MIPCOM 2024 deploys today its third journey confirming the trends we’ve mentioned so far: it is a very active but low-profile market, with many new opportunities but not big news, where the industry moves to the future making focus on the past, and the main pushing actors come from emerging regions, while the central markets suffer recession. So, we would get into a bizarre content market from a logical perspective, with weird trends.

A German top producer explained: ‘The four main content countries are suffering the same picture -reduction of projects, costs and people- but because of different reasons: USA, due to the recent writers’ strike that stopped most of big projects; UK, due to the Brexit and inflation; France and Germany, because of strong social problems; the latter, also economical crisis for the first time in years. How do you confront this challenge? Developing international markets -with financial back or fresh energy: Asia, MENA, CEE, Latin America- or handling so top product that surpasses the barriers’.

Weird trends? Fiction projects in Western Europe are turning into docu-fictions, mixing scripted with real images, cheaper and simpler to produce. Many projects lastly join 60% real and 40% fiction. Second, a basic comedy format as ‘LOL: Last One laughing’, from Japanese Yoshimoto Kyogo (stressed yesterday) gets unique success, because it is extremely simple and has no format bibles, very easy to adapt by small countries. Prime Video has generated more than 20 adaptations across the world -see coverage apart.

Third, the focus on emerging regions could change the series duration average. A Latin American broadcaster said: ‘The emerging world (2/3 parts of total) prefer horizontal series (daily) than vertical, one episode per week, as in the central markets. So, now that the budgets are outside, the English distributors are not selling their mainly short series, 4 episodes, 8 episodes etc. The cost per episode is terrible and they finish in few days. The Turkish, Latins and Koreans sell more overseas, because they have +40 episodes per series. The cost is better and they keep the audiences loyal’.

Fourth, the return to the past comes in many possible ways. A Spanish producer commented: ‘The European format titans are taking their recent classics to make a twist and launch again. Also, a newest sub-genre is ‘What happened with?’, about searching the actors of an old series to see how they are now. Or with a news focus, to return to the place of a tragedy to see how it stays nowadays. We have ‘Friends’ together after decades, or ‘Ugly Betty’. Nostalgia, empathy, are big winners nowadays’.

The tech future? David Eilemberg, head of Content at Roku, sentenced: ‘Now we include 50% of the whole OTT platforms of the US market. And above all, we are migrating to Connected TV (CTV). This is the future. It replaces the aggregation operator with AI apps, makes both user experience and advertising processes easier, generating full data of audiences and their feedback’.

Justin Sampson from Barb Audiences said: ‘Now, the 6% of Channel 4 audience in UK follow its top programs through YouTube. This media doesn’t cannibalize traditional TV, it is another access way. Broadcasters must pay more attention to Tiktok, YouTube and Instagram, which are taking most of digital advertising pies. They are not just for influencers tips, they are for premium content’.

Nicolás Smirnoff, Alberto Buitrón and Francisco Ferreyra

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