Oct 22, 2026 · 57 min · 11 segments
In this special episode we honoured to welcome Diederick Santer, whose career in TV is a fabulous example of the joys and challenges of making TV. From being the boss of Eastenders to running his own…
Diederick SanterGuest
Claire TavernierHostMaureen KerrHost
Oliver TurnbullHostSo I really want to get into your head here and ask you, so if you think about it today and all of your experience, so what does a commercially attractive... a drama look like today, then? Are people thinking about the talent, the IP, the underlying IP, I should say, the genre, or something completely different? What's happening in that room when you're sitting there with all these executives?
I mean, BritBox is a good one to talk about because The proposition was very simple and that the service was not required to be all things to all people.
It was a kind of UK scripted and to some degree unscripted specialist in Anglophile territories.
And so you'd look at... what's the show that everyone's watching? You'd look at that and you could sort of see kind of what was efficient in terms of cost per view.
And that was a great metric and certain shows that weren't budgeted that high or that we weren't paying a fortune for could yield extraordinarily low kind of cost per views.
And so another really interesting metric is, and I know other streamers do this as well, what is the first viewed show when you start a subscription or when you start a free trial? Why have you come to that service? And so we would see often it was not the warmer crime things.
Or we had an adaptation of, we had a story about Cary Grant, which played really well in America.
And, I mean, the other thing you look at, all broadcasters look at this now, is completion rate.
So I really want to get into your head here and ask you, so if you think about it today and all of your experience, so what does a commercially attractive... a drama look like today, then? Are people thinking about the talent, the IP, the underlying IP, I should say, the genre, or something completely different? What's happening in that room when you're sitting there with all these executives?
I mean, BritBox is a good one to talk about because The proposition was very simple and that the service was not required to be all things to all people.
It was a kind of UK scripted and to some degree unscripted specialist in Anglophile territories.
And so you'd look at... what's the show that everyone's watching? You'd look at that and you could sort of see kind of what was efficient in terms of cost per view.
And that was a great metric and certain shows that weren't budgeted that high or that we weren't paying a fortune for could yield extraordinarily low kind of cost per views.
And so another really interesting metric is, and I know other streamers do this as well, what is the first viewed show when you start a subscription or when you start a free trial? Why have you come to that service? And so we would see often it was not the warmer crime things.
Or we had an adaptation of, we had a story about Cary Grant, which played really well in America.
And, I mean, the other thing you look at, all broadcasters look at this now, is completion rate.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.