Distribution in Focus: Blue Ant’s Mark Bishop

As buyers descend on the UK capital for Showcase, London TV Screenings and Mip London this week, Broadcast International speaks to Mark Bishop, co-president of Blue Ant Rights, about the key trends and challenges facing the business.

Strategic scaling through M&A and integration across our business units remain central to our growth across Blue Ant Studios, Blue Ant Rights, and our global channels. This collaboration powers our expansion: our studios create premium content, Blue Ant Rights scales it globally, and our streaming teams provide the audience reach and insights that shape our strategy.

With our acquisition of Thunderbird last month, we are now bigger and better positioned to support partners globally. For starters, integrating our newly acquired assets gives our Blue Ant Rights catalog scale of over 9,000+ hours across all genres. We’re expanding our Rights team to move into scripted content and grow our kids, family, and YA team and offerings in the market. This goes hand in hand with how we’ve restructured our Studios group into genre-based centers of expertise to streamline the development of ambitious, globally-travelling content around Unscripted, Kids & Family, and Scripted content.

Additionally, the expansion of Blue Ant Rights also includes moving into licensing and consumer products, which will extend our brands into new revenue streams beyond the screen and build long-term value for our partners.

Navigating a landscape where global commissioning has slowed has been challenging for the industry at large. It’s no secret that producers are finding it harder to bridge financing gaps for high-quality projects and it’s more of a challenge to find, co-finance, and package projects for a steady distribution pipeline.

However, the global Blue Ant Rights team has experts across every field: sales, acquisitions, licensing, formats, co-productions - people who truly understand their markets and work hand-in-hand with our partners to create long-term value. That collaborative spirit is at the heart of everything we do. Being agile and having the ability to combine our studio capacity through Blue Ant Studios with our distribution expertise through Blue Ant Rights helps us bridge that gap.

The company also operates global channels that can co-finance or finance projects, offering multiple ways to partner. That collaborative spirit is at the heart of everything we do.

We see the success of YouTube content creators as a shift toward audience-centric storytelling and finding ways to reach audiences where they are. Audiences gravitate towards the content they enjoy in a platform-agnostic way, whether that’s a traditional linear or streaming experience or short-form vertical storytelling on a social feed.

Streamers partnering directly with creators demonstrates how valuable built-in communities and authentic voices have become. For our business, it reinforces the importance of developing IP and talent that can travel across platforms, formats, and windows.

Blue Ant’s YouTube offerings are expanding exponentially, giving us the added ability to use these digital platforms to monetize content and as a learning tool to identify what resonates with high-affinity audiences. We also leverage YouTube to build and incubate hyper-niche content brands, cultivating dedicated global audiences around specific passions before porting those proven brands into our FAST and linear ecosystems, and to third-party partners.

Having access to this real-time feedback enables our Studios and Rights groups to scale talent and IP into premium global franchises and adjust our offerings to meet audience expectations.

Windowing has always allowed content owners to reach more of their audience, and this is being embraced by platforms and traditional broadcasters as they share content moving forward. For example, ITV content is already on Disney, and Disney content is on ITVX. Additionally, we see this with UKTV content on 4OD and Sky originals on Netflix.

At Blue Ant, we supply global platforms, linear channels and local streamers, but we take that same content further and deeper, reaching audiences through SVOD, Fast, AVOD and on to YouTube. Our expertise is in maximising all windowing opportunities for content creators and originators to fully exploit their IP. Additionally, the recent acquisition of our own SVOD platform, MagellanTV, allows us to further control and curate comprehensive windowing strategies.

Although a landscape of increased consolidation narrows the marketplace, Blue Ant Rights is well positioned in the industry and with valued relationships across all markets to continue to thrive. We also offer a strong and varied catalogue of content to feed all the genres these brands serve.

As a significant partner to many linear networks under the Warner Bros. umbrella, particularly in the unscripted and factual space, we are curious to see how a new buyer will steer their channels business. We’ll be watching closely to see if a shift in their strategy will create new opportunities for us to support those brands with our specialised content.

Channel 4 is the home of world-class programming from a community of production companies we know well and, as of next year, their in-house production unit. We look forward to continuing to distribute great C4 content, regardless of its origins.

Ideally, we’re looking to invest in content across both unscripted and scripted that audiences will love and lean into. We’re focused on shows with natural scalability and a high level of audience engagement that can function for a variety of different broadcasters and platforms in a wide range of markets. For example, a lifestyle format that can sit comfortably on a European commercial broadcaster, or a US pay TV channel, with a life on our own channels and strong consumer products potential. Or a bold scripted series with a unique point of view that can live on streaming services, but might also play on a traditional broadcaster.

Blue Ant Rights is launching three scripted dramas at the London Screenings: In the Pines (6 x 60 minutes) from Meta Films, is a character-driven crime drama inspired by real events set inside a dangerous criminal enterprise built on deception; Elkhorn (18 x 60 minutes) from Morningstar Entertainment), an action-packed Western that presents the coming-of-age story of a young man, Theodore Roosevelt, who must overcome an unimaginable personal tragedy when his mother and wife die on the same day; and Suspect (2 x 90 minutes) from Orchard Studios, which revolves around the police interrogations of prime suspects in real-life high profile true crime cases.