The Struggle to Acquire Emmy Award Winning Content

Services with WarnerMedia volume deals watching The Emmys will be happy to see that their investment continues to give them access to award winning content

Acquiring award winning content on an individual basis is likely to become increasingly hard to do

HBO commissioned titles won the most awards with 30 in total, taking 70% of the awards in Drama or Limited Series categories

When not selling to their own services, WarnerMedia’s content from HBO goes to specific buyers as part of volume deals

These are valuable enough that the company has postponed its HBO Max expansion to some of these key territories and instead renewed these volume deals

Between volume deals, Digital Originals and SVOD multi-market deals it’s likely to further increase the challenge for buyers in international markets looking for award winning US content

Of the Outstanding Drama Series nominees only two titles were available as individual acquisitions to buyers, The Handmaid’s Tale (MGM) and Killing Eve (Endeavor)

The market is challenging for even Limited Series with few titles freely available. Even Mrs. America was tied to some services as part of long standing FX volume deals that predates the Disney acquisition of Fox

As well as all of these issues, there is the increasing trend of US studios licensing to their own services internationally, covered in an insight published last week

International buyers looking for award winning content will have to look for non-traditional commissioners of high quality content and take advantage of the reduced interest from Netflix in multi-market SVOD deals for new titles as they instead focus on their own productions