After an all-time high of 599 scripted series produced in the US in 2022, the decline reached a 14 per cent fall in 2023.
France, which has been praised for its funding public system and its ‘cultural exception’, is now at a similar tipping point.
“Producers have become the unwilling bankers of their own industry,” was the message from consulting firm Dutoit Media in a keynote speech at a professional TV event in Paris.
Though it reached an all-time record with budgets equaling €1.23 billion and fully dominated the Top 100 TV ratings locally, the triumphant picture of French fiction is at an end.
“The funding engine than enables the creation is becoming brittle,” noted Dutoit Media founder, Jérôme Dutoit, former VP of strategy at Paramount. “The magic money of the 2015-2022 period, during which platforms financed French production to acquire subscribers, not to balance their sheets, is definitely over,” he told delegates from the scripted sector.
“Before 2022, the dominant KPI for platforms was subscriber acquisition. Since 2023, it is retention. With an acquisition cost pf €50 to €130 per subscriber in France, and a monthly margin of €5 to €8 after content amortisation, a subscriber must remain eight to fifteen months to recoup. This radically changes the nature of commissioned projects. The big hit is replaced by regular comfort,” Dutoit stressed.
Compared to other European countries, Dutoit’s findings highlight the gap between rising costs and declining broadcaster funding (70 per cent ten years ago, 55.8 per cent now) creating a “scissor effect”.
With a cost of 52-minute episodes reaching €2.08 million per hour in 2024 (+22.9 per cent in one year), French fiction, excluding daily dramas, costs two to three times more than Belgian or Scandinavian drama of comparable quality.
“Those countries have always had to seek external funding and have built structurally more resilient model,” noted Dutoit Media.
The consultancy firm encouraged producers and TV drama creators to produce better by controlling costs thanks to technology (studio factories, virtual sets, AI), focusing on IP and premium content, finding audience communities and securing presales on the European levels.
Dutiot believes Europe can become a domestic market after nine countries including France signed a first Council of Europe legal framework on series coproduction at the recent Series Mania event in Lille.
“What will make the difference among players will be their ability to rethink their place in the value chain, to see themselves as IP architects rather than grid providers,” he concluded.
