Former Lionsgate top executive Paul Presburger, now CEO of Miércoles Entertainment Studios, shared his thoughts on less aggressive streaming spending and the growth of advertising-supported streaming (AVOD) at the Iberseries & Platino Industria Spanish- and Portuguese-language TV conference and market in the Spanish capital Madrid on Tuesday.
“For content owners, AVOD is a bit of a mirage,” he said during a session in which he was interviewed by Sergio Pizzolante, president, Secuoya Studios commercial & international distribution. “So far, even if it’s working well, it’s pennies, right?” He compared the financial benefits by mentioning artists and music streamer Spotify. ”Oh, my song was played 3 million times, and I made $500,” Presburger said. “It’s somewhat like that. But money’s been made at the top end by the company selling the advertising, and not as much drips down.”
The executive said he is considering models to make advertising work for his company too. “For a producer, if you had an advertiser on board beforehand that you can attract, and we’re looking at doing that,” things could work better, he argued.
Presburger is also a believer in the resurgence of content distribution windows across the film and TV industry. “We’re going to run these things through windows, like we’ve done with movies. You make a lot of money at the theaters. You make a lot of money selling video on demand. You make a lot of money on selling the pay-one rights, the pay-two rights, the free TV rights, the AVOD rights, and you have to run it through that vault,” he offered. “And that will be coming back as the streaming services and everybody’s trying to cut their budgets.”
He also pointed to signs of changing priorities in negotiations for financing and rights as streaming profitability continues to be a core focus for many in Hollywood. “I remember we used to go to Netflix, or we’d go to somebody that said, ‘no, we won’t split rights. We want to own everything.’ And now they’re much more flexible, both in terms of the territories, in terms of the rights, because they want to lower their risk in content,” Presburger shared. “So the goal for producers is to find studios that can help them finance. So it’s either bringing on a sponsor, it’s equity financing, which I think is going to play a bigger role, tax incentives — it’s all of these things coming together and then finding the streamers or finding folks that can help cobble the financing of these shows together, much like movies have been done in the independent world forever.”
On a panel about remakes and adaptations that followed, Presburger shared an anecdote involving fellow panelist Meg Thomson, executive vp, worldwide content at Globalgate Entertainment, the international production and co-financing company co-founded by Presburger. “I had a meeting a year ago with one of the big streamers’ head of international, and we were just throwing around ‘what should we be doing in the Spanish-language world?’ And they said: ‘something like Succession,” he recalled. “Well, I got back to the office, and I called Meg, and Meg said, ‘what about Swanenburg’? It’s this amazing Dutch series that is like Succession with two murder mysteries built into it. And she had already set it up in Korea.”
Presburger previously also worked for Pantelion Films and Spanish-language streaming service Pantaya, departing in late 2022 to focus on Globalgate.