All3Media production Three Girls, which won Best Drama Series at the Broadcast Awards
Virgin Media’s chief digital entertainment officer says he believes the cablenet’s first original commission will help define the service.
Virgin is working with parent company Liberty Global, Amazon Prime Video and All3Media International on dystopian sci-fi drama The Feed.
“In essence it goes to making your service distinctive,” David Bouchier told Broadband TV News. He said the ten hour-long episodes were not a volume play, but came from a talent team that was choosing the right kind of programming.
The Feed is based on a book by emerging author Nick Clark Windo and centres on a near future where tablets and phones are no longer required because the feed downloads the information required directly into the brain. Needless to say the feed goes down and something or someone seems able to access people’s minds.
“When you ask product people about dramas they always say it’s for 18 to 35s, but equally important is the British sense to it,” said Bouchier. “It’s produced by a British company, uses settings that are British and adopt an approach to storytelling that will be British.”
Around a quarter of Liberty Global’s 70 per cent stake in the drama is being funded by Virgin. It is being commissioned from The Walking Dead writer Channing Powell and Studio Lambert.
Previous exclusives on Virgin’s on demand service have been acquisitions.
The Feed will air in 2019 across the globe with Virgin and Liberty holding exclusivity in their respective European territories (The Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania) and Amazon having rights to the US, Canada and Latin America.
