France Télévisions has teamed up with ZDF and RAI and is eyeing a joint VOD platform to fight Netflix.
Talking at the Séries Mania festival in Lille, Takis Candilis of France Télévisions was proud to present a coproduction about Leonardo da Vinci with its Italian and German counterparts RAI and ZDF.
Together, the three public groups have created a group called the Alliance, “a European audiovisual group whose objective is to be able to finance and offer viewers larger-scale fiction projects”. The aim is to create big budget prestigious TV series.
This close collaboration is coupled with “privileged” partnerships with RTVE (Spain), RTBF (Belgium), VRT (Belgium) and RTS (Switzerland). An invitation to join the alliance is also extended to other European broadcasters to exchange and share the financing of prestigious TV series.
“We can imagine European blockbusters that can compete with the American series,” added Eleonora Andreatta, RAI’s fiction director.
Three new joint projects have already been decided, the first one being an eight-part series about the life and work of Leonardo da Vinci. It will be produced by LuxVide and Beta Film, for a budget that France TV estimates at between €2.5 and 3.5 million per hour.
The other two are joint ventures between France TV and RAI for budgets around €2 million per episode. They are Mirage, a spy story produced by French production company Lincoln TV, to be shot in Dubai early 2019, and Eternal City, which takes place in Rome in the sixties. This will be a co-production of Aurora TV, Fearless Mind and Banijay Studios France.
A few days ago, five Nordic channels (from Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland) announced an alliance called Nordic12 to co-produce a dozen series a year.
The next step could be the establishment of a “platform of European content”, according to Franck Freiling, Vice-President in charge of of ZDF’s international relations.
