Banijay's CEO Tells European Producers to Hold Their Ground, and Make the Fight About Rights
Marco Bassetti, CEO of London-based Banijay Entertainment — which Variety calls the world's largest independent studio — used a fireside chat at Rome's MIA market to urge European producers to hold their ground in negotiating terms of trade with U.S. studios and streamers. His idea of the fight worth having is that studios and streamers should recognize creativity and provide rewards for it, and the concrete form of that reward is producers retaining the IP rights on what they make.
His own comparison is a network deal: he says that when he works for a TV network, especially in countries like England, he retains ownership of the intellectual property.
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The mechanism he prizes is ownership with a clock: if he sells a series, he says the rights eventually revert to him after three years, which he calls a built-in incentive for the creator. Treating production companies as mere service providers, in his telling, is a problem precisely because it gives creators no reason to work with that buyer.
The fight he calls entirely pointless is the one with an enforcement mechanism. Europe's Audiovisual Media Services Directive forces foreign streaming services to spend a portion of their revenue on local productions, leaving the modalities to individual countries — an obligation on money rather than on rights.
The messenger is worth noting: the man urging European producers to hold their ground runs what Variety calls the world's largest independent studio. Not a contradiction — but the position has an obvious beneficiary.