Mipcom 2026 preview: Skydance, Banijay, YouTube and AI reshape the landscape; BBC Studios’ Sharifa Mansour and Kate Woods on getting programmes made

yeah it's the first market with those two behemoths on either side of the um of the atlantic the skydance thing has obviously only concluded officially and launched on the stock market on the day that we're recording this podcast, which is about five days before Mipcom.

So how much sort of presence that new company will have there? Because I mean, it's been far from certain that that deal would get done until the last week or so.

But yeah, it's the first Mipcom with these two massive companies So I guess my thoughts for the week are threefold, really.

Firstly, how are these companies going to behave and what is their strategy? Because there's obviously, there's a lot of controversy, particularly around the Skydamps deal that people say it will lead to less choice, less variety, less competition, fewer buyers buying fewer shows, which is obviously bad for a market like Mipcom and our sort of corner of the business in general.

There is another school of thought from Content London, and Simon Chin said this at our event last December, that if they want to genuinely create a massive competitor for Netflix, you could end up in another streamer arms race Like the one we had a little while ago where you had Prime, Apple, Netflix all sort of stocking up on content and paying big money for shows.

So it is possible that that could happen.

They've put out a very long memo to staff talking about such an enormously positive future as Skydance is.

I think one of the aims they've said is to win trust every day, which I think a lot of people, news watchers will have an eye on what happens with CNN in that regard.

But they get, they seem to be talking up this idea that they want to be a mega player in the streaming business.

So if you wanted to look at it positively, it could be another big buyer to go with Netflix.

The second thing, I mean, Banerjee have pretty much set their top team now and are taking a new look distribution team down to MIT.

There are obviously going to be other execs falling out of these two companies still to come.

So, I mean, it is sometimes interesting to walk down the with two mega mergers just concluded there's going to be a lot of that this time.

And then I guess the third thing I'm looking for is where the other sort of smaller and mid-range players, particularly in distribution, fit into this landscape.

You're seeing different approaches from people like Sphere Abacus, for instance, have done a few mergers with Flame, with Bell Media, and then most recently with Rocket Rites.

They're very much pursuing a volume play to launch onto YouTube and launch fast channels and basically have a catalog sort of thousands and thousands of hours deep.

Jonathan Ford is interviewed in our Factual Weekly this week about that strategy and that deal.

And then you've got other players like Bossa Nova Media who are talking up their development days and the projects that have come out of that and very much their strategies to get in with much earlier funding.

Because there are a lot of projects out there that are looking for funding in this mega merger environment.

So is that the role of distributors? So yeah, looking to see one, what these big players look like and how they're going to behave and what their strategy is.

Two, what's going to happen to the execs that have fallen out of these mergers? And three, where it leaves the indies and the mid-range and the smaller companies.

Indeed, yeah.

I mean, the likes of ITV Studios, Fremantle, Media One, BBC Studios, even Sony perhaps, I mean, they're all going to be having to respond to these changes in some ways.

In terms of the way that the business is looking at the moment and the kind of barometer changes, that we get from the news that's coming across our desk every day.

I mean, the industry's in a very sort of strange place at the moment.

yeah it's the first market with those two behemoths on either side of the um of the atlantic the skydance thing has obviously only concluded officially and launched on the stock market on the day that we're recording this podcast, which is about five days before Mipcom.

So how much sort of presence that new company will have there? Because I mean, it's been far from certain that that deal would get done until the last week or so.

But yeah, it's the first Mipcom with these two massive companies So I guess my thoughts for the week are threefold, really.

Firstly, how are these companies going to behave and what is their strategy? Because there's obviously, there's a lot of controversy, particularly around the Skydamps deal that people say it will lead to less choice, less variety, less competition, fewer buyers buying fewer shows, which is obviously bad for a market like Mipcom and our sort of corner of the business in general.

There is another school of thought from Content London, and Simon Chin said this at our event last December, that if they want to genuinely create a massive competitor for Netflix, you could end up in another streamer arms race Like the one we had a little while ago where you had Prime, Apple, Netflix all sort of stocking up on content and paying big money for shows.

So it is possible that that could happen.

They've put out a very long memo to staff talking about such an enormously positive future as Skydance is.

I think one of the aims they've said is to win trust every day, which I think a lot of people, news watchers will have an eye on what happens with CNN in that regard.

But they get, they seem to be talking up this idea that they want to be a mega player in the streaming business.

So if you wanted to look at it positively, it could be another big buyer to go with Netflix.

The second thing, I mean, Banerjee have pretty much set their top team now and are taking a new look distribution team down to MIT.

There are obviously going to be other execs falling out of these two companies still to come.

So, I mean, it is sometimes interesting to walk down the with two mega mergers just concluded there's going to be a lot of that this time.

And then I guess the third thing I'm looking for is where the other sort of smaller and mid-range players, particularly in distribution, fit into this landscape.

You're seeing different approaches from people like Sphere Abacus, for instance, have done a few mergers with Flame, with Bell Media, and then most recently with Rocket Rites.

They're very much pursuing a volume play to launch onto YouTube and launch fast channels and basically have a catalog sort of thousands and thousands of hours deep.

Jonathan Ford is interviewed in our Factual Weekly this week about that strategy and that deal.

And then you've got other players like Bossa Nova Media who are talking up their development days and the projects that have come out of that and very much their strategies to get in with much earlier funding.

Because there are a lot of projects out there that are looking for funding in this mega merger environment.

So is that the role of distributors? So yeah, looking to see one, what these big players look like and how they're going to behave and what their strategy is.

Two, what's going to happen to the execs that have fallen out of these mergers? And three, where it leaves the indies and the mid-range and the smaller companies.

Indeed, yeah.

I mean, the likes of ITV Studios, Fremantle, Media One, BBC Studios, even Sony perhaps, I mean, they're all going to be having to respond to these changes in some ways.

In terms of the way that the business is looking at the moment and the kind of barometer changes, that we get from the news that's coming across our desk every day.

I mean, the industry's in a very sort of strange place at the moment.