SkyShowtime’s Kai Finke: Recent Spanish Originals Are ‘Just the Tip of the Iceberg’ in Local Investment
TOLEDO, Spain — How do you grow a streaming service in today’s so-overcrowded market? One solution, if you’re pan-European OTT player SkyShowtime, is paraded on a billboard at Spain’s Conecta Fiction this week: “Yellowstone.”
Tapping content from Paramount and Universal Studios, as well as DreamWorks, NBC and Sky Studios, SkyShowtime offers “shows and movies from two legacy studios, two of the biggest entertainment brands in the world,” Kai Finke,SkyShowtime chief content officer, said at a Conecta Fiction keynote Thursday. “It’s a privilege, a luxury, content from Paramount Pictures or Universal Pictures is definitely powering us,” he added.
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That said, “we’ve understood that in order to operate successfully streaming services across our region and European footprint, it is absolutely key for us to tackle local programming,” he added.
In early June, SkyShowtime unveiled two new Spanish Originals, darkly comedic family drama “Mamen Mayo,” produced by Spanish powerhouse Nostromo (“Through My Window”); and “Pelotaris 1926,” produced by The Mediapro Studio and TelevisaUnivision’s ViX streaming service, a 1920s drama about three female pelotari players trying to make it in Spain’s Basque Country and Mexico.
These titles, however, Finke claimed, are just “the tip of the iceberg” in terms of local content investment in Spain.
“Local is a huge hit and driver for engagement. Spanish language movies have always done very well at the Spanish box office. Spain has always been a country with a great tradition of producing fantastic television. Over the last 10 years or so, production values, and budgets, have gone up,” Finke said, noting that “‘Bose’ and ‘The Envoys’ have really attracted meaningful audience,”
“We’re working on a lot more projects as we speak,” Finke added. “You can definitely expect an increasing volume of local-language submissions from scratch.”
What does SkyShowtime want?
“There’s no kind of one-size fits-all approach to what SkyShowtime is looking for in terms of a project or package, Finke said.
“Sometimes an idea can be shared via a conversation. We can also happen to look at a fully packaged project, or we have the time to develop together with creators a show.
Whether SkyShowtime will be unleashing many big series from Spain, however, is another matter.
“We want to be realistic about the budget, though we’re looking definitely at commissioning a whole number of projects in the market.”
SkyShowtime could also contemplate co-production. We are definitely interested also in co-production setups where ultimately we can potentially split the bill and build an audience together,” Finke averred.
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