Storyville’s Nevine Mabro, SVT’s Mikael Österby, and Al Jazeera Documentary’s Muhammad Refaat shared their perspectives on commissioning and acquiring docs in a YouTube-first world at MIA in Rome.
Nevine Mabro, head of BBC’s Storyville strand; Mikael Österby, head of factual acquisition at SVT in Sweden; and Muhammad Refaat, film commissioner at Qatar-based Al Jazeera Documentary, took part in a session moderated by Rudy Buttignol, president of NXT, which focused less on constricted budgets and more on the quest for breakthrough ideas and evolving viewing habits, as these programmers look for ways to manage YouTube engagement while sharing detailed briefs on what’s working and what’s not.
Buttignol kicked off the session, titled International Broadcasters: Beyond the Co-Production Deal, by asking how each is responding to the massive shift to social video across all population segments.
“BBC is responding in that they’re beginning to try and find audiences in different places,” said Mabro, who joined the BBC at the start of this year from Channel 4. “Previously, with documentaries, you would make a film; then you would cut it down and put it out on social, hoping to bring that audience to linear TV or streaming platforms. That never really works because you wouldn’t get that audience coming to watch the film, but you would get an audience on YouTube or Instagram or TikTok or whatever to see a form of the film. Once people understood that, they’re now using social platforms to take PSB documentaries to that audience, and they might not watch an hour-and-a-half film; they might just watch 30 seconds or four minutes. But they’re still getting high-quality films, high-impact films, political films.”
The Storyville strand “offers something very different to TV documentaries on the BBC,” she continued. “We do high-quality cinema films that work on television. We think a lot about the beginning of a film, so we can’t take the audience for granted anymore. BBC especially used to have huge ratings. People would just go to the BBC to watch, and so you didn’t have to fight for that audience. You have to fight a bit harder to bring the audience in and retain the audience. So, how a film opens is really important because you want to retain the viewers. With the smaller PSBs, that was ingrained in us because we didn’t have that audience. We didn’t have it guaranteed, so had to hustle and think about how to promote things, and so it’s quite good to have that background, knowing now that every broadcast is in the same position.”
Österby said SVT, too, is spending a lot of time digesting this audience shift. “One of the first things I check when someone pitches me something is, does this person understand what’s going on? So many are still in the broadcasting world and think it’s the same, and it’s a different ball game.”
SVT understood this early, he said, embracing a digital-first perspective in 2019. “We spend so much time trying to understand online, but we don’t.” Calling it the “best public-service broadcaster in Europe” when it comes to digital reach, Österby said, “but we’re failing big because the competition is so fierce. So what do we do then? We’ve changed the commissioning model. We work with needs, not with target groups. Do we cover all the needs people have, and what kind of needs do they have? My work isn’t the same as it was five years ago. We tell stories differently. We work with marketing differently, and it’s just different. But it’s fun! Public-service broadcasters tend to work towards how one wants to understand the world. It’s a need, but it’s the smallest need. The biggest one is that I just want to flee the world. I want escapism, and I want to be inspired.”
Refaat said that Al Jazeera Documentary has embraced YouTube distribution. “We have been putting all our films on YouTube for the past 20 years from the beginning and for free. So we have been digital and broadcast since 2006. So we broadcast the film, and five minutes later we put it on YouTube. We thought that we were ahead. But we think this model is failing for us because now we are totally confused about what we should do with YouTube, what the strategy should be, and what kind of film we should select for YouTube. Before that, we just put everything because we considered it a library for films, a legacy for everything we produce. Now we put an amazing film, or what we thought was an amazing film, and it did nothing. It doesn’t reach people. So we have to select and think about how to make it differently to fit into YouTube, not just as another platform, but a completely different environment.”
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