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The Miami Herald | January 24, 2011
Let’s make a deal: 5,000 TV producers gather in Miami Beach
Practically everything you’ve ever seen on television plus much more that you haven’t is on sale at the three-day National Association of Television Program Executives convention that kicks off Monday.
It won’t be the most colossal sale made this week at the Fontainebleau. But it surely tells you everything you need to know about this week’s convention of the National Association of Television Program Executives, where 5,000 members of the boob-tube-ousie are gathering to wheel and deal TV shows.
“I’m not going to tell you the name of the country,” says Stephen J. Davis, president of Hasbro Studios, which makes family and children’s shows such as The Transformers. “But my head of sales came bursting into my office. `This is great! They want to buy everything we have! And they want to pay $55 an episode!’
“And we’re going to do it, even though what they’re paying us won’t cover the cost of shipping the shows. Because you want to get a toehold in that market.”
From $55-a-show blue-plate specials to staggering intercontinental deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars, practically everything you’ve ever seen on television plus much more that you haven’t is on sale at the three-day NATPE convention that kicks off Monday.
Though NATPE also includes educational sessions, professional seminars and just-plain-stargazing interludes with people such as Regis Philbin and Sabado Gigante‘s Don Francisco, the convention has less to do with art than with the art of the deal. NATPE is the television industry’s most bustling international marketplace. Producers, network executives and TV-station bosses from all over the world will be schmoozing and selling shows. And as with that Hasbro deal that Davis hopes to seal here, no market is too small.
“We have meetings each half hour, all over the hotel,” says Marta Sacasa, vice president of a Nicaraguan station, who expects to take a dozen or so shows home with her to the smallest TV market in Central America. “We have meetings at breakfast, meetings at lunch, meetings at dinner, meetings over drinks. And then there are the random meetings in corridors, which might be the most important of them all.”
NATPE began in 1964 as a meeting of mostly U.S. TV executives, looking for game and talk shows to fill holes in their schedules not covered by network programming. But a growing worldwide TV market in which shows and formats crisscross borders at the drop of a checkbook has given it an increasingly global orientation. That’s one of the reasons NATPE moved to South Florida this year from its longtime home in Las Vegas.
“NATPE is reinventing itself,” says Raul Mateu of Miami Beach’s Fluent Media Group. It used to be that people went there to, say, close a deal for Wheel of Fortune for stations in Iowa. That business is now all done at a big corporate level. It’s the international market that’s open and exciting, and the whole reason to put NATPE in Miami is to attract people from other parts of the world.
Mateu is a bit of a poster boy for the growing internationalism of NATPE. In the briefcase he’ll lug around the Fontainebleau are shows from Chile, Colombia, Argentina, Romania, France and South Korea.
“If I sell just one of them to a network, that show instantly becomes a multimillion-dollar business,” he says.
Producers at NATPE sell not only finished shows, dubbed or subtitled to make them accessible to new audiences, but also show concepts that can be adapted by a local producer.
Format sales have a long history in television — the 1970s hit sitcoms All in the Family and Sanford and Son were U.S. remakes of British shows — but the new popularity of game programs and reality shows has made those formats into hot properties. “In a lot of these markets, local dramas are often too expensive to afford,” says David Lyle, president of Fox Look, which peddles shows from Fox’s broadcasting and studio companies. “So a cheaper, unscripted show, with a proven track record, has serious interest for them.”
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