Popular series such as “The Handmaid’s Tale”, “This is Us”, and “Killing Eve” are in high demand across both global and local services. These shows, commissioned by studio giants, are usually sold quickly to global streamers in overseas markets, limiting the window of opportunity for local acquisition. However, using Show Tracker, we have identified a number of popular shows with delayed premieres in select markets, providing an opportunity for local streamers to acquire notable content.
Delayed premieres occur for many reasons. There are often pre-existing multi-year deals in place, such as with “The Neighborhood”, or sometimes studios strategically hold premieres back in certain markets. In the UK, three popular shows from overseas were late acquisitions, being released almost four years after their original premiere dates. “All American” only premiered on ITV2 in the UK last year as part of ITV’s exclusive deal with WarnerMedia in 2022. The show “Young Sheldon” also had a late premiere in Sweden, being sold via vertical integration to HBO Max. Here, Warner chose to release the show close to the Swedish launch of HBO Max as opposed to its premiere in other markets through third-party acquisitions where the show was released close to its original premiere date.
Popular award-winning TV shows are often a challenge for local services to acquire due to increased levels of vertical integration from studios, volume deals or purely because the content has been specifically developed for global SVOD, but delayed premieres can often provide local services a rare opportunity for acquiring high-level content.
Despite being a show commissioned by ABC, a division of Disney, “The Conners” first window overseas premiere was through local services instead of Disney+. This is due to distribution rights belonging to Carsey-Werner Distribution, which struck a one-year-only agreement with Disney for first-window international premieres in 2018 before Disney+ was launched. After this deal ended, Carsey-Werner decided to withhold selling the show’s international distribution rights opting to wait for more seasons to be produced in hopes of selling the show by itself instead of a volume deal with its other library content. As a result, “The Conners” only premiered early this year in the UK. Given that the show has yet to debut in several markets such as Italy, France, and Sweden, local services still have the chance to acquire multiple seasons of a Primetime Emmy Award-winning show.
Like “The Conners”, “The Neighborhood” is another potential acquisition for buyers as it has gained reasonable success in the US and is yet to be sold in certain markets. Although the show is distributed by Paramount, its release was not completely monopolised by Paramount+ after its international launch, taking more than 3 years to premiere in the UK, Germany and Mexico. Three out of the seven markets that the show was sold to were local services — two of its most recent releases being to ProSieben in Germany and E4 in the UK due to their long-standing relationship with CBS. Channel 4 had an existing relationship with CBS as they had previously struck an exclusive deal for shows such as “Man with a Plan”, another CBS comedy, and ProSiebenSat.1 has an extended programming deal with the studio.
We can see there are valuable opportunities for local services to acquire hugely successful shows with a wide audience base. The key is to find available unsold content untouched by a global studio streamer to unearth these hidden gems.
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