Mipcom 2013: be prepared to a very busy week

Paul Silk, CEO at Reed Midem, introduced Mario San Roman, CEO at Azteca, who said: ‘Working in TV is like a coin, it has two faces: on one side, glamour; on the other, social responsibility. We produce 20,000 hours per year attending these two faces. Now we talk about TV, in the future we’ll talk about content, in many platforms’.

Buyer opinions about MipJunior? Christine Reinaudo, program producer at France Televisions, France: ‘We’ve had more products screened than last year, more hybrid live-animation programs and I could find products for all targets’. A head buyer of a top kids global TV channel said: ‘I am a bit disappointed. Coming the soccer world cup, I expected to find many good kids products about… I’ve found just 2-3 and no qualified enough’.

FRAPA, main format protection and registration association --now based in the Netherlands-- organized yesterday its global member meeting introducing FRS, own brand-new registration system. Now entering FRAPA website, www.frapa.org, format creators just click a bottom at the home page, fill in the application and after paying by paypal (50€ a non member, 20€ a member) they register their format in a safe, independent and legally protected way.

Patty Geneste, CEO, said: ‘If you want to protect your formats and to be prepared to gain any legal dispute around the world, the best thing you can do is to register them in our system. It is already available’.

The independent producers associations of UK and Brazil, PACT and ABPI respectively, organized a cocktail together… co-productions between different regions continue as a big topic this Mipcom. PACT released its annual report about content exports, telling that last year, UK international content sales grew up again to 1224 million of pounds, and the number of co-productions was up by 60%.

USA, the top customer of UK content, was up 11%, till 475 million of pounds. China was the market with fastest growth, 90%. Sales to Latin American markets grew 24%, headed by Brazil. And Australasia was the second biggest customer, with 103 million of pounds.

Buyer testimonies? Xiaowei Yin, Vice General manager Star China: ‘There are important news in our country: after the top success of Talpa’s The Voice in our channel, all the broadcasters developed singing shows, some with legal international formats and others were copycats. So, SARF (regulation entity) decided to rule genres from now, and every broadcaster can air just one singing show, and it must be approved by the entity. Also, broadcasters must push own format creations’.

Leng Raymund, VP integrated program acquisitions at ABS-CBN The Philippines: ‘Last weekend we introduced our local version of Talpa’s The Voice and it was the top success of the year. Though, daily fiction continues heading the prime time of the weekdays in our country’.

Leyla Formoso, buyer for public channels in Venezuela: ‘I buy for 8 free digital channels now. For me, it is difficult to find educative, social, cultural content. Most of the offer is devoted on commercial products. I take a lot of factual’.

Rowland Okorie, CEO Equity Concepts, Nigeria: ‘This is a great moment to invest in Nigeria, as the main international formats are being developed locally: Idols, Who wants to be a millionaire, X Factor for the fist time… We have 165 million people in our country, and many young people are devoted on production now’.

Nicolás Smirnoff and Fabricio Ferrara

Full Story October 6 | October 5
See Mipcom 2013 Videoconferences