Among the U.K.’s most successful and well-regarded indies, Woodcut Media is building out a full IP management ecosystem across production, distribution, and D2C via YouTube, Kate Beal, founder and CEO, tells ScreenMDM in the latest edition of our Real Talk strand.
Beal is an accomplished producer and the founder of the Association of True Crime Producers, an organization committed to raising standards in the genre, which remains one of the company’s key verticals, Beal tells ScreenMDM Talks.
The genre remains at the forefront of a fast-changing factual television ecosystem. Beal doesn’t view the landscape through the lens of declining commissions, but rather as the business undergoing a reset.
Embracing New Directions
“I think we’re in an exciting and also scary period of change,” she says in the wide-ranging conversation with ScreenMDM Talks, which you can watch on YouTube or Spotify or continue reading below.
“The structure of content has changed—the way we watch, the way we consume, and how much we need to make. We’ve reached a level that it is down, but I think that’s just where we are now. That’s just what we consume and how much we need to make. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing. We’re not trying to reclaim or remake the past. We’re just looking to try and find out what the content of the future is. It’s an exciting time of change, but it’s also, in some ways, terrifying because none of us really knows what five years’ time looks like. I can tell you probably what the next six months look like. None of us knows the true impact of AI and world events that are out of our control. You need to be open to change, open to learning, and excited about what’s ahead. And with that mindset, it doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily be doing what you did ten years ago, but you’ll be doing something that you’re interested in.”
True Crime’s Next Wave
True crime, a genre that Woodcut is well-versed in, has “come of age,” Beal says. “It is now here to stay,” but the space isn’t quite as congested as it was. “There’s still a lot of it being commissioned, but it’s not quite the peak it was a couple of years ago, which isn’t a bad thing. We all know that fashions come in and out with genres. History is very much back in at the moment. Broader factual programming is also very popular. So we at Woodcut have as much factual history happening as we have true crime, which is a really nice place to be. Three years ago, we had probably twice as much true crime as everything else. But it ebbs and flows. In a couple of years’ time, something else will be fashionable.”
Elevating the standards and ethics in true crime is part of the mandate at the Association of True Crime Producers. The key, Beal says, “is making sure that all the stories we tell are victim-centered, whether that’s working with the victim’s family or just making sure we honor the victim in some ways. That removes the salacious or gawping element to the story because you are making the victim the central character.”
Elevating a female perspective is also paramount, Beal says. “We made a documentary a couple of years ago, The Murder of Sandra Rivett. When I ask people in the U.K., ‘Who is Sandra Rivett?’ They don’t know. When I say, ‘Who’s Lord Lucan?’ who allegedly murdered her, everybody knows his name. So it’s reclaiming the story and centering the victim. If you have that in your mind as your North Star and you are respectful in your storytelling, the viewer is then respectful in watching.”
The Art of IP Management
Woodcut has spent the last 12 to 18 months building out its content monetization infrastructure as it continues to grow its catalog. “We very much think of ourselves as an IP management company now. We’re not just a production company. You have the production arm, the distribution arm, and the direct-to-consumer arm. The production is crucial because it makes and creates the IP, but then we still need to distribute it through Woodcut International or other distributors, and we also do direct to consumer ourselves now.”
That has included working with Keshet International and Seven Network on the FAST channel Crime Files and building out three YouTube channels: True Crime Uncut, Underworld Uncut, and History Uncut.
“It isn’t simply putting our programs on YouTube. That would have been the easy option. We don’t want the easy option at Woodcut, it seems! So we now produce three original films a week, one for each channel. There’s no easy plug-and-play way to do YouTube. You have to get there at the beginning, build an audience, a community, trust, and authenticity. Our subscribers are going up every day, our views are going up every day, and what we make changes depending on how the subscribers react. So it’s been such an amazing experience as a program maker to have such a close conversation with the viewer. It’s another way of exploiting our content.”
The company’s 360 efforts also include vodcasts and, naturally, its continued relationships with linear broadcasters. “It’s finding that one piece of content and then making it work in as many ways as we can.”
Adapt to Thrive
Ultimately, Beal explains, “You can’t replicate the business model of a production company that existed ten years ago. It’s not possible, because the financing isn’t there. The easy one-stop solution of let’s go to a channel and get all the money you can doesn’t work anymore; you have to think more practically.”
Leading a company during such transformative change, constant learning is paramount, Beal says. “The way to run and sustain a business is to be humble, inasmuch as I don’t actually know what’s coming, but what I can do is learn and prepare ourselves. We are going to have to be nimble and react using all the knowledge that we have acquired over the last few years. We’re very lucky that Woodcut is full of geeks! In the way that we geek out about a program subject here, I’m also geeking out about how you run a production entity in 2026.”
