Buyer’s Profile: Chris Oliver-Taylor, ABC (Australia), chief content officer

Chris Oliver-Taylor (Source: Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

In this ongoing series, TBI speaks to key buyers about the shows they want and the models being used to pay for them.

Here, Chris Oliver-Taylor, chief content officer at Australian public broadcaster ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), discusses the subscription-driving power of scripted drama, the popularity of British content on the service and his hopes to raise producer’s programming ambitions.

Bay Of Fires (Source: ABC)

What kind of titles are you currently looking to commission?

We make about 10 scripted shows a year in Australia, we make a lot more entertainment and factual, but I’m focusing really on quite broad plays that will drive audiences to our streamer, ABC iView.

From my experience at Netflix, what we knew then that we know now is that scripted content for the most part drives subscription viewers and drives streaming viewers, and so I want to make sure we’re looking at content that is going to do that.

Separately, I think those very big, very expensive bets of comedy and drama, broad plays that also have a home internationally. So for us, that’s going to be probably crime dramas.

We’re going to look at working with our friends over in the UK in particular, trying to find things that might work in both territories. But we’re not trying to revolutionise in drama and comedy, we’re trying to find broad plays that appeal to millions of Australians in the first place.

Are you open to pitches & at what stage would you want to join a project?

Really early if we can. I say it a little bit facetiously, but even a one-line pitch will allow us to make a decision. It often will at least allow us to say we’re not looking for that at all, it’s not for us. But if there’s something in that early pitch that’s interesting, then we can get more information and start talking it through. So early as we possibly can.

It must have a sustainable production model, so we can go to multiple seasons. There’s no point creating a show, which is just so ambitious, that we can only did one run, and even if it’s a success we can’t do it again.

What financing models can you offer & how much can you contribute towards productions?

There are minimum licence fees in Australia. That’s just been changed to just over 500,000 Australian dollars (AUD) per hour for drama and per half hour for comedy.

We’ll go above that quite considerably, up towards a million AUD for drama – not with a smile on our face, necessarily, but we recognise that it’s about us trying to do less content, but bigger and bolder, and therefore that means we need to put in more money.

By us putting in somewhere between 500,000 and a million AUD per hour, it then triggers significant soft funding in Australia, so you can probably double that money with an offset and direct funding from Screen Australia and others, and then still go to international market.

What I’m trying to get our production sector to think about is how do we raise our ambition for our shows? How do we make dramas that cost 3 million AUD an hour, and we’re putting up, you know, 750,000 AUD an hour say, to generate that additional value that will then attract our distributors. So rather than going lower and cheaper, how do we go bigger and more ambitious?

Bluey

Which recent titles have performed well for you? What is it about those projects that makes them a good fit for your channel/platform?

Bay Of Fires, which is created and produced by a great actor called Marta Dusseldorp, and written by Andrew Knight. Set in Tasmania, it’s a crime drama with a bit of a comedy bent to it. It’s our number one drama on ABC and our number one iView title of all time – apart from Bluey! – doing significant numbers there.

I think it’s a combination of two or three things: a really known actor that most of our audience loves; significant scale and the ambition of the piece – it’s not a huge budget, but not a small budget either, sitting in that kind of 2 million plus range.

And it’s crime with a bit of a comedic bent, the tone of that show also has appealed to quite a broad audience, that has worked tremendously well. It’s with Fremantle, our distributor partner, and we are going to a second season of that.

What is on your acquisitions wishlist at the moment?

We’ve historically not really looked too broad in our acquisitive titles, buying mainly So British content; BBC drama, ITV drama, BBC quiz, BBC chat, those kind of things, and they do great, so we’ll continue to do that. But I also think we can look at some of the more distinctive and different foreign language shows; some growth is coming out of, say, Portugal, coming out of Spain. I think that’s interesting. How would that play for our audience? I’m not sure yet. But I want to find that out.

I think that one of the big changes in the last five years has been, certainly in Australia, there has been much less of a barrier of having subtitles or being in a foreign language. People, I think, are getting more attuned to watching great content in its native language.

Which rights would you be looking to acquire? How flexible can you be?

For commissions, we will take exclusive rights for Australia now, we are moving a bit more aggressively in that space. Whilst we are commissioning that shows through multiple seasons, I only want our audience to get that on ABC iView, I think is really important.

Once we stop commissioning, I think then it can be sold second window in Australia. But whilst we’re working on that show, it should stay with us. And that’s an unashamed push to ensure that audiences do recognise the ABCs importance and come into the ABC, as opposed to finding it on somebody else’s platform.

I think globally, though, it’s always open, we only take Australia. I don’t mind if other broadcasters take day-and-date ahead of us in a world premiere or have a different launch strategy, I’m happy with that. We can work those deals out.

I want to look after the ABC’s audience though and make sure that the ABC that they’re paying for, they can get that content for free.

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