Broadcasters in CEE are struggling to find new co-production partners amid falling interest from larger countries and the continuing rise of streaming services.
Speaking at NEM Zagreb, Natalija Gorscak, President of the Management Board at RTV Slovenia bemoaned the lack of interest by Netflix in her country.
“Do you think that Netflix would be interested in investing in Slovenia with a potential audience of 800,000? They just care about Poland and the other big countries,” she said, adding that people were stupid enough to pay €9 a month for Netflix, yet balked at the RTV licence fee of €12 for significantly more local content.
“We are not taking care of our local media landscape,” said Gorscak. “We need to work better with the local producers, we need to think about how we can produce things in our own languages. We need help in protecting our culture and our language.”
Bartosz Witak, General Manager, SVP of CEE, MENA and Turkey at BBC Studios, said Netflix has created a lot of new jobs on the production scene in Poland, but not in Slovenia. While the commercial arm of the UK public broadcaster has occasionally worked with Netflix, Witak said BBC Studios worked with others and would prefer alliances with smaller and more local streamers.
Lenka Szántó, Creative Producer, TV Nova/Voyo, said she regarded the streamers as direct competitiors because like them they wanted to dominate the local market. “We have one million subs [In the Czech and Slovak Republics] meaning there’s Netflix, there’s Voyo, and then there’s all the others.”
Speaking on the problems of creating co-productions, Rahela Štefanovi? Editor in Chief HTV, Croatian Radiotelevision (HRT), said she was trying to improve the broadcaster’s legal framework that currently favoured working with local producers who lacked the resources of the larger countries.
“Inside the EBU the experts are trying to make as many co productions as they can. In drama it is very difficult. In documentary it is much more simple,” she said. Financing and the polarisation of the political landscape had also brought problems.
The once sure-bet of children’s co-productions has lost the favour of the UK, France and the Nordics, who are not as keen on working with the smaller countries as they once were.
Witak was now less optimistic on how content to travel. “It’s much easier to think about non-scripted documentaries, documenting a situation or an event. It’s difficult for drama to travel as there are so many differences in terms of perceptions and details. It is much better to sell a format that Is created to local requirements than to create something from scratch.”
