The impact of Donald Trump’s second term as US President and its effect on international trade. How that extends to television, and in particular programme production and distribution, was the subject of Monday’s opening session at NEM Dubrovnik.
Pointing to earlier research on what was once called Peak TV, Guy Bisson, Research Director and co-founder of Ampere Analysis, said that over the last two years global first run series orders we were now consistently down 25% in volume terms.
“The new peak is 75% peak TV. And we’re not going back to where we were, I’m afraid,” he said, adding that content spend had gone from “mid-double digit growth year on year to very low single digits.”
At the same time US production companies were looking at production outside of their domestic market. “Significant business was flowing through from US companies to international markets… Central Europe was also a beneficiary. Increasingly, in the era of Trump, this is referred to often as runaway production, especially for content that could be made in the US but is made in international markets for cost reasons.”
Bisson told delegates that US companies depend on international markets to make their money with 54% of box office revenue coming from outside of the United States. When it comes to transactional revenue the figure is 69%, while for subscription revenues, 55% of revenue is from outside the US.
“The streamers have been major drivers. Their proportion, in just four years, the percentage of content made outside the US has dropped from nearly 60% to just 35%. And they’re working across nearly 40 different countries for that production. So well and truly a global business. Europe, as I said, has been a beneficiary, but they’re now increasingly looking to even more diverse markets, particularly in Asia.”
In the pullback of 2023-2024, Bisson told delegates it was the Middle East and Africa that suffered, the cost effectiveness of Central Europe production made the market a major beneficiary during the pullback.
If Donald Trump were to get his way and he clamps down on international production, it is the big European markets, UK, France, Italy, Spain, Germany that have the most to lose, alongside Poland, for example, Turkey and the Scandinavian markets that have all been the biggest beneficiaries of that runaway production.
