this weekend the energy and new product as other years. ‘Many are keeping themselves to main Mipcom week’, it was said.

Olivier Dumont, president, Hasbro: ‘An example of what we are doing is ‘The Amazing Digital Circus’, that gained massive viewership with just one YouTube episode, making Netflix acquire streaming rights and Moose Toys secure toy rights’. Josh Silverman, CFO, Mattel: ‘We want to generate more and more new content with our IPs, especially premium scripted live action’. Victoria Lozano, EVP, Crayola: ‘We are looking for partners to develop our properties, as we signed this year with Moonbug. We want to inspire creativity through fun’.

About the ‘forward and back’ duality for Mipcom, it is good to hear these two buyer opinions: Stamos Protopsaltis, Telecomplex, Greece: ‘My country turned to a big production pole, but many TV channels and platforms have invested more than advertisement incomes afford. So, they need to be wiser from now’. Breno Souza, Globo TV Brazil: ‘This week, we’ve announced in our OTT Globoplay, a two tiers structure, a first level with ads and the other, without. In Cannes, we are buying terror & fantasy series + factual for Globoplay, to complement our own production, and films --action, thrillers and overcoming dramas-- for free TV. We consume +600 films in free TV per year’.

About business future, it was really rich to assist the FAST event that SoFast organized at its yacht, with 60 VIP FAST customers and prospects —see the separated article. María Rua Aguete, OMDIA: ‘For all audiences, TikTok, YouTube and Instagram are the top three platforms for far in advertisement incomes. Bundling (mixing platforms offering) will take a quarter of SVOD business in 2029. CTV is growing so fast in the U.S., that Samsung and LG are reaching Sky TV in set top boxes. In aggregators, who is earning more money from Roku, LG, Google TV, Samsung, Vizio, Fire TV? Roku, because who leads US, leads the world. Outside USA, the top 5 FAST markets are UK, Canada, Brazil (growing strongly!) Australia and Japan. After English, Spanish and Korean are the main languages of Netflix content, worldwide’.

Nicolás Smirnoff, Alberto Buitrón y Francisco Ferreyra

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