Hey, Creative Army!

Great news! Stage 32 and our wonderful Director of Education, Sam Sokolow, were recently featured in an IBC 365 article, “WHAT DO STREAMERS WANT? SITCOMS, POLICE DRAMA AND REALITY SHOWS”.

This article spotlighted Stage 32’s hit expert panel at last month’s FOCUS London Conference; FROM REVOLUTION TO EVOLUTION: What The Streamers Are Looking For Today. It was a phenomenal conversation moderated by Stacey Carr, Entertainment Consultant at Stacey Carr Consulting, and featuring Sam Sokolow, Executive Producer & Director of Education at Stage 32, Elizabeth Kormanova, Head of Business & Legal Affairs at Rocket Science Industries, and Tom Sherry, Managing Director at Headline Pictures.

You can learn more about the panel and some of the insights shared in the below excerpt.

An Excerpt From IBC:

“The word is out that streamers want comedies and police procedurals – formats that work with new ad supported models,” said Sam Sokolow, Executive Producer at Stage 32, a US-based social network for film and TV professionals. “Programming that fits with patterns we might have seen on TV 10 years ago.”

Sokolow was speaking at the Focus conference in London in December.

“The industry is in a significant period of change,” said Tom Sherry, MD, Headline Pictures (co-producer of Amazon Prime’s The Man in the High Castle), also on the panel. “This is a time when we cannot predict what a production will cost. Crew rates have changed [under new Bectu and Pact rules introduced at the beginning of the year]. Travel, accommodation and the basic cost of fuel have gone up. We’ve seen a spike in the cost of production and those spikes are increasingly difficult to sustain.”

The biggest reason for cutbacks in spending is due to the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA strikes, which have caused some productions to be delayed or cancelled.

At the same time, the likes of Disney and Warner Bros are aggregating different DTC streamers and content divisions into one super-app in a move which is also intended to streamline production spend.

Disney will spend $25bn on content (including sports) next year which is $2bn less than 2023 and considerably less than the $33bn it spent in 2022. This reduction also fits with Disney CEO Bob Iger’s plan to create less content and focus on a more curated original programming lineup.

To continue reading the full article, click HERE!

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