With canceled or postponed productions, Eccho Rights remains proactive and designing new strategies to support producers and broadcasters with disrupted pipelines due to the Coronavirus outbreak. “Many ongoing productions are being canceled and that is a huge problem for many producers. We feel strongly for producers and try to support them in the best way we can, trying to find proper endings in the middle of the seasons, to make the season in order to match in general,” Fredrik Malmborg, Managing Director at Eccho Rights, told to Señal News. The executive also said that the distribution strategy of the company had changed.
In the current environment, all broadcasters had canceled its productions. That situation gets even worse for some of them, due to the cancelation of many summer sports events. "We are discussing with many of them how to support them in general from our archives. We are moving over in some cases from dubbed series into subtitles series and also many platforms are also moving over to subtitles,” Malmborg stated.
For the executive, the broadcasters’ crisis can represent a big opportunity for distributors because the digital platforms are selling more subscriptions than ever. “That is a growing market that we are discussing with many of them to license our short series.”, added.
Eccho Rights is offering a number of series that it's already dubbed into Spanish as “Cennet”; “Wounded Birds”, “The Promise” and “Elif”. “We can make an offer at a lower fee perhaps and we also have an archive that we have been dubbing of one thousand hours per year into Spanish every year,” asserted the Eccho Rights’ Managing Director.
As part of CJ ENM, Eccho Rights now is also offering a package of six Korean series to program a full slot in Latin America. “Our team has already sold them to three broadcasters in the region and we are looking for more,” said.
In the middle of the chaos and difficult situation of the entertainment industry, Fredrik Malmborg stays positive and waits for a quick recovery of the TV advertising revenue. “We expect to have two months of 'quarantine' in each country but after that, I’m sure the advertising market will quickly catch up,” he affirmed.
Malmorg also believes that the industry might understand that it is not necessary to attend to many markets as it did before. “I think we had our stand participating in 16 markets. It is a lot, maybe we can reduce that part of the strategy. We are all learning to work on distance, we’ve been doing it for a long time as we have offices in Istanbul, Stockholm, Madrid, and Seoul. We are kind of used to work from anywhere and I think that trend will continue but it’s a new world out there and we have to support each other and find solutions to the problem that we have,” he concluded.
By Romina Rodríguez