“Some people said we had let the fox into the hen house,” Salaria said. “You can see why. He represents a platform with enormous power over audiences, advertising, creators, and increasingly television itself. It’s a good line, but it’s also a bit convenient because YouTube didn’t do this to us while television sat innocently in the corner. Broadcasters put programs, clips, and talent on platforms. Producers built businesses there. Advertisers followed audiences there. Creators found communities and invented formats traditional television had often missed. Viewers moved between a drama, a podcast, a creator, and a YouTube channel without asking anyone in this room for permission. The boundaries we still argue about are the ones the audience mostly stopped caring about years ago. So, before we decide exactly what we think, let’s hear what Pedro’s got to say. There are real questions here about platform power, revenue, rights, data, and the future of public service media, but YouTube is also part of our world in a way it simply wasn’t a few years ago, and the MacTaggart should absolutely be the place where we hear directly from the people shaping this industry.”

The festival in the midst of its own evolution, moving to Manchester in 2027 after five decades in Edinburgh. The goal is to remain relevant to an industry in the midst of significant transformation.

“There’s a lot of talk about AI slop, but maybe the real warning is not that AI will make too much bad content,” Salaria said. “Maybe it’s that we start thinking that more content is the answer, because very soon there will be more content than any of us could watch in a thousand lifetimes. Volume is not the prize; choice is, and everyone in this room knows how much harder those choices get when your budgets are tight, and when there’s less room to be wrong. So perhaps the challenge for television isn’t to join the race for more; it’s to hold our nerve about what deserves to be made, and for me, that is what sits behind tonight—not simply whether YouTube is television, but what television becomes when the question is no longer ours alone to answer.”

Edinburgh TV Festival’s Advisory Chair Adam Hawkins—the director of documentary series at Netflix in the U.K.—spoke in his introduction to Pina’s address about the limitless opportunities for content creation today.

“The quality bar has never been higher, and audiences have never been more engaged. But here’s the thing I find truly exciting: it’s not just that the ceiling has risen; it’s that the floor has completely disappeared. The barrier to entry has never been lower. You no longer need an agent, a commission, or even an industry contact to build a television audience. This is the democratization of television, and it changes everything: who gets to make it, who gets to watch it, and who gets to matter.”

YouTube is television, Hawkins stressed, “not television’s scrappy younger cousin, not a distraction from proper television. It’s on our screens, it’s in our living rooms, and it’s watched by millions of people every single day. It is where culture is made, where careers are launched, and where the next generation of storytellers is finding an audience without asking anyone’s permission.”

Over his 45-minute address, Pina stressed the increasingly central role of the living room in YouTube viewing; the platform’s monetization and global expansion opportunities; and the deep, granular understanding you can get of your audience. The emergence of the creator economy is not a tragedy for the global content business, he said, arguing that democratized production, advances in technology, and the use of data and analytics are ushering in a new golden age of television.

Countering the narrative: YouTube is not the enemy.
There is a narrative about YouTube as it relates to the TV industry, and it’s not a great one, Pina said. “It goes something like this: ‘British television is under siege. For decades, the U.K. was a global powerhouse for creative genius and fearless reporting. Then foreign tech companies came along and tempted viewers away from good programming with low-quality clickbait. In the online free-for-all, misinformation thrives. The bottom has fallen out of the British creative economy because millennials and Gen Z are abandoning television for the siren song of the algorithm, for the labyrinth of endless scrolling. So, enjoy the likes of Panorama, Planet Earth, and It’s a Sin while you can, because the days of well-funded, high-quality TV in this country are numbered.’”

He called that assessment a “well-scripted tragedy,” with the celebrated U.K. TV industry as the fallen hero and social video as the aggressive conqueror. “It’s a powerful story. It’s an emotive story. The trouble is, it is not true.”
Pina ran through stats showing traditional TV still commands significant audiences in the U.K., as well as numbers indicating YouTube is increasingly driven by living room viewing, especially among the under-35 “smartphone generation,” he said.

“Now, I do not wish to play down any of the very real concerns I hear across the industry,” he said. “Viewing habits have changed dramatically, especially among under-35s. The majority of video watched in U.K. homes still comes from broadcasters, but when you focus on 16 to 34s, less than a quarter of what they’re choosing to watch is traditional broadcaster content. It would be easy to shake our heads and say they’re just scrolling through slop, but that’s not true. Personalized recommendations help them find more of what they enjoy, and the result is not a race-to-the-bottom churn of addictive rubbish.”

A lot of what is being consumed on YouTube does come from major broadcasters, studios and streamers, Pina went on to say. “So while it is true that traditional broadcast TV no longer has a monopoly on viewers’ attention, that does not mean that any form of online video now has the monopoly. It simply means there is no monopoly anymore. And from the viewer’s perspective, that is a very good thing indeed.”

You can’t resist the tide. And it’s not an either/or situation.
There is no going back; audiences won’t want to return to the days of limited options in the traditional television space. “But if we take a long view of human culture, we find no reason to assume that online video will supersede television as a form.”

Pina used the tremendous traction creator content got on YouTube around the World Cup as an example; in the U.K., most of that viewing happened outside the live match windows.

“We call that the game around the game. Online sports commentary doesn’t replace TV coverage; they exist side by side. This is what a healthy media ecosystem looks like: complementary forums playing different roles and pushing each other forward.”

Television will get left behind if it doesn’t adapt, Pina stressed. “Let’s not sugarcoat it. Things will have to change because the playing field TV once dominated has shifted, and the steady revenue streams and booming budgets built on the central position TV once held can no longer be relied upon.”

Read more

• Day at the Library: Library & FAST deals

• On the Pod: Jeff Biederman & Jake Horowitz, creators of Estate of Mind

• Real People, Scripted Drama: True-life drama commissions

• Brand Aware: Book and other adaptations

• From Asia with Love: Cross-border collaborations and manga wins

• Medical, Mystery & Romance: Commissioning roundup

• Back for More: Update on renewals

• Window Watching: The scripted acquisitions market

• Micro Moves: The latest in short-form vertical drama

Day at the Library

According to a Luminate report this summer, library content consumption is outpacing original viewing on streaming platforms by more than three times, logging 25 billion hours streamed in the first three months of this year, with originals at 7.3 billion. Netflix put a $​500 million value on AMC Global Media’s The Walking Dead universe​, scoring co-exclusive rights to the original and its spinoffs for five years. Meanwhile, ​Rakuten TV partnered with AMC Global Media​ to launch a dedicated The Walking Dead Universe FAST channel in the U.K.

Elsewhere in the AVOD/FAST space, a ​dedicated NCIS: New Orleans FAST channel launched on Samsung TV Plus for viewers across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. ​Tubi acquired over 450 library movies and TV episodes from NBCUniversal Global TV Distribution and Sony Pictures Entertainment for Australia, Canada, and the U.K. The platform also rolled out a dedicated horror hub, ​expanding its annual Terror on Tubi stunt​. Tubi’s more than 13,000 hours of horror content log 53 million hours of streaming every month, across blockbusters and cult classics, originals, and creator content. The hub is set to expand to international markets, including Canada, the U.K., Australia, Mexico, and Latin America.

On the Pod

Jeff Biederman and Jake Horowitz joined ScreenMDM Talks to discuss their hybrid docu-comedy series Estate of Mind, which launched on Bell Media’s Fibe TV1. From indies Sideways Dog Productions and Grainey Pictures, ​the 4×20-minute series blends real interactions with improvised comedy.

Real People, Scripted Drama

Not long after Meta’s $18 billion settlement related to child safety on Facebook and Instagram, ​Channel 4 announced Billionaires (w.t.), a three-part factual drama from Halcyons Heart Films exploring social media disinformation, big tech accountability, and real-world human consequences. 5 ordered To Nicola, Love Peter (w.t.), a 90-minute title from Wonderhood Studios examining former ​Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and her ex-husband Peter Murrell’s embezzlement scandal. Lux Vide (a Fremantle company) is developing an international event series dramatizing the life, career, and legacy of fashion icon Giorgio Armani. In the U.S., HBO greenlit The Trial of Louise Woodward, a drama series starring Meghann Fahy ​based on the 1997 trial of a British au pair in Massachusetts, written by Matthew Barry and directed by Susanne Bier.

Brand Aware

We covered several book and other scripted IP adaptations this past month. Prime Video ordered a six-part limited series adapting Stephen King’s London-set short story Crouch End from Mammoth Screen. Element Pictures is adapting ​David Nicholls’ best-selling novel You Are Here for the BBC and STARZ​, with Fremantle handling international distribution. Production has begun on The Detection Club, a 10-part mystery-solving period drama for the BBC and BritBox starring Miles Jupp, Bryony Hannah, and Cara Theobold as celebrated crime authors G.K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers. Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson and his G-Unit Film & Television are working with VICE Studios and Starbreeze Entertainment on the adaptation of the video game franchise PAYDAY. Alicia Silverstone is reprising her role from the 1990s teen comedy Clueless in an event-series sequel on Paramount+. In a radically different take on being inspired by known IP, FX ordered Legends, a meta-thriller created by and starring Charlie Hunnam,​ alongside his Sons of Anarchy co-stars, as fictionalized versions of themselves reuniting at a fan convention.

From Asia with Love

Lots of news from Japanese studio The Seven, backed by TBS, including a series based on Yugo Aosaki’s award-winning mystery novel Rock, Paper, Landmines, and an adaptation of Saki Hiwatari’s landmark sci-fi romance manga Please Save My Earth, both for Prime Video. Elsewhere in the region, streamer ​Viu partnered with Thailand’s TrueVisions NOW to launch a branded content hub across Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines for premium Thai series; and Netflix announced an expanded South Indian programming lineup, committing to release an average of one new Tamil, Telugu, or Malayalam title per week through the remainder of 2026. The slate features major theatrical acquisitions, licensed titles, and new originals.

Medical, Mystery & Romance

USA Network ordered ​Diplomatic Immunity, a Rome-set medical drama from FOX Entertainment Studios​, with FOX Entertainment Global handling international distribution. ​Channel 4 and Virgin Media Television Ireland slated Complicit, a six-part murder mystery from Tall Story Pictures and Metropolitan Pictures (ITV Studios oversees global sales). Sky commissioned ​Charmer, an eight-part thriller about a “seducer for hire”​. ​Disney+ greenlit Mad Love (w.t.), a romantic comedy-drama series set in Italy, co-produced by Fremantle‘s Element Pictures and Brooklyn-based production company Sinestra.

Back for More

​Disney+ renewed Clerkenwell Films’​ British comedy series Alice & Steve for a second season. BBC One opted for a second season of the sci-fi comedy-drama Ann Droid. The Mark Gatiss U&alibi detective drama ​Bookish received a third-season renewal​ (six episodes) alongside a two-part 2026 holiday special from Eagle Eye Drama, with Beta Film managing global distribution. Sky greenlit a second season of the Welsh crime thriller series Under Salt Marsh​. HBO renewed the ​Stephen King prequel series IT: Welcome to Derry for a second season. Elizabeth Meriwether’s Furious, starring and executive-produced by Emmy Rossum, was renewed for a second season at Hulu​. Prime Video went for more of the ​YA series Sterling Point​. Also in the buzzy YA space, Netflix revealed a raft of new commissions and renewals, including ​Sid & Zoey, a supernatural mystery-romance hybrid from writers/showrunners Jon Kasdan and John Shiban, executive produced by Blumhouse Atomic Monster and Bad Robot.

Window Watching

The Stan-commissioned medical drama ​The F Ward notched up sales in 100 markets for Paramount Global Content Distribution​. Broadcasters and platforms include Channel 4, CBC in Canada, SkyShowtime, Claro video across LatAm, Streamz in Belgium, COSMOTE TV in Greece, RTE, JioHotstar, Sky NZ, HBO Asia, AMedia Networks, and more. MGM+ picked up ​All3Media International‘s espionage thriller Secret Service for the U.S., Canada, Latin America, and Italy. All3Media International also closed key global presales for the ​Two Brothers Pictures thriller Maya​. ​Peacock picked up U.S. rights to Dynamic Television‘s Ms. X​, commissioned by Sky’s Three and ThreeNow in New Zealand. Dynamic Television also closed multi-territory international sales for Acorn TV‘s Brooke Shields-led mystery series You’re Killing Me​, selling to UKTV, BBC Channels, Stan, and Disney+ across EMEA. Austrian distributor ​ORF-Enterprise signed a licensing pact with Prime Video for a slate of German-language scripted series across the DACH region. BBC Three bought the U​.K. broadcasting rights for the Australian dark comedy-drama series He Had It Coming​ from Fifth Season. Global platform ​MUBI acquired global streaming rights for the acclaimed Spanish original series La Mesías from Movistar Plus International. Mediaset acquired the ​Italian broadcast rights for the Turkish romantic drama series My Sweet Lie from Eccho Rights. Netflix acquired the LatAm streaming rights for ​Kanal D International‘s classic Turkish drama Fatmagül​.

Micro Moves

Positioned to help drive the branded-entertainment market for short-form vertical, ​COL Group, VIRTUE Asia, and V47 Entertainment have partnered to host “Inside Microdramas”​ on October 27 in Singapore, billed as the first-ever upfront event dedicated to microdramas and the vertical video economy. ​COL Group also sealed a pact with Thailand’s CP Group for a short-form video initiative featuring a talent incubation program, local adaptations using AI and COL’s IP library, and the launch of FlareFlow Mini on TATANG by TrueID. Meanwhile, ReelShort partnered with Vidio to debut a dedicated “Short Drama” tab on the platform, launching over 200 Indonesian-dubbed titles and planning local co-productions.

In Europe, International distributor ​Primitives signed a global rights agreement with Belgium’s Play Media to handle an initial slate of 20 vertical microdrama series spanning romance, fantasy, and drama.

​WEBTOON Entertainment introduced a live-action vertical short-form slate on its English and French apps, premiering adaptations of popular webcomics and webnovels. Vivian Yin’s Y+X Entertainment Group recruited more than 50 authors and screenwriters—including New York Times bestsellers—to expand the creator network for its forthcoming premium microdrama platform, LumiView.

• Docs in the Public Interest

• 9:16 Opportunities

• Breaking New Format IP

• The Creator Pipeline

• Factual Goes FAST

• Criminal Activity & Going Back in Time

Docs in the Public Interest

Despite funding challenges, public broadcasters worldwide are fighting the good fight, cobbling together funds to keep investing in trusted factual fare—geared primarily to local audiences, but universal enough to travel. Pubcasters that made news with their commissions over the last month included PBS in the U.S., which revealed the ​2027 lineup for its American Experience strand​. The long-running strand is set to feature limited-series docs on Charles Lindbergh and the FBI, alongside continued emphasis on driving its social video presence after its short-form videos on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube generated more than 19 million video views in the last five months. S4C is also leaning into digital, calling for ​digital-first versions of established shows as part of its More than a TV Channel strategy​. True crime, contemporary history, terrorism, and the role of mythology in popular culture feature among a new batch of commissions ​from indie production companies at BBC Scotland​. Meanwhile, the BBC’s commercial arm, BBC Studios, has begun the search for a ​successor to Jonny Keeling at the head of its storied Natural History Unit​.

9:16 Opportunities

The vertical video space is still dominated, in volume and revenues, by microdrama, but opportunities for factual continue to expand. ​Snips landed deals with Banijay Rights and BIG Media​ to reformat shows for vertical, short-form rollout. The initial selection from the distributors runs across entertainment, documentary, and factual programming. Keller/Noll (Chopped, America Says) and Crazy Legs Productions are collaborating on a ​new short-form vertical quiz show format, Do You See What Eye See​.

Breaking New Format IP

Meanwhile, in 16:9 formats, the last month featured news of a smattering of new concepts, including a brand-funded one that Banijay Entertainment is bringing to seven European markets simultaneously. ​Live Better for Less, a lifestyle entertainment format produced by Banijay UK’s Electric Robin with Vinted and WPP Media​, will air in the UK, France, Germany, and Spain (Prime Video), the Netherlands (RTL 4), Poland (TVN Style), and Italy (Warner Bros. Discovery’s Real Time). Each series will consist of seven 24-minute episodes, with a localization strategy developed in partnership with AI outfit Adapt, powering translation, voice generation, and visual lip sync. Also at Banijay, ​SAT.1 and Joyn have commissioned The Million Dollar Idea (Die Millionenidee)​, a new business competition format created by Endemol Shine Germany. The new prime-time format will feature inventors pitching their product and service ideas, vying for an investment from German entrepreneur Ralf Dümmel. ​FOX Entertainment is heading to BCWW in Seoul​ next month on the hunt for compelling new Korean IP. Belgium-based ​Primitives has acquired the worldwide format rights (excluding German-speaking Europe) to Terrain: Battle of the Flags​, an adventure-reality competition from ZDF and Roses Are Blue created by German comedian, actor, writer, and YouTube creator Torge Oelrich—better known as Freshtorge.

The Creator Pipeline

Three original series from Dan Abrams’ ​Law&Crime now fill a Monday prime-time slot on REELZ‘s linear network​. The block delivers back-to-back episodes of Bodycam, Most Outrageous Crimes, and Interrogations, three of Law&Crime’s most popular digital-first series. ​Little Dot Studios expanded its global digital broadcast network to 250 actively managed channels​ and surpassed 30,000 hours of premium long-form programming after a series of new and renewed licensing agreements with international distribution partners. ChaiFlicks secured the SVOD rights to both seasons of the award-winning ​YouTube series And They’re Jewish with Hen Mazzig​. World of Wonder assembled an expanded lineup of ​Drag Race UK content for WOW Presents Plus​ ahead of the season eight launch of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK on BBC Three. Merzigo has announced a new season of its popular dating reality series ​Qesma W Naseeb: Alarusat & Alhamaat​. After building a large, dedicated following during its previous season on YouTube, the format now moves to SVOD as a Prime Video original across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Ample Entertainment unveiled a ​YouTube channel to develop and launch original IP​. Ample Originals will host documentaries, series, creator collaborations, and companion content. KC Global Media partnered with the Sarawak Tourism Board to produce a new original travel and adventure series for ​AXN Asia and its accompanying YouTube channel, featuring content creators from the region​ (reflecting the growing trend of turning to tourism boards to help get shows off the ground).

Factual Goes FAST

The lean-back nature of the FAST ecosystem has made it fertile ground for factual distributors, and this month was no exception. Germany’s Joyn streaming platform expanded its lineup of FAST channels from ​BBC Studios to include BBC Earth and BBC Lifestyle​. Subscribers to discovery+ in the U.S. can now access a ​suite of streaming channels built around some of the platform’s biggest franchises​, as well as live events. The 24/7 linear-style curated feeds highlight popular genres and themes across unscripted, factual, home, food, and crime content.

​​Lifestyle is a key offering in the TV5MONDE FAST strategy​, which ScreenMDM covered in a recent podcast with Patrice Courtaban, EVP of global growth and business development at TV5MONDE and CEO of TV5MONDE USA. “We are still in the experimentation phase because we always try to learn, and every market is different,” he said. “When we launched our FAST channels, we looked at the markets and tried to identify the drivers across all regions. Also, where can we launch a FAST channel where the space isn’t already overcrowded? If you have 20 drama series channels, maybe that’s not where we want to be. We’re always trying to differentiate.”

TV5MONDE Voyage, a lifestyle-and-discovery channel spanning trends, fashion, craft, and travel, and TV5MONDE Info, a live news channel, lean into easy, lean-back viewing that can cut through the clutter on FAST.

Criminal Activity & Going Back in Time

True crime and history dominated our factual commissioning and distribution coverage over the last month. Sphere Abacus secured a deal with ​Prime Video in the U.K. and Ireland for Britain’s TikTok Murder​, produced by Phoenix Television and Born This Way Media in association with TPC. ​Banijay Rights licensed the true-crime doc The Promise: Finding My Mother’s Killer​, produced by the Banijay UK label Workerbee, to Hulu in the U.S. ABC News‘ 24-hour streaming news channel rolled out four new series, including ​Burden of Proof, a daily series delivering coverage from high-profile trials​. ​BossaNova is handling the international distribution of Surviving Fred and Rose West: Inside Cromwell Street​, a two-part true-crime doc for UKTV.

On the history front, ​BBC Select commissioned Woodcut Media to produce the six-part series Ancients: The Greatest Finds​; and ​History Hit and Little Dot Studios revealed a collaboration on How the Tudors Lost Their Heads​, a six-part series for National Geographic in the U.K.

Jonathan Mark Tatti, CEO of Begin, is leveraging his many years in South Asian media (he’s a veteran of Zee TV, CNBC, and Samaa TV) to scale Begin in Pakistan as it caters to audiences largely ignored by global streaming giants.

Give us a sense of Begin’s positioning within a crowded streaming landscape.

Begin is positioned as a hybrid entertainment and premium sports destination serving high-growth, underserved markets across the region and their diaspora audiences.

Rather than competing as a one-size-fits-all global streaming service, we are building a platform that combines tier-one live sports, particularly properties outside cricket, with local and regional entertainment. Our focus is on creating an offering that reflects the interests and viewing habits of audiences that are often not fully served by larger global platforms.

What have been some of the strategies you’ve used, including bundling and telco partnerships, to drive reach?

We have developed direct integrations with telecommunications providers, including direct carrier billing, which helps remove payment friction for customers. We also support mobile-wallet integrations, allowing us to reach large unbanked and underbanked populations across emerging markets.

We are exploring opportunities to include Begin within broadband packages, high-speed data bundles, and mobile data passes. The objective is to make access to the platform as seamless as possible while reducing barriers to entry for consumers.

Alongside this, we are developing more flexible ways for customers to access content, including sports tickets, shorter-duration passes, and modular subscription tiers. This allows users to choose the content and access model that best suits their needs.

Tell us broadly about the approach to content curation. How have you carved out a distinct lineup to drive acquisition and retention?

Our acquisition strategy is centered on marquee live sports, including properties such as Serie A. While we are not currently focused on acquiring cricket rights directly, we are working with other platforms to explore how cricket can complement the wider offering.

We are also evaluating properties such as tennis and other leading sports outside cricket. The goal is to build a strong portfolio of premium sports content that can attract audiences to the platform.

From a retention perspective, we complement live sports with serialized entertainment, including local and original dramas, reality television, and formatted shows. Pakistan Idol was our first major move into this space.

Once users join the platform, they have access to a broader catalog of entertainment content, which helps drive engagement beyond individual sporting events and supports long-term retention.

How important is sports in your overall offering, and what has been the approach to acquisitions in this area? How are you balancing top-tier international sports like Serie A with local sports coverage?

Sports is the strongest live-engagement driver within our offering and one of our primary subscriber-acquisition tools.

Securing exclusive Serie A rights allows us to bring premium European football directly to passionate football audiences across our markets. These types of properties play a central role in attracting users to the platform.

At the same time, we balance tier-one international properties with high-affinity local and regional sports to keep the overall experience relevant to audiences in each market.

We are also working towards localized commentary and contextualized match packaging. The objective is to combine world-class sports content with local relevance and stronger connections to fan communities.

Continue reading for more from Tatti on the strategy for original content, acquisitions, short-form vertical, and implementing AI tools.

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“On the surface, that is a calm, healthy growth story,” Vivek Couto, executive director and CEO of MPA, said in revealing the new forecasts at APOS in Bali this summer. “But the surface is misleading. Almost every dollar of that new revenue is digital—premium streaming, social and user-generated video, and microdrama, a format that did not exist commercially a few years ago. Online video overtook total television in 2025. And linear TV, the engine that built much of the industry, is shrinking by around $21 billion over the decade even as the total video pie keeps growing. So, the pie is bigger, but it is a fundamentally different pie.”

Ultimately, the screen economy is undergoing a reset, in the region and elsewhere. But this isn’t a story of decline or disruption, Couto stressed. “It is a story about reallocation. Demand for premium video in this region has never been higher. What is changing quickly, and unevenly, is where the value sits, who captures it, and what it now takes to turn an audience into a business and build on new revenue streams.”

The region is the largest and youngest screen base in the world, and while subscriptions are still increasing, “the high growth is moving to retail media and commerce,” Couto said. “Video, social, and commerce are no longer separate businesses; they are collapsing into the same platforms.” On top of that, “AI is resetting the cost of content, the speed at which it travels, and the languages it travels in.”

The nature of streaming growth has also morphed, moving away from “global libraries and aggressive pricing” to “product quality, local relevance, and live sport. The platforms winning today are the ones pairing strong local programming with international content and premium rights, and then using personalization and discovery to keep people there.”

Many of the winning platforms are local incumbents, including JioStar in India, U-NEXT and TVer in Japan, TVING and Wavve in Korea, Vidio in Indonesia, and Viu across Southeast Asia. “In every major market, the strongest local platform is gaining share against global scale by pairing local content and sport with smart bundling. The lesson is that a local champion can now reach regional-scale economics, particularly in big markets. JioHotstar surpassed $1 billion in revenue last year and is on track to surpass YouTube in total revenue by the end of this year in that market. In advertising, it is precisely these scaled local players that have been able to withstand the pressure that is eroding other players.”

In this post, we deliver insights from APOS from JioStar’s Kevin Vaz, Viu’s Janice Lee, and Vidio’s Sutanto Hartono and Mark Francis on how they are looking to scale their businesses, tapping into local content expertise, collaboration, microdrama, sports, and AI tools to chart a new path forward in Asia’s streaming economy.

What’s Inside:

• Beyond Scale: The JioStar Story with Kevin Vaz, CEO, Entertainment

• The Pan-Regional Giant: The View from Viu with Janice Lee, CEO, Viu & MD, PCCW Media Group

• SVOD in a Mobile-First Market: The Vidio Journey with Sutanto Hartono, MD & CEO, Emtek Media & Vidio, & Mark Francis, Chief Content & Strategy Officer, Vidio

Beyond Scale: The JioStar Story

When it comes to understanding the scale and scope of the JioStar business, the numbers are staggering. Formed from the combination of Reliance’s Viacom18 and Disney India’s media operations, JioStar brought together the JioCinema and Disney+ Hotstar platforms to create a dominant streaming service, JioHotstar, with more than 500 million monthly active users and over 260 million paid subscriptions.

For Kevin Vaz, CEO of the entertainment business at JioStar, the biggest lesson from combining the two platforms has not been about scale or reach, but redefining the consumer experience.

“The future of media is more about creating integrated ecosystems where consumers can come and seamlessly consume content on screens of their choice, and it has to be personalized for them so that they feel that moment,” Vaz said in an APOS keynote address. “The definition of scale has changed. Scale is not about how many people you reach. I think scale is defined as what impact you have on people’s lives after you reach them.”

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• The YouTube Generation

• MIP Markets Digital Agendas

• Bigger Bundles

• Vertical Velocity: By the Numbers

• Building a $1 Billion Microdrama Giant

• 9:16 Rush

• Engagement Games

• Creator Exchanges

• Powering Social

• Pubcaster Shifts

• CTV Battles & FAST Evolution

• Free Streaming & Linear Lives

• The Art of AI

The YouTube Generation

​YouTube hit a U.S. viewing share of 13.4%…

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Per Jia, it’s been a challenging ten-year journey for the company, fraught with cash-flow fears, as it evolved from mobile gaming and serialized fiction apps to launching ReelShort in 2022.

“I did experience some dark times,” Jia told me in a candid conversation at APOS, where he was among the keynote speakers. After a batch of productions failed to catch on, “I almost gave up,” he said. “Nobody told me what was wrong with microdrama. Or if this would be a robust model. If we could make money. But I trusted my instinct. If there’s something wrong, don’t complain to other people; go back to your content and fix it. If you’re really serious about a story, and you truly believe in it, there is a market to find out. When you see a one-day return of over 100%, you know you’re doing something correct. It’s not easy. Projects fail. It’s so easy just to quit, but I’d tell the team, let’s give it one more shot.”

Continue reading for Jia on AI, acquisition costs, unit economics, and the future of vertical video.

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Backed by Guy Hameiri, who co-founded Abot Hameiri, and Lior Friedman, a former SVP at Amagi, the venture officially launched its content studio in May, aligning wit…

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• Clutter Busters: Real People, Historical Backdrops, & Novel Takes

• A Minute to Win It

• In the Mood for Love

• Prime Crime

• Anime, Asian Gains & Adult Animation

• Globe-Trotting: CanCon, Iberian Ideation, Turkish Delight

Clutter Busters: Real People, Historical Backdrops, & Novel Takes

Peak TV may be over, but the challenge of discovery remains, translat…

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• The Making of Fluff Piece with Sylvia Brindis & Shane Snow

• ICYMI: Gen A to Z in June

• MIPJunior Takes Shape

• Live Action Appeal

• Movers & Shakers

• Social Media Matters

• Deal Tracker: What’s New in Acquisitions, Commissions & Co-Pros

• Chasing Fandom

​The Making of Fluff Piece ​

Sylvia Brindis and Shane Snow discuss how Fluff Piece, the Wonder Project‘s fi…

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• Wanna Bet?’s Winning Combo

• YouTube Optimization: Partnerships to Scale

• Reinventing Commissioning for the New Age

• Criminal Minds

• Making a Breakthrough

• The Month in Real Talk

• Resurrections & Relocations

• Going Digital First

Wanna Bet?’s Winning Combo​

For more than four decades, Wetten, dass..? has entertained German families on Saturday nights. Thoma…

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Viewers are also largely fine with watching ads on FAST (82.3%), especially if they are relevant, help discover new content, or are simply accepted as part of accessing said content for free.

FAST is being powered by both financial and discovery imperatives; 45.9% of viewers surveyed for the Rakuten TV study use it to decide which subscription services are worth paying for, and 29.9% use it to help reduce overall spending.

Scaling the niches.

The key to success in FAST involves balancing broad reach and niche fandom. Per the study, movies and TV series remain the strongest drivers of engagement across Europe, while themed and genre-based channels are a key growth opportunity. Indeed, that is the only sector where audience demand exceeds current viewing behavior, suggesting that specialized content experiences are not yet available at scale. And local content is paramount.

There are differences emerging across key European territories.

In the U.K., FAST is increasingly driving content discovery and subscription decision-making. In Germany, subscription fatigue is contributing to FAST adoption. Local is particularly important in Spain and Italy.

Where the money is.

The CTV advertising sector will be worth $81 billion by 2030, Omdia projects, surging from last year’s $44 billion, with Google, Amazon, and Netflix expected to capture half of that market.

CTV advertising will surpass traditional linear TV advertising during the 2030s, Omdia says, with the center of power shifting clearly away from traditional broadcasting to streaming, TV OS players, and advertising ecosystems. By 2030, Google will capture a 26% share of global CTV ad revenues, driven by YouTube’s dominance in the living room, with Amazon at 13% and Netflix at 9%.

The factors driving the CTV ad market include the expansion of ad-supported tiers on streamers, the convergence of retail media and TV advertising, gains in programmatic and targeted TV advertising, the expanding role of TV OS platforms and smart TV ecosystems, and the rapidly intensifying battle for consumer attention.

“The battle for the living room is no longer only about streaming content,” said Maria Rua Aguete, head of media and entertainment at Omdia, in the study. “It is increasingly about controlling the platform, the advertising layer, the operating system, the data, and ultimately the consumer relationship.”

Tech companies are increasingly competing to control the TV interface itself, Omdia notes, as CTV becomes a key gateway for digital advertising, retail media, and commerce integration.

Mobile viewing is affecting CTV viewing.

Samsung Ads’ Behind the Screens report says that in this new fragmented era, viewing habits have become “fluid,” hewing closer to smartphone usage trends than the old days of channel hopping.

Key stats include that the average household uses five apps. The number of apps embedded in smart TV ecosystems continues to balloon, rising by 8% last year to reach 18.4 billion launches. “Fragmentation is no longer just about more services—it reflects audiences actively spreading their attention across a wider range of platforms,” the report indicates.

In this post, excerpted from the ScreenMDM Digital-Shift White Paper, you’ll get insights on how an array of key CTV players are positioning their businesses, including Samsung TV Plus, Rakuten TV, TCL, wedotv, Tubi, and Roku.

Use SCREENMDMEXTRA for an exclusive 20% discount on the ScreenMDM Digital-Shift White Paper.

Platform loyalty doesn’t matter a ton—it’s content that viewers are chasing across the landscape.

No single ecosystem is winning in CTV, the report notes: 24% of Samsung TVs account for 81% of all linear viewing, while 27% of Samsung TVs stream and never watch linear.

It’s not FAST, it’s free television. Audiences don’t care about the delivery method.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s VOD, linear, or broadcast,” said Shujah Farooq, partnerships and content acquisition manager at TCL, at StreamTV Europe. “You just want free content.”

“We try to abandon the name FAST, because we think that’s not the right definition,” Philipp Rotermund of wedotv told me recently. “If you take the streaming out of the name, it’s free TV.”

The CTV FAST operators are an essential piece of the puzzle for wedotv, but that’s not the only space the AVOD platform and FAST channel operator is looking to for expansion. “In the end, we are in the business of selling eyeballs,” Rotermund said. “So, we have to get in front of the eyeballs. And that’s why in any market, we want to have full coverage.”

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“The average screen in the United States earns close to $900,” said Couto, executive director of MPA. “The average screen in the Asia Pacific earns a small fraction of that. You can read it as a verdict that Asia under-monetizes and always will. Or you can read it as a runway. That gap is the single largest pool of latent value anywhere in global media, and the whole question for the next five years is who is equipped to close it, because closing it is no longer about adding reach. It is about converting reach into revenue.”

For the global majors, Asia-Pac continues to serve as a growth opportunity as they face saturation in North America and Europe, but the battleground has become more complicated since the arrival of Netflix and Prime Video a decade ago. The nature of streaming growth has morphed, moving away from “global libraries and aggressive pricing” to “product quality, local relevance, and live sport,” Couto said. “The platforms winning today are the ones pairing strong local programming with international content and premium rights, and then using personalization and discovery to keep people there.”

And many of the platforms that are winning are local incumbents, among them JioStar in India, U-NEXT and TVer in Japan, TVING and Wavve in Korea, Vidio in Indonesia, and Viu across Southeast Asia. “In every major market, the strongest local platform is gaining share against global scale by pairing local content and sport with smart bundling. The lesson is that a local champion can now reach regional-scale economics, particularly in big markets. JioHotstar surpassed $1 billion in revenue last year and is on track to surpass YouTube in total revenue by the end of this year in that market. In advertising, it is precisely these scaled local players that have been able to withstand the pressure that is eroding other players.”

In this post for our ScreenMDM Extra and ScreenMDM Club members, we feature insights from Prime Video’s Gaurav Gandhi, Netflix’s Minyoung Kim, Disney’s Tony Zameczkowski, and Warner Bros. Discovery’s James Gibbons for the global SVOD view on Asia. In part two next week, we’ll explore the strong domestic players to see how they are rewriting the streaming playbook in Asia.

What’s inside:

• Netflix’s ten-year Asian journey.

• The Prime Video view: common business model, uncommon playbooks.

• Franchise magic at Disney.

• HBO Max’s premium play.

• Hub evolution: bundles, collaboration, and being something to everyone.

• What’s next? Asia’s soft power and content travelability.

Netflix’s Ten-Year Asian Journey

Netflix had a significant presence at APOS this year as it marked ten years in Asia with a Squid Game-themed opening party at the summit. The message from Minyoung Kim, VP of content for Asia, excluding India (which is run by Monika Shergill), was clear: the biggest lesson has been the critical role of local storytelling. At the time of launch, when the service went live in 190 markets in a day, the focus was on “programming for global,” Kim said at APOS, sharing the stage with execs from Prime Video, HBO Max, and Disney+. “We were trying to program Asian stories for global, targeting the global market and the global audience. In that process, what we really learned is the importance of local content in growing in Asia, and the more authentic stories are the ones that travel a lot better compared to when we’re trying to target the global audience.”

That perspective informs Kim’s entire strategy for the region, including where to deploy resources. “We need to make sure we are able to invest in areas that are going to make the most impact.’ That started with originals out of Korea, Japan, and India, with investment now also being scaled up in Southeast Asia. Local content licensing has been essential to filling gaps in the local content slates across those key territories.

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In this post, excerpted from the ScreenMDM Digital-Shift White Paper, you’ll get expert insights from:

• Aaron Sisto, Co-Founder, Chronicle Studios

• Brian Briskman, Co-Founder, Likewise Media Consultants

• Dominic Smales, Co-Founder, GloMotion Studios/WinnieWood

• James Loveridge, Co-Managing Director, Agency, Little Dot Studios

• Nico Lockhart, Managing Director, TeamFalco

• Scott Greenberg, Co-Founder, Chronicle Studios

• Tobias Schiwek, CEO, We Are Era

(If you’re quoted, DM me if you’d like to see an excerpt of the entire 90-page report.)

There doesn’t need to be a disconnect between the “creator” and “traditional” content worlds.

“Most creators want to expand their ecosystem,” said Brian Briskman of Likewise Media Consultants at StreamTV Europe. “They want to get bigger than what they are, even if they’re huge on YouTube. For expanding audiences, creators are building the brands for Gen Z and beyond.”

Moving beyond a marketing mindset.

Owned by All3Media, Little Dot Studios is among the leading social agencies operating in the international landscape, and one of the most well-established.

“For the last 14 years, we’ve been trying to bring people on the journey to change their perception of YouTube and social and how you can utilize it more than like a marketing platform,” said James Loveridge, who jointly leads a team overseeing social strategy, production, and paid media for a range of big-name clients, managing over 1,000 social channels and generating 11.2 billion monthly organic views.

Not everyone is along for the ride, Loveridge said. “The mindset shift piece is interesting, because there are still pockets in legacy media that see it as a competitor, or it’s a place just to drop trailers.”

Embrace the language of social, not just the platform.

“Lean in” is the key message from many social media optimizers. As in, work with those who have skill sets best suited to this ecosystem.

“Engage with creators and make original content,” Loveridge said. From there, there’s an opportunity to “make original digital formats and repeatable formats.”

You can’t just dump a library on social video and expect it to get discovered.

“The content that you have might be great, but if you don’t put the same amount of focus on the optimization and the packaging and the analysis and the distribution strategy, then it’s just going to get lost,” said Loveridge. “There is an infinite amount of content being uploaded onto these platforms every single second. So you need to make sure that you package it effectively and put as much focus on that strategy as you do the content itself.”

Don’t be Dad at the disco.

That subhead comes from interesting insights from Dominic Smales at GloMotion Studios/WinnieWood at MIP London. The “first wave” of the creator economy, he said, “was done on zero money at all, and they did it really in a very agile way that made a lot of commercial sense. We’re getting to a point where it’s going to be an awkward evolution as the money comes in. There are oceans of cash being spent all over the place [in SVOD], but the audience is getting less and less engaged. The new generations of audience are with [creators] who have done it with zero money. It’s two currents. crashing together in the ocean.”

As such, you can’t win by spending “£50 million on a YouTube video. It’s not about that. It’s about lending the skills and the craft that have made the legacy entertainment industry so successful up to this point to this new generation of talent and distribution platforms that are reaching audiences in a new generation—but trying to do it in a non-dad-at-the-disco way.”

“The idea initially, when creators and television networks were meeting, starting in the earlier days of YouTube, was, this creator has X million followers, we’re going to bring them into our studio system, and they’re going to suddenly become TV stars,” Briskman said. “That, not surprisingly, does not have a huge amount of success.”

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The ScreenMDM Digital-Shift White Paper features a wealth of insights on how execs from across the landscape are making sense of the new normal. For traditional producers and distributors, embracing social and other forms of monetization has been essential—not just to make up for the commissioning squeeze and diminished broadcaster and streamer budgets, but to keep brands front and center in a fragmented viewing environment.

Build communities and fandoms, not marketing channels.

“Five, six years ago, we probably were still seeing [social] as a marketing platform,” said BBC Studios’ Helen O’Donnell at StreamTV Europe. “It was a place that we could put out clips of our brilliant shows, and people would engage with them en masse. If you’ve got a big brand like BBC Earth, for example, we do get really good numbers when we put out a trailer. However, the business model has changed: it’s now creating a front door to some of our shows. Some people like to have a deep interaction with our shows by watching them on TV, while others prefer to engage with them on one of our digital platforms. So that means we have formed a really integrated digital brands proposition, where we have channels that put out not just clips but also original content for audiences, tailored to the platform it’s going out on. So I think we’re less worried about where our audiences sit, as long as it’s a front door and a window to some of our great channel brands.”

Find new ways to resurrect beloved IP.

Baywatch is returning to screens soon with FOX’s reboot, arriving in 2027, and already licensed to Sky in the U.K. But Fremantle has been building on the classic IP for a while, remastering the original several years ago, launching a FAST channel, and deploying clips and compilations across social video platforms. “That helps us because we have an audience we can speak to and carry into the reboot with FOX,” Griffin said.

Your commissioning partner is probably not always on with your brand.

“We can talk about our brands year-round,” Griffin said. “You sell a show to a broadcaster, they talk about it for four months while it’s on air, then they go away. They focus on their other shows. We care about our IP as creators and content owners, and we want to talk about it all year long.”

Jay Bennett, discussing the social machine around the long-running hit Murdoch Mysteries at NATPE Global, said, “It is just the reality that you have to get out there and do it yourself. It is about supporting the fans, and showing the strength of the brand and the love for the brand.”

Social is easier when it’s baked into your production workflow.

Christine Waage, who leads sales for The Bold and the Beautiful, spoke at NATPE about how Bell-Phillip Television Productions meets fans’ demand for constant updates on the series.

“We’re always on set; we film 40 weeks a year, 252 episodes,” she said on the discoverability panel I moderated. “We film with iPhones and feed it to CBS. And internationally, I have a Tom Sawyer approach. I find a super fan in any country that we need, and then we feed them content, and they run our local language, because we would not be capable of running all of our languages.”

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We are not here to give you audience n…

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ScreenMDM Español, the Spanish-language arm of ScreenMDM, led by Elizabeth Bowen-Tombari, caught up with senior executives from TelevisaUnivision, TV Azteca, América Multimedia in Peru, WBD LatAm, and Canal 13 in Chile to explore what’s working with audiences across the region. The answer: it’s vertical, it has an IP angle (based on one or can become one), and collaboration is crucial for creating content that can travel.

You can access all of these interviews in Spanish here.

This post for ScreenMDM Extra subscribers includes:

· Macro to Micro: Damián Villar Talks TelevisaUnivision’s Big Short-Form Bet

· TV Azteca’s Evolution: Content Chief Adrián Ortega on Finding New Audiences

· Global & Local: The View from Warner Bros. Discovery’s Mariano Cesar

· Embracing Multiplatform & Collaboration: América Multimedia’s Fernando Muñiz

· Canal 13 in Chile’s Vertical Lead: Pioneering the Mininovela

Macro to Micro: Damián Villar Talks TelevisaUnivision’s Big Short-Form Bet

A leader in Spanish-language production, with market-leading outlets in the U.S. Hispanic market and Mexico, TelevisaUnivision has taken a decisive approach to the vertical content market, launching the mobile-first platform ViX MicrO.

“We saw the opportunity and decided we had to get into this,” Damián Villar, general director of content and production, told ScreenMDM Español. “We did a very thorough analysis of all the data and mobile consumption, and we thought it would be a business that could serve as a very interesting complement for our audience, especially for those between 19 and 35 years old.”

The move required a major shift in the Spanish-language content giant’s storytelling and production processes. “If you don’t have a cliffhanger in the first three or four seconds of the episode, you won’t manage to hook them anymore,” Villar explained. “Today, we don’t just have one per episode; we have two or three within a minute or a minute and a half. That is necessary to try to capture the audience.”

It’s taken months of trial and error to get here, Villar concedes, as the team has experimented with storytelling styles and genres and mulled how to address the volume issue when a user can blaze through an entire show in less than a day. TelevisaUnivision has launched some 70 micro-titles, making two to three a week. The aim is to top 100 by year-end, scaling to 300 annually. Each show takes five days to film.

As has largely been the scale with its long-form output, TelevisaUnivision is ensuring it owns all of its IP in the vertical space. Adapting titles from its significant back catalog could be on the horizon, Villar said. “That heritage is gold; it’s a jewel. So, if what we’re going to do isn’t going to be worth it, we won’t touch it.”

The vertical slate is heavily skewed to melodrama, at 80%, but diversification is on the planner for this year and next, including true crime and horror.

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The message from that session—which also featured CBO Frédéric Balmary, Iberia CEO Pilar Blasco, and Workerbee CEO Rick Murray—and the wealth of headlines from the company over the last few months is clear: adjusting to a more B2C future is critical.

“We keep adapting ourselves, innovating, and changing,” said Balmary, who, as chief business officer, works directly with CEO Marco Bassetti on the company’s overall strategic direction. “As a producer, distributor, and content powerhouse, we have to adapt our B2B model to a more D2C one.”

That is happening across three strategic (and cross-pollinated) pillars, Balmary said: live, digital (aka, the “affinity economy,” as Shapiro has dubbed it), and sports. And the company made a lot of news in all of those spaces over the last few months.

Its German division has launched a streaming service for live shows and entertainment called ShowdownTV, landing with a martial arts event series, and partnered with football influencer Diyar Acar via its branded-entertainment unit. Banijay Entertainment shored up the global format rights to the YouTube-first adventure game Stop The Train. Banijay Productions is developing a slate of microdrama formats. Banijay Iberia has announced a trio of vertical short-form series. Banijay Finland is producing a video mockumentary for Yle in both 9:16 and 16:9 formats. Married at First Sight, a popular microdrama on the ReelShort platform, is getting a Brazilian remake courtesy of Endemol Shine Brasil, which is also working with A Fábrica on a slate of vertical titles. Banijay Rights, meanwhile, has partnered with Merzigo to help optimize and monetize select titles, covering YouTube channels such as MasterChef Universe, Mr Bean TV and Survivor Official TV, and will manage the social media presence for British chef, author, and television personality Jeremy Pang. Banijay Live Studio unveiled an immersive experience for Black Mirror in association with VR studio Univrse, and has been building out the footprint of the live experience LUMINISCENCE with LOTCHI, a Banijay Live company in France.

“We are facing strong headwinds and key structural change in our industry,” Balmary said of the state of the media economy today. “We will continue our ambition to become the largest European studio with a strong focus on English-language content and streaming services, which now represent more than 20% of our revenue. We want to continue to attract and retain the best creative talents and be the best home for them, and also expand our catalog, which is huge now, with more than 250,000 hours.”

Indeed, the “traditional” business remains at the heart of the Banijay portfolio, one that is getting a lot bigger with the acquisition of All3Media. “Scale has never been so important,” Balmary added.

Keep reading for insights from the four executives about what’s working in live events, the approach to sports content, and aligning with creators to drive engagement and monetization opportunities.

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An Ampere Analysis study earlier this year found that more than half of Netflix’s overall original series slate was non-English-language last year, up from 49% in 2024. Spain was out front on the platform with a 21% share of the foreign-language lineup. Across the global SVODs, Spanish content had a 23% share.

Per Rahul Patel, principal analyst at Ampere Analysis, these shifting dynamics reveal “how local content strategies are no longer peripheral, but central to the platforms’ growth. And when non-English-language titles travel beyond their local market and perform well internationally, they provide stronger returns on content investment for the global streamer.”

Having a Squid Game or a Culpables isn’t the primary commissioning lens, though, at least according to insights shared by senior programmers from HBO Max, Prime Video, and Disney+ at Series Mania Forum in Lille. While largely promotional keynotes, intended to highlight upcoming originals, the sessions with HBO Max’s Sarah Aubrey, Disney+’s Angela Jain, and Prime Video’s Nicole Morganti and Thomas Dubois pointed to a few key themes, namely, to win globally, you must first win locally; IP matters; niche and broad audiences are on their watch lists; and while making the cut is no easy feat, the door does appear to be open to the best ideas from Europe’s biggest creative hubs.

While none shared specific wish lists, their input on upcoming slates, talent development, and top-level strategies does provide some nuggets for those seeking to understand what these global commissioners are looking for from the region.

What’s inside:

• Local First: Developments from key local markets, including France, Italy, Spain, and Turkey.

• IP Matters: Having a built-in fanbase certainly helps in landing a commission.

• Niche & Mainstream: YA is in demand, as is comedy and other genres that will drive fandoms. Broad, commercial reach is on the wish list, too.

• Strategic Priorities: Discerning wish lists from the programmers’ commentary about recent commissions and market gaps.

Local First

“Local stories commissioned by local teams for the local audience” are central to Angela Jain’s strategy as head of content for EMEA at Disney+. “We are definitely ramping up local production. We know there’s a huge amount of creative talent that we can tap into, and there’s the opportunity to grow.”

Jain continued, “It is about local shows working in their local market, in the country in which they were commissioned. You do want as many people as possible to watch your show. Of course you do. It would be nice if these shows began traveling when they return. It is not the expectation for the first series at all. It has to work in its local market. The travelability thing is not the reason why we’re here,” she stressed.

Sarah Aubrey, head of original programming at HBO Max, overseeing a global remit, took to the stage in Lille just a few days before the platform’s much-awaited U.K. launch. The platform is projected to have a global reach of about 150 million subs by year-end, Aubrey noted. Having a mix of U.S. shows that can resonate with global audiences and local hits that meet audiences where they are is paramount, she explained.

“Since we have these other shows that travel around the world, there’s not the same pressure on a local show to retrofit itself into being a global hit, which I think is, frankly, a recipe for disaster. I believe strongly in making a show for its audience and making it specific, and if it is, then it will resonate in success no matter where you watch it.”

IP Matters

Acknowledging that cutting through a saturated content landscape is a never-ending challenge, all the programmers referenced the crucial role of IP, from docs about well-known scandals and celebrities to book-based IP.

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If the last few weeks are any indication, this revamped global outlook is clearly beginning to bear fruit for companies across the Japanese content ecosystem, from anime producers finding growing fandoms internationally and manga publishers licensing hit comics for live-action or webcomic adaptation to a wealth of opportunities for scripted formats, a growing tape-sales business, and an always busy entertainment remakes space.

That’s Entertainment

In the last few months alone, Banijay Entertainment, which makes Yoshimoto Kogyo’s Prime Video hit LOL in 11 markets, has secured the rights to remake the comedy powerhouse’s The Laughing Throne and You Laugh You Lose across its 23-market footprint, and Fremantle landed production, development, and distribution rights to Special Delivery, co-developed by Blue Circle and TBS, outside Japan. Nippon TV is doubling down on its international unscripted format business, hiring ITV America alum Nick Ower to position the Nippon TV and Gyokuro Studio unscripted format slates with broadcasters, streamers, and producers across the Americas.

“Nippon TV has a proven track record of creating global hit formats, including Dragons’ Den/Shark Tank, Silent Library, Old Enough!, and Red Carpet Survival,” Kenichiro Akiyama, who leads Gyokuro Studio, told me at the end of last year for my Asia TV Forum edition. “This success led to a strategic decision to significantly expand the business globally, with a long-term goal of ¥100 billion in international sales by FY2033. Positioning the unscripted format business as the core of this expansion, Gyokuro Studio was launched in June 2025. Our core advantage is that we can maximize the strengths unique to a broadcaster, not just as a production company. This backing allows us to utilize broadcast slots as a strategic sandbox; we air innovative unscripted shows within our timetable, collect audience feedback, and then polish ideas again. This enables rapid, self-contained development before the global launch of the format.”

In this post for paid Substack subscribers, we examine Japan’s growing soft power. This deep dive includes:

· Drawn in Japan: Recent Nielsen stats on anime viewership in the U.S., insights from Crunchyroll’s David Ball at StreamTV Europe, and significant globalization moves from leading anime producers.

· The IP Pipeline: From One Piece to hit manga comics, platforms and producers are building global franchises and hit live-action series from well-known domestic animated properties. ScreenMDM Extra hears from Koji Sakabe, a producer at NHK Enterprises, about how Hirayasumi became a hit across demos at NHK.

· Scroll Savvy: The emerging microdrama and webcomics opportunity.

· By the Script: Charting recent activity around Japanese scripted formats from Nippon TV and Fuji TV.

· The Acquisitions Opportunity: As the Western scripted market cools in the post-peak TV era and the romance genre booms, Asian producers have a tremendous opportunity to fill gaps on international SVOD platforms, Ampere Analysis’s Olivia Deane told delegates at Series Mania Forum.

· Collaborative Spirit: From regional joint ventures in Asia to genuine collaborations with key partners in Europe, scripted co-pros are picking up traction. We feature insights from the producers and commissioners of four projects featured in the BEAJ and Empire of Arkadia-backed Coming Next from Japan session at the Series Mania Forum, plus recap of a range of deals that reflect Japanese media companies’ increasingly global perspectives.

Drawn in Japan

More than 45 billion minutes of anime content were streamed in the U.S. last year, according to Nielsen. That stat was released by the research giant in an analysis on World Anime Day titled “Why anime fans should be on everyone’s radar.”

“Anime fans are much more than passive viewers,” Nielsen said. “They are multifaceted enthusiasts who are hyper-engaged across the digital ecosystem. Their interests also span multiple consumer categories with the spending power to engage these passions.”

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