At the end of July, Vision+Media, in association with PACT, hosted a round-table session for content producers looking to discuss international markets, rights and contracts in the digital era. PACT is the UK trade association that represents and promotes the commercial interests of independent feature film, television, digital, children’s and animation media companies. Joining Dawn McCarthy-Simpson from PACT were Andrew Baker from Rights.TV and Karen Holden from UK Trade & Investment, who together shared advice on co-production best practice and exploiting IP across the international market.
Forming the remainder of the group were content producers from a number of sectors with the areas of drama, factual, animation, documentary, children’s and IPTV all represented.
Dawn began the session by explaining the role of PACT, citing examples of their lobbying work as success stories. For instance, the negotiation of the terms of trade between UK public service broadcasters and independent producers as part of the Communications Act 2003, which helps independent producers to protect and retain their intellectual property. Dawn explained that there is currently a huge threat of the deregulation of the Communications Act 2003, and so PACT is fighting hard against this. Other lobbying activity includes negotiating with the BBC to raise their out-of-London production quota and pushing for the indie production quota in the UK to reach 25%, well beyond the European standard of 10%.
From an international perspective, Dawn explained there they have seen growth in the Canadian and Australian markets in particular due to tax credits being available in these countries, so independent producers should be looking for co-production opportunities in these countries, in addition to the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) territories that the UK government is continuing to push. Documentary continues to lead the genres in terms of international sales, but children’s animation is expected to grow further and further because of how quickly and easily content can be converted into other languages.
MIPTV and in particular the UK indies stand at the international content market’s exhibition in Cannes were discussed as being critical to the success of forming international partnerships and selling your content to the international market. Dawn quite calmly explained that this is because “everyone goes to MIP”. All the buyers of content (and not just of television content) are at MIP so this is *the* place to be, however you need to be clear about what you are wanting to achieve before going out. Depending upon your sales skills the option of using a sales agent/distributor was discussed with the advice being that if you do decide to go down this route, to make sure that you meet with them prior to the event in order to place your content higher up in their agenda. Furthermore, even if you use an agent, go along and represent yourself as well. It was estimated that around 60% of companies on the UK indies stand also have a distributor representing them at MIP.
Andrew Baker of Rights.TV then opened up a discussion around contracts and legal advice with tips such as capturing the rights of every aspect of a production (animation, music, code, etc.) throughout the project, defining responsibilities in co-production relationships beforehand, and of course to reach an agreement about revenue share as early as possible. Template contracts/agreements are available through trade organisations such as PACT, however seeking specialist advice from lawyers with an understanding of the industry was generally accepted to be the most sensible thing to do.
Before breaking into one-to-one sessions with Dawn, Karen and Andrew, Andrew shared some examples of successful multiplatform commissions which demonstrated that even projects that begin as television-based initially often expand across platforms as interaction with audiences becomes more and more important.
