1. CELEBS (AND MUCH MORE) ON YOU TUBE
The importance of the AVoD (Ad-based Video On Demand: the free streamers) in general and You Tube in particular is under everyone’s eyes. In a recent article, the format expert and columnist Siobhan Crawford, has pointed out that “YouTube is the single most popular platform for the 15-35-yer-old demographic” (see: https://tbivision.com/2022/11/23/opinion-why-you-should-look-to-youtube-for-the-next-big-formats/).
In line with this, UK free-to-air public broadcast Tv network Channel 4 has just launched a new channel called 4 Reality on YouTube, where you will see the full-length episodes of Channel 4’s most popular realities together with social shorts and exclusive new contents. 4 Reality will aim to engage a younger female audience aged 16-24 and will join other Channel 4 YouTube channels: 4 Comedy, 4 Documentaries, 4 Entertainment and the recent Channel 4.0.
The new series of Celebs Go Dating will land on the new YouTube channel immediately after the linear broadcast on E4 (owned and operated by Channel 4). In the format, single celebrities join an exclusive dating agency in an attempt to find true love and matchmakers pair them with non-celebrity partners.
Now the new frontier seems to be the FAST (Free Ad-supported Streaming TV) channels, basically the same thing as AVoD, but instead of ad-supported on demand content, it is ad-supported live TV content. The borders and landscape of the audiovisual are changing at an unprecedented speed.
2. LOST IN DENMARK
A group of ordinary people is stranded in a remote location where they have to survive until they are evacuated. Participants are only given basic food, a radio and essential survival equipment, and have no idea who else is with them in the deserted landscape. All they know is that they have to survive until evacuation and that the only way out is to do it together.
This is the basic concept (for now no other details are available) of the Fremantle’s adventure format The Lost Ones (Flokken, the original title), commissioned by Danish public broadcaster TV 2. Let’s see how this topic will be developed in the series.
3. A SPANISH BLACK CARD IN LONDON
Waiting for a complete report of the Content London, which will be published on the next issue, we’ll focus on the C21 Global Entertainment Format Pitch, sponsored by ITV Studios, that took place Wednesday 30th November at Kings Place.
The winner of the 8 projects selected for this year’s pitch was Black Card, a reality competition from Spain’s iZen Group. The series sees 12 contestants each given a ‘black card’ with varying amounts of money – some will have a lot and others only a little. The contestants can steal money from each other by competing in challenges, with the winner taking home the value of their card.
The project will receive funding to progress the idea to the next stage.