PBS programming exec Bill Gardner helped make Season of the Osprey happen. He describes why the Osprey pitch was a winner, and how it became a successful NATURE / Love Nature co-production. This podcast launches our Season of the Osprey platform, the cenrepiece of our outreach campaign. Listen to Bill Gardner on PBS, Natural History …
From a Baltimore childhood ripped from THE WIRE to the stage of the New Mexico Philharmonic, a musician shares his inspiring story in R.A.W. Tuba. Trailer: Concept The directors David Larson and Darren Durlac wanted to produce a film about Arts Education and how it’s under-appreciated and underfunded. When visiting the Baltimore School of …
Congrats to MY OCTOPUS TEACHER‘s extended family for winning the Best Documentary Feature award at last night’s Oscars. I write “family” because it took a deeply committed and close-knit group of friends and colleagues to bring Craig Foster‘s unexpected subject from chilly False Bay to Netflix, and then to Hollywood’s #1 stage: How It …
Nielsen released their Top 10 Streamed Programs for 2020 (U.S.) in three categories: Originals, Acquisitions and Movies. Their key metric is Minutes-Streamed-per-Show. In the Originals category, the Top 10 is led by OZARK with 30.5 billion views in 2020. TIGER KING is #4 with 15.6 billion views. When I looked deeper into the data, I …
Twelve documentary buyers and producers reveal what drives their decisions. Each commissioner is driven by a particular strategy, pipeline and budget ‘sweet spot’. Each producer describes a unique path from concept through funding and production to distribution. Since 2010, the mission of my Documentary Business newsletter has been to reveal how these individual production pathways …
How are the channels responding to the rise of Netflix and the streamers? They’re launching their own streamers like NBC and Peacock, providing their brand and content, like Nat Geo to Disney +, or maybe just getting caught in the headlights. Dan Salerno is deeply specialized in documentary and unscripted programming, and together we pull …
My valued colleague Dr John Morse shared his latest Annual Nielsen Household/Persons Update for September 2020. These widely used Nielsen universe numbers provide an important context for advertising targets, and thus for programming strategies. Nielsen updates all its universe national base counts once per year that go into effect each September. Total Universe This year …
Abramorama COO Karol Martesko-Fenster reveals how COVID forced a rapid turnaround in the theatrical distribution strategy for Discovery’s Apocalypse ’45. He describes the ‘virtual theatrical’ release for Oscar nominee Erik Nelson’s gripping archive-based documentary about the Pacific campaign that brought WW2 to an end. Karol shares his pre-COVID strategy and its radical switch into a …