Life After Peak TV: “It’s A New World Order… There’s A Rethink Required” – Berlin
Berlin tuned into TV, Monday, and the drama crowd in Germany were told that after scaling the peaks, it’s time to survey the “open plain.”
Ampere’s influential analyst Guy Bisson broke out key data in a presentation titled: ‘The Open Plains After Peak TV’. “What do you land on after a peak? Either a valley or possibly an open plain. We are on the open plain of post peak TV. We are flat, and we’ve been flat since the end of 2022,” he said.
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“It’s a new world order,” he continued. “The industry was scaled for 100% peak TV, and it now has to navigate 75%. There’s a rethink required about how companies interact and operate with and against one another.”
The Ampere founder detailed what he termed the “broadcastification” of streaming services. With market saturation, subscriber acquisition is no longer the SVoD’s priority and as streamers look for paths to profitability there is a desire to drive ad revenues. Bisson said the upshot is they are increasingly behaving like traditional commercial broadcasters.
One consequence is, and will continue to be, more unscripted on SVoD, he said. “Streamers moved heavily into unscripted around 2019-2020 and they have not looked back,” Bisson said. “We have moved from one in three series orders being unscripted to half of streamer series orders being unscripted.”
Nicole Morganti, Head of Originals for Amazon MGM Studios in Southern Europe, acknowledged the wider shift to unscripted and said other streamers have in fact mirrored Prime Video’s strategy. “We started in unscripted,” she said, adding that Prime’s current unscripted priorities are more focused on “women and young adults” after its earlier work and sports output skewed older and/or male.
It cuts the other way too, Hauke Bartel, EVP, Fiction at RTL Germany, said in the group discussion after Ampere’s data drop. According to Bartel, the “broadcastifciation” of streaming followed the “streamification” of broadcast.
“Broadcasters have tried to be like the streamers, commissioning bolder more complicated streaming type shows,” he noted, but added that it has not always worked out for them and sometimes made it harder to reach their traditional audiences.
José Pastor, Fiction Director at Spanish pubcaster RTVE, said smart windowing is crucial if streamer-broadcaster cooperation is to blossom – but it only works if the broadcaster gets to go first.
“All of our shows are sold to streamers, the thing is we want the first window,” he said. “We are the best promotion a series can get; if free-to-air goes first, it is the perfect marketing campaign for when it goes to a streamer in the second window. But the opposite doesn’t work.”
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