Sales round-up: China goes Beyond for kids & factual; BBC takes ABC’s ‘Born To Spy’; ‘The Water Guardians’ land in Canada & Europe

MythBusters

China goes Beyond for kids & factual

Chinese broadcasters and platforms have acquired a range of children’s and factual titles, following deals with distributor Beyond Rights.

Youku, the streaming platform of Alibaba Digital Media and Entertainment Group, has now picked up both series of pre-school animation title Hushabye Lullabye (30 x 3-minutes), a MaraKids production originally for CBeebies in the UK.

Discovery Networks Asia-Pacific has acquired a package comprising 70 hours of MythBusters content, featuring episodes from series four, five and eight, in addition to a selection of specials, including one dedicated to James Bond. The series is originally produced by Beyond Productions for Discovery US.

The Red Apollo Group has meanwhile acquired a selection of history titles: ITN Productions’ Elizabeth (9 x 60-minutes), both series of Phoenix TV’s Undergound Worlds (20 x 60-minutes), Curse of Akakor (6 x 60-minutes ) from Beyond Productions, and Shipwreck Secrets (6 x 60-minutes ) and Medieval Dead series three (7 x 60-minutes), both produced by Like A Shot Entertainment. Meanwhile, No Country TV has picked up two history series produced by Woodcut Media: Combat Ships (9 x 60-minutes) and Wings of War (8 x 60-minutes).

Finally, Yuxiu International Media Co has acquired Pernel Media’s natural history hour, Who’s Afraid of the European Hamster.

Born To Spy

BBC takes ABC’s ‘Born To Spy’

UK streaming service BBC iPlayer has acquired action-comedy kids series Born To Spy, from Australia’s ABC Commercial.

The 10 x 30-minute series is created by Justine Flynn and produced Aquarius Films and follows siblings Yu Na Park and her brother Min whose lives could be described as textbook dull. But everything changes when they uncover the truth: their unremarkable parents are in fact international spies, their family business is a sham and their house hides a state-of-the-art spy headquarters.

Born To Spy will launch on BBC iPlayer on 29 June 2022.

The Water Guardians

‘The Water Guardians’ land in Canada & Europe

Radio Canada and Planète+ in French-speaking Canada have acquired docuseries The Water Guardians, along with RTP2 in Portugal, EITB and TV3 in Spain and RTBF in Belgium.

Produced by j2f Production and LSD Films for Canal+, the four-part series is directed by Cedric Leprettre, Basile Roze, Cyril Denvers and Emmanuel Corre and written by Cyril Denvers and Candice Souillac. About Premium Content holds worldwide distribution rights.

The nature and ecology documentary series addressing the global issue of water scarcity through stories of people who have been working to preserve or discover sources of water.

From French Polynesia to the Rift Valley, via the Himalayas, the Maghreb, India and Latin America, The Water Guardians takes the audience through a highly optimistic journey to meet an engineer, a farmer, an agronomist, a mayor, entrepreneurs and members of NGOs.

All are ordinary people invested in protecting our oceans, our natural freshwater ecosystems and our agriculture, or in discovering new sources of water. They are all committed to ensuring our water needs around the globe, with individual actions drawing the paths of hope that we should all follow.