The audience for COUNTRY MUSIC extends Ken Burns‘ run as the high-performing PBS documentarian. The average audience over 8 episodes was 4.42 million. That’s more that 3x the PBS average for prime (1.24 million). And slightly higher than the average for the VIETNAM series (4.38 million). COUNTRY MUSIC maintained its audience, even returning to peak …
The 18,000-member D-Word documentary community is hosting my online conversation on the topic : Dealing with Netflix: What you need to know NOW! Here is how host Doug Block set up the conversation: In the current documentary landscape, Netflix is the giant elephant in the room, and everyone else — be it filmmaker, broadcaster, distributor …
NETFLIX 2020: What You Need To Know Now! is my updated study of how Netflix buys documentaries. Netflix has been a black box for the documentary production community. My new research reveals much more about Netflix’s strategy, programming decisions, budgets, deal terms, preferred producers, and the business model that drives it all. The new study …
TRUE ROYALTY is a London-based subscription video service dedicated to British Royalty. Co-founder GREGOR ANGUS describes True Royalty as a “clearly-defined interest” or mega-niche. His analysis points to tens of millions of hyper-engaged Royal TV viewers. They are concentrated in the U.S. and Commonwealth countries. True Royalty’s business case was endorsed by U.S. box office …
Sue Dando has been the head of The Nature of Things, CBC Television’s flagship documentary science and nature series, for seven years. The strand is one of the most successful television series in the world: it is now heading into its 59th season. Sue shared her strategy and commissioning process at Sunny Side’s Science-themed Meet The …
Ricarda Schlosshan is a supervising editor and commissioner for Terra X, the popular primetime documentary slot of German public broadcaster ZDF. Ricarda described what Terra X is looking for at Sunny Side‘s Science-themed Meet The Executive session. She shared the details of Terra X’s pipeline: 45 new programs per year Each film is 44 minutes, …
The widely-used Nielsen Household and Persons Universe numbers provide an important context for the economic health of the channels that commission, coproduce and acquire documentary programs. My valued colleague, Byron Media‘s John Morse, shared the data and context. TOTAL U.S TV UNIVERSE: The total US Universe of TV homes increased from 119.9 Million a year …
Greg Boustead is director of Science Sandbox, a portfolio of strategic grantmaking at the Simons Foundation, focused on outreach and engaging new audiences with science. He shared his strategy and grant-making process at Sunny Side of the Doc’s Science-themed Meet The Executive session. We are publishing Greg’s very informative session as a podcast, though without …