Banijay Entertainment‘s co-head of scripted has given his assessment of the current scripted market, suggesting that the budgeting challenges of the post-peak TV could give rise to better television.
In an on-stage interview with Deadline at Seriencamp, he added that the upside to streamers lowering their spend is that their budgets are now more “stable” and simpler to plan around.
“You can talk about the streamers decreasing investment, but there is now a plateau, and it is a little more stable way for them to work, which is great as we then know how they work and what their budget limits are,” he added. “As long as we know the rules, it’s easier to work in this environment.
“It wasn’t purely a great time during peak TV, because everything could be done, and one or two things weren’t that great. In the long-term we need to produce great things, because that’s the only way audiences will come back to us. We’re not just competing against each others, we’re competing against games and social media, so we have to be on the top of our game.”
Tax breaks versus levies
Banijay claims it is now the largest independent producer of scripted in Europe, giving Jensen and Matthews a birds-eye view on dozens of production companies working in multiple territories. It is a market wrestling with how to finance programs and ensure the streamers who pushed prices up dramatically during the peak TV era continue to invest.
Jensen said while tax breaks are vital to the new European TV world, he wasn’t completely supportive of streaming levies. He noted that while France had landed “a lot of productions” from its system, Denmark had seen streamers cut back on spend after introduction a mandatory spend system.
“It can go both ways,” he said. “I’m not that much for putting a tariff on things, but I believe people locally want to watch local things, so if you enter a market, you probably want to do local shows. The streamers pulling out and not spending will probably see they lose some subscribers locally.”
Tax incentives on the other hand, can change the shape of a market, but need to be introduced in a methodical way. “Locally, we’ll probably need to have rules between broadcasters and streamers,” said Jensen. “Tax breaks need to be reliable and understandable. It’s benefitting the local territory when you do that, and there are numerous examples of it.”
Jensen also used his appearance in Cologne to spell out how Banijay treated investments in scripted, playing down the idea that super-indies push their subsidiaries in certain directions.
“Creativity is the most important part,” he said. “Banijay is a group that has been acquiring companies and making a lot of talent deals over the years, but what we don’t do is go in and put producers in a box. We want the entrepreneurial person running that scripted company to do their thing. We wouldn’t go for the talent if we didn’t want what they do.”
Jensen took on his new role in January, when he and Steve Matthews – who is Head of Scripted, Creative – were upped from their roles as CEO of Banijay Nordics and Content Partnerships Executive, respectively. He described their roles as like a “door opener to the international market to local producers.”
Jensen and Matthews can work with indies to access Banijay’s scripted fund to help finesse scripts, strike talent deals or land IP, while they try to add more formalized systems into place. Jensen paid tribute to former HBO Europe exec Matthews for his “reputation as a great, great creative” who could provide an outsider’s view on local productions.
Jensen was talking a day after Banijay Entertainment CEO Marco Bassetti sowed some market confusion around Banijay’s interest in ITV Studios. While it’s been reported several times that Banijay – one of the most active consolidators in the market – has spoken with ITV, Bassetti told a SXSW London audience, “We’re not buying ITV Studios” before going on to talk about the need for scale in the globalized entertainment market.
Jensen didn’t address the M&A situation, but talked about how scale had been important for Banijay, which claims to be the largest independent scripted producer in Europe through companies such as Kudos, Banijay Studios in several territories, Grøenlandia, Jarowskij/Yellow Bird, Rabbit Track Pictures and The Forge.
“I hope that people think we are a place where they can collaborate,” he said. “When you look at the current market situation, my feeling for some time now has been you have to be big, like us and some of our competitors, or small, where you’re not dependent on constantly selling shows and you control everything yourself. They’re two different paths to the same thing.”
Jensen also addressed how producers can work with Banijay companies on co-productions – with the current state of the market, strategic partnerships and clever financing models have been the talk of the week here in Germany.
He admitted Banijay would prefer to keep co-productions within its ranks if possible, but pointed to cop drama Weiss & Morales – which is made by Banijay Espana’s Portocabo, Nadcon and ZDF Studios for RTVE in Spain and ZDF in Germany – as an example of a production with third parties.
“We are really open to it,” he said. “We want to have the best IP and be a great place to go to. If your idea resonates in the Nordics or Spain, we can facilitate that and we’d love to have more collaborations.”
Jensen noted Banijay has seen “much less money” coming from the States into European productions in recent years and said this is playing into the way shows are being built.
“We don’t known about the Trump tariffs – we will keep an eye on them – but we do know there was less money from the U.S. even before those talks, and that there is momentum for us here. We need to build Europe stronger in general, and in the media industry as well. That is about collaborating between borders, but also internally. You don’t need to own everything forever, so you can find ways of financing and working together.”
Further back in his career, Jensen was among the original producers of unscripted format Survivor in Sweden. Asked what scripted producers could take from unscripted, he said: “When you are pitching a show, you person you’re pitching to is not the one who makes the decisions. That is knowledge the unscripted guys have known for a long time. There is a business knowledge in unscripted that we could learn in scripted.
He also suggested there could be more IP developed in “parallel” with the unscripted world, pointing to how unscripted shows such as The Traitors had been influenced by murder mystery dramas and suggesting this could work in reverse.
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