The battle for content rights – born to be king?

Raymond Snoddy explores the growing complexity around broadcast and programme rights.

Many happy hours have been spent at broadcasting conferences over the years debating whether content is king – or not. It seems close to a waste of breath, a truism, because after all without content, obviously as a broadcaster or distributor you have nothing.

Gradually though the argument has moved on and the content is king proposition has been accepted as a ‘given’ and discussions now hone in on subsidiary debates about the relative roles of everything – from marketing and brands to distribution and the importance of creating a fan base for your programmes.

Obviously committed fans are good for keeping programmes alive, though such commitment might simply be a function of the quality of the content and marketing in the first place.

Coming up very fast on the rails as a prime candidate in the debate, is the thorny issue of rights, though purists can argue that rights are just a sub-division of content – the way you acquire and exploit that very content. But what a sub-division!

The struggle for rights and the complexity and cost of those struggles is intensifying week by week as one of the big battlefields of the communication industries.

This week alone, saw BSkyB complete an exclusive deal with NBC Universal for rights to everything from Anna Karenina and Jurassic Park to Gladiator and The Bourne Legacy.

There was a similar extension in September of a multi-year agreement with Warner Bros., which gives Sky subscribers access to all eight Harry Potter movies and many other front line films. Doubtless BSkyB is paying more, probably a lot more, for the extension of such rights.

It is no coincidence that the battle for movie rights is raging fiercely at the moment. The satellite broadcaster has been given the freedom to go for the jugular, following the Ofcom finding that its control of big studio movie rights did not amount to a monopoly.

The real aim of the action is to ensure that the likes of Netflix and other over the top (OTT) operators remain shut out. By doing such deals Sky is keeping its hands on the first-run pay TV rights and ensuring that Netflix gets seconds at best.

It is that battle for controlling and owning rights that has driven Netflix into commissioning expensive original content, such as the US$100 million upfront outlay for 22 episodes of an American version of the UK drama, House of Cards.

A few days later at the other end of the market it was announced that the US cable network Lifetime is working on a US version of Come Dine With Me. The programme was developed for Channel 4 by ITV Studios and the format rights will produce some dollars for ITV coffers.

Runaway hit Downton Abbey, as big a success in the US as it is in the UK, will earn rather more. The commercial broadcaster is only part owner of the Downton rights and the ways the rights are actually exploited are believed to be somewhat less than straightforward.

ITV gets some more money from the sale of the DVD but there is a gap before that can happen. Then ITV doesn’t have streaming rights to the series and only some of the global broadcast rights, bringing Netflix into the action.

The layer of rights means that the series may not come onto the ITV Player for ages, although the company may then be able to charge for some of the cliff-hanging episodes.

In the UK, the rise of the SuperIndy has changed the dynamics of relationships between independent producers and broadcasters. Many Indies no longer have to go cap-in-hand to broadcasters, grateful for whatever deal they can get.

Once Indies had the choice of going to Channel 4 or trying to get in on the BBC’s independent quota and that was about it. Now apart from newcomers such as Netflix splashing the cash – though the company always wants fully developed ideas – BSkyB is putting more cash behind original productions in drama, comedy and the arts. Indies now happily work for Sky in a way that wouldn’t necessarily have happened as recently as five years ago.

Now Amazon has joined Google and YouTube in funding original production. There could be increasingly problems over the longer term for Channel 4, which makes no programmes of its own, caused by greater competition for the best ideas, the most attractive rights.

The case of Shed Productions, founded by refugees from Granada, remains one of the best examples of what has changed in an industrial sense. Shed made The Voice for the BBC but the format was owned by Warner Bros., which in turn owns Shed and presumably leaves the BBC with little to exploit. There could be a lot more dependent relationships like that in future.

For ITV the challenge will be to try and own more of its rights for more robust exploitation overseas. At least the siren voices in the City saying sell ITV Studios were correctly ignored and there is the possibility of moving towards more in-house production even though targets have proved elusive in the past.

Some broadcasters such as HIT Entertainment in the specialist children’s market insists on owning 100% of its rights and can exploit its prime property Thomas The Tank Engine through generation after generation of children.

Others such as YouTube believe that creating an open platform is the thing and owns no rights at all.

By far the best way of acquiring rights is to come up with the idea and make the programme yourself. Petra Fried, executive producer of Misfits, the E4 hit, thought she saw a glimmer of an idea while watching Ghostbusters with her children. Colleagues at Clerkenwell Films gave the misfits ASBOs and put them in orange jumpsuits and the fourth series has just launched.

Tim Hincks, president of Endemol, likes to talk about the origins of Million Pound Drop. They were playing in his office with a cardboard box with a hole in it…

So the king is? Ideas, creativity and making connections – stupid.