Report Predicts Slow-Down In Reality And Game Show Formats

A new report predicts that long-running dramas, magazine and factual programmes will become more popular on television than the current crop of reality and game show franchises.

However, TV brands such as Wife Swap and the Idol franchise are set to become more popular over the next five years, according to the report by Oliver & Ohlbaum Associates, on the European TV content creation sector.

Overall, the report highlights a general slowing of revenue growth to around 3% a year in the European TV content creation market over the five years up to 2012.

However, against this backdrop, leading European producers of global formats are set to continue to grow by 15% a year, the report adds.

This growth will be fuelled by a continued switch by broadcasters across Europe to cost-effective formatted programmes in more genres.

Currently less than 15% of European commercial network’s peak time schedules are filled with formatted shows.

This growth of global formats will be European broadcasting’s answer to revenue and financial pressures and will also be boosted by the once-closed US market opening up to foreign programming ideas, according to the report.

“The appetite for global formats is unlikely to slow over the next five years, given that it still only accounts for a small proportion of peak time schedules – especially on publicly funded broadcasters – and that its attractiveness in terms of audience appeal, development cost and risk is unlikely to diminish,” the report said.

O&O also predicted that financial pressures and the “globalisation of the external content creation market” would force publicly funded broadcasters to rationalise their large in-house production divisions.

The research said that this rationalisation will be driven by high fixed costs and added that because many European public broadcasters fail to make programmes that connect with young people they would become less reliant on in-house production.

The independent TV production sector will become “economically more powerful” and will be able to secure more rights and greater control of the “full life value” of content, the report said.

However, in return, the independent sector will have to “shoulder more of the financial and creative risk” of developing new shows.

The independent production sector will grow by an average of 5% a year, although the sector will become more consolidated and potentially “less independent”, the report concluded.

O&O: www.oando.co.uk