MIPLONDON has today, Tuesday, a key challenging journey: there are 14 screenings around from Paramount and NBCUniversal to independents, so buyers must receive good value to come. The interview of Bela Bajaria, CCO, Netflix with David Beckham, is a very strong attraction, among others. So far, MIPLONDON is collecting mixed opinions: on one side, many exhibitors claim for more traffic. On the other side, the conferences and cocktails are crowded with industry people, and --see the pictures-- there are good buyers on board. MIPLONDON gets buyers from the screenings, others are full-invited by organizer RX and others continue coming on their own, due to their MIPTV tradition, taking the chance to visit the screenings, too.

What certainties may we provide about buyer traffic? A good indicator is the meetings that exhibitors have during the week. PRENSARIO has set up a survey with about 20 space holders, checking an average of 30 meetings per exhibitor for the whole week, with some cases of 40 easy meetings and others that worked hard to have 30 or less. Some say that at MIPTV they reached easier to 30 meetings, while here they depend on the casual traffic that is not as in Cannes. But we have cases, especially Turkish distributors, with 35 meetings just in two days. RX says MIPLONDON is a different market, focused more on quality than volume, but great that there are good numbers of meetings, too.

Testimonials about buyer traffic? Doris Vogelmann, Vme (US free TV): ‘We attended MIPTV and now MIPLONDON + the screenings. We look for factual, animals, preschool, and dramas for prime time’. Massimo Righini, CCO, Casta Diva (Italy): ‘We attend both LONDON SCREENINGS and MIPLONDON. We’d like to find dating shows and comedy shows for broadcasters and OTTs’. Hany Samir, Alwathaeqya Channel (Egipt): ‘We are a free TV documentary channel for MENA. We look for any kind of docs and factual. We used to attend MIPTV and now just MIPLONDON’.

Business trends at MIPLONDON? Two main themes mark the week. On one side, as Roy Ashton from Gersh Agency (USA) stressed in a conference on Monday, ‘UK main fiction producers are in a financing problem now, because in the past the networks paid the total cost of aired productions, but now just the 50%. So, they must finance the other 50% and they don’t know how, because we talk about high-end productions. The solutions are in the international market, with co-productions and production twists’.

On the other side, YOUTUBE is the new starship media for content business, as SVODs years ago. Yesterday in his session --see the article attached-- Neil Price, VP global film & TV partnerships YOUTUBE UK, encouraged industry to produce contents alike and to adopt its monetization models. But digital is not for everybody, usually you must upload first and find incomes later, based on other rules and consuming volumes. UK and French broadcasters are checking options to work together: to synergy contents and --last minute-- to license YOUTUBE big products to take profit of its success, as OMDIA will describe in a panel this Thursday.

Copyright Capital (Switzerland) is a top-category YOUTUBE buyer and investment fund. Jack Ojalvo, CEO: ‘We can operate with revenue sharing or paying, it depends on content relevance and if we are exclusive or not. Our funds go from USD 200-300 for small online creators, to USD 1-3 millions for big ones. Average is USD 0.5 million per project. But now we are in two projects with more than USD 5 millions each, too’.

Nicolás Smirnoff and Francisco Ferreyra

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