Services Exports Promotion Council (SEPC), set-up by the Ministry of Commerce & Industry, has brought out the India Intellectual Property (IP) Guide at Cannes in MIPCOM 2019

In a message, to the industry in the India IP Guide released at 36th MIPCOM at Cannes, Commerce Secretary, Anup Wadhawan, said that the Government of India is committed to safeguard against infringement of originality and creativity of the makers to give a boost to services exports. IP is the most important asset for its creators in the media and entertainment sector and the message by Commerce Secretary further said that India firmly believes in the significance of IPR as the centrepiece of the industry’s future growth.

For the second consecutive year, SEPC’s India Pavilion at MIPCOM, Cannes, France, the world’s largest content market, has enthused and attracted industry. Over 60 Indian delegates were part of the India Pavilion delegation. Over 115 Indian companies comprising over 250 delegates were at MIPCOM.

The Indian exhibitors and visiting companies were at MIPCOM to buy, sell, serve and partner with companies present at MIPCOM from over 111 countries across the world. India Pavilion is the one-stop place to meet content creators, audio visual service providers in animation, VFX, AR/VR, gaming, new media services, film production services and much more. Many of the Indian companies were with their completed IPs or pitch for their in-production properties.

One of the key objectives at SEPC is to facilitate service exporters of India and handhold medium and small enterprises to expand their global footprint and to present IPs from India to the buyers and distributors from across the globe. The IP Guide is to illustrate strengths of the Indian content creators.

Takeaways and Trends from MIPCOM 2019

A lot happened at MIPCOM 2019- Keynotes by industry veterans, special sessions that brought together people from various verticals and interactions that threw light on the present and future of M&E sector. Pickle brings you takeaways and trends from MIPCOM

Personality of the Year

Robert Greenblatt , Chairman, WarnerMedia Entertainment and Direct-to-Consumer, who is one of the most successful entertainment executives of the last 30 years, delivered MIPCOM’s Personality of the Year keynote, interviewed by World Screen’s Group Editorial Director Anna Carugati-Guise. Greenblatt started by remembering when he got the bug for the entertainment industry, in his teenage years. He watched a film called That’s Entertainment, which compiled the best scenes from MGM musicals. “I was really knocked out,” he said. “I realised that one studio made them all, MGM, and a lightbulb went off in my head. I was always a fan of movies, but I thought ‘I wanna someday run a studio!’”

Amazon & India

Amazon Studios’ Head of International Originals James Farrell and Director of European Originals Georgia Brown delivered a keynote. Farrell offered his take on the international picture, including India. “The whole premium scripted drama area is pretty much a white space in India, where they make great films, great soap operas… but nobody is really making high-budget, high-quality, 8-10 episode scripted drama.” And these shows can travel. “We’re past that ‘well are we going to make it global or local? Let’s just make it really great and specific,” he said.

Content Mix

Amazon Studios’ Director of European Originals Georgia Brown talked about the content mix. “In the co-production space we’ve had a fantastic couple of years… and that’s something we’re going to continue to do,” she said. “We want to engage customers on any level we can. It’s not just about giving them originals, at Amazon we can offer them shows from lots of different people.”

Women Power

Another highlight of MIPCOM’s was the Women in Global Entertainment Power Lunch, with A+E Networks and The Hollywood Reporter. Reed MIDEM’s Laurine Garaude began by welcoming some of the most influential women in the TV business today, notably introducing Newen CEO Bibiane Godefroid, who presented Pour les femmes dans les médias, a French movement to stop sexual harassment in media companies, initially conceived at this very lunch.

Inevitable change

World’s ‘largest free movie and TV streaming service’ Tubi’s CEO Farhad Massoudi and chief content officer Adam Lewinson talked about their strategy, and the wider trends around AVOD in 2019 in their keynote. Massoudi started by comparing the TV industry to other content industries: “The music industry has seen a 60% increase in revenue due to streaming. Radical change is coming to TV and I’m excited to be part of it.” That change looks to be unavoidable, looking at the stats.

Big Bang Moment

Another session at MIPCOM focused on the ‘D2C big bang moment’. Midia Research’s EVP and Research Director Tim Mulligan explored the challenges for SVOD and direct-to-consumer in 2019. “What could be arguably the biggest, pivotal moment of the history of media in the digital landscape,” said Mulligan, citing four new launches in the next six months: Apple TV+, Disney+, HBO Max and Peacock. “The big media players are coalescing with the big tech players to make streaming central to their existence,” he said.

Changing trends

David Clarke, EVP Content at DRG, talked about changing trends for distributors. “Like everybody else, we’re behaving much more like a studio. That’s about supporting creativity much, much earlier, and about getting across development much, much earlier,” he said. “The marketplace for great IP that is available to independent distributors such as ours, there are very few shows that leak out of the super-indie studio system. So when they do come out, you have to be ready and willing to support them and invest in them, and convince those producers that you’re the right home for them.”

View from Japan

Taka Hayakawa, VP at Fuji Television, offered a perspective from Japan, including Fuji TV’s investment in mobile developer Niantic, the creator of the game Pokémon Go. The companies have collaborated on an animated project. “A very good example of our strategy for investment: we invested in the company, and we tried to make collaboration,” he said. Another project, The Window, started life as a drinking session at MIPCOM three years ago with an executive from ZDF! “It’s kinda ‘Soccer meets House of Cards’,” he said.

High Five

Vincent Teulade, CEO of Pistis Strategy Advisor presented five areas of upcoming tech trends. “We’re seeing pay-tv playing a defensive strategy right now, while commercial TV is under increasing pressure. SVoD and AdVoD might become the new norm for an hour of entertainment”, said Teulade.

AI Route

Philippe Petitpont from Newsbridge talked about how their AI based system enables a quicker and more cost efficient process for producers to sift through material, including archive material. “We see that producers are able to decrease work load by 50-80%. We also see a possibility to be much faster when it comes to production. And all the film and data generated while filming can now be indexed affordably and get a new lease of life”, said Petitpont.

Machine learning

Jack Habra from Reminiz talked about using AI and machine learning to generate relevant and verified data from any kind of video content, from live streams to on-demand. “We are an AI solution at scale”, said Habra while describing the process. “We can identify everything from characters to logos and brands, from emotions to interactions, and generate data on all of them”. This is turn enables more efficient contextual advertising, content recommendations as well as live stream monitoring.

Sony’s Super Offerings

As ever at MIPCOM, Sony was there with its 4K and 8K Ultra HD Theatre, offering a programme of sessions on all things high-resolution. They included a brisk ‘Around the 4K world in 30 minutes’ overview of current trends. Paul Gray, research and analysis director at IHS Markit Technology offered the information. Globally, UHD resolutions exceeded half of TV shipments for the first time in the final quarter of 2018. “From now it’s pretty hard to find a TV at 49 inches or bigger that isn’t UHD,” said Gray. More than 260m households now have UHD televisions, and this is predicted to grow to 574m by 2023. In North America, 64% of households are expected to be UHD by 2023. “Not all these sets can do everything,” he warned, in terms of UHD content.

Drag Race

Over the last decade, RuPaul’s Drag Race has become a televisual institution, not to mention a format that’s spreading well beyond the US. Host and producer RuPaul Charles delighted MIPCOM with a keynote, in which he was interviewed by Variety’s managing editor, television, Cynthia Littleton. “We love drag, we love television and we love drag queens!” he said, pinpointing the appeal of his show. “We all were little boys who society said ‘There’s no place for you here’. We start there in that commonality of the struggle. Things are said sometimes that are salty! But it always comes back to ‘you are my sister, you are my brother: we all come from the same place.”

Freemium Streaming

ProSiebenSat.1 CEO Max Conze spoke about Germany’s largest freemium streaming platform, Joyn – a 50/50 joint venture with Discovery Networks – and the plans to launch a premium, subscription-based tier this winter. The moderator for this session was journalist Kate Bulkley.

“One of the things I’ve been all my life is be in consumer-facing businesses where technology plays a role, and to a certain extent, where marketing plays a role,” he said. “We need growth going forward… linear distribution alone, viewing is declining, probably the money that you can make with it is declining as well. So probably we need to make that business future-fit as well.”

Funding Creativity

The Esterel room at MIPCOM hosted a strand devoted to ‘funding creativity’, including a conversation with BBC Studios. Paul Dempsey, president, global distribution, and Ralph Lee, director of content, BBC Studios Production, fielded the questions from moderator Erik Barmack, CEO of Wild Sheep Content. BBC Studios have seen some great new content this year, and some familiar, but recharged. “This year we relaunched Top Gear, which has come back really strong” said Lee. “And in our new series Seven Worlds One Planet we’ve gone further than before with aerial photography, as well as storytelling”.

What’s TV Now

Darren Star, creator and executive producer of shows including Sex and the City, Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place, as well as his current hit, Younger, was interviewed by Jill Offman, EVP at Paramount Network / Comedy Central. He started by talking about Emily in Paris, his new drama-comedy. “Americans certainly have this wonderful romantic relationship with Paris, and I think we’ve seen it in movies, books… I don’t think there’s been a TV series that’s really captured it,” he said. “What’s wonderful about television now is it’s become so expensive that we can film an entire series here! That wasn’t quite as possible a few years ago, and the definition of what television is has expanded so much that what would have been a feature is now a TV series.”

Around the world

Endemol Shine’s CEO of Creative Networks Lisa Perrin spoke about the company’s approach to developing, financing, producing and distributing content. She was interviewed by Erik Barmack, CEO of Wild Sheep Content. Endemol Shine has over 3 billion views of their content over all platforms monthly. While new content is always being developed and produced, many of the shows are long-running enterprises. “Big Brothers is in its 20th year now”, Perrin said. “It still travels around the world. The show reflects the audience very well. But how to innovate around formats like this, that takes skill.”

Beyond the Giants

You’ll hear lots about Netflix, Apple, WarnerMedia and other giant streaming services this market, but there’s life beyond those platforms. A session called “Streaming Services: Beyond the Giants“ looked at how domestic and regional players are thriving. Speakers included DocuBay COO Akul Tripathi; BritBox President Soumya Sriraman; and Media Prima Director, Digital Asset Management Unit, IP-Animation and Licensing & Merchandising, Airin Zainul. The moderator was Midia Research’s Tim Mulligan.

Twitter Talk

Kay Madati, Global VP and Head of Content Partnerships at Twitter, outlined the ‘past, present and future of Twitter’s content partnerships’, aided by ITV Partnership Controller Bhav Chandrani; Eurosport Digital General Manager Paul Rehrig, and Twitter’s Head of News and Sport Partnerships, EMEA, Jo Kelly. “Twitter is the place where people come to discover and talk about what’s happening in the world. And increasingly so it’s publishers like you who bring your premium content to the platform… to partner with and marry that conversation,” said Madati, adding that Twitter’s users play an active, not passive role in the process. “They are not passengers on that content journey. They are drivers.”

Power of TV

Ruth Berry , Managing Director, Global Distribution at ITV Studios, talked about how television is ‘shaping culture around the world’, referring to shows including Love Island, Noughts + Crosses and World on Fire. She was interviewed by Manori Ravindran, International Editor, TBI Magazine. “For us it’s very much about how the power of television can connect with audiences,” said Berry. “And how we can connect with those audiences increasingly on a global level.” She talked about the so-called golden age of television. “We’re still in a golden age of television. It’s glimmering its way along the Croisette very well!”

Food for thought

“Getting to the Top – Insight & Tips from – and for – Women in the Media” mentoring breakfast was co-hosted with MediaClub’Elles. Industry veterans including France Televisions’ Caroline Behar; TwoFour54’s H.E. Maryam AlMheiri; All3media’s Louise Pedersen; Cartoon Networks’ Adina Pitt; RMC Decouverte’s Guenaelle Troly; and Fuzzy Duckling Media’s Sam Witters shared their experiences and advice. The breakfast was divided into tables, for attendees to connect and discuss the issues that are important to them in 2019. At the end of the event, each table’s representative stood up to share some of the talking points.