International Industry Says Goodbye to MIPTV, Canneseries Promises to Return

The banner outside the Majestic Hotel said it all.

“The Last Dance” read the message on the banner from Turkish-based television sales group Global Agency, a farewell gesture to the international TV market MIPTV, a fixture on the industry calendar since its launch in 1965, which will wrap its final edition this Wednesday.

The billboard summed up the wistful mood of many industry executives who made the final trip to the Mediterranean to say farewell to MIP.

“It feels like a funeral march,” quipped one German channel boss, as he strolled down the streets past the mostly empty restaurants and cafes. In MIPTV’s heyday, when more than 10,000 international executives crammed into Cannes for the annual Spring market, it was a battle to find a free table.

Those days are long gone and MIP’s demise, as a TV market designed for the pre-streaming era, was a long time coming. Event organizers RX France are hoping to transfer the market to London to run alongside the fast-growing TV industry showcase the London Screenings. But the new MIP London, by design, will be a pale imitation of peak MIPTV, intended more to complement the London Screenings rather than stand alone in its own right.

The end of MIP comes as the entire small-screen industry is in the doldrums, with traditional ad-supported and pay-TV struggling and global streamers cutting back on their free-spending ways as Wall Street pressures them to save their way to profitability. Hovering over it all is the great unknown of artificial intelligence, and how fast-evolving A.I. tech will upend, or destroy, existing business models.

Against that grim backdrop, some of the executives who attended MIPTV’s swan song tried to put on a brave face. In a keynote address on Monday, Mark Endemaño, partner and managing director at London consultancy AlixPartners, noted that while growth in overall content spend has slowed down, it is still expected to reach an all-time high of $243 billion this year and that, even with the much-publicized end of peak TV, marked by the decline in original shows commissioned in the U.S. year, there were still a total of 1,600 originals (fiction and non-fiction) made in the states last year, compared to 1,500 in 2020. If TV is peaking, it is doing so from a near-historic high.

Endemaño argued companies who can go “back to the future” by adapting older business models, including collaborating on production and bundling content for distribution and returning to windowing to exploit revenue streams across subscription and ad-supported streaming, as well as traditional free and pay-TV as well as on social media, will be best suited for success in the coming period of disruption.

Others see new opportunities as streamers and other commissioners pull back from worldwide rights, allowing producers to structure deals more creatively.

Elisabeth d’Arvieu head of French production group Mediawan, which owns a suite of companies, including Brad Pitt’s Plan B, said commissioners now are being “very smart and are willing to work on windowing or a geographic split” with producers to get series made. Mediawan’s upcoming slate includes an epic new miniseries adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ revenge classic Count of Monte Cristo, starring Sam Claflin and Jeremy Irons and set up as a co-production with Palomar in Italy and France’s DEMD Productions for European public broadcasters France Televisions and RAI in Italy.

“Co-producing in between countries is a way to bring premium shows to our local customers but because [buyers] are only buying rights for one territory they can do this with a reasonable cost,” said D’Arvieu. She pointed to the upcoming Finnish drama series Dance Brothers, produced by Endemol Shine Finland for Netflix and public broadcaster YLE, as an example of the kind of collaboration “we wouldn’t have seen maybe three years ago.”

The audience demand for high-end international series, at least, does not seem to be waning. Canneseries, a television festival launched alongside MIPTV back in 2017, has seen its profile and popularity rise as MIP’s have fallen. This year’s Canneseries lineup included premieres of some of the year’s most hotly anticipated shows, including Amazon’s big-budget video game adaptation Fallout, from Westworld director Johnathan Nolan; the French Disney+/Hulu series Becoming Karl Largerfeld, starring Daniel Brühl as the notorious German fashion designer in his pre-ponytail period in the early ’70s; and AppleTV+’s period drama Franklin, starring Michael Douglas as the American founding father, alongside, Noah Jupe, Ludivine Sagnier and Eddie Marsan.

Canneseries has faced stiff competition, not least from SeriesMania, the international TV fest held just last month in the northern French city of Lille. With the end of MIPTV, many have been questioning whether the festival has a future without the spring market. Canneseries artistic director Albin Lewi insists the show will go on. “I can say definitively, there will be a Canneseries next year,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “We are not going anywhere.”

A small ray of light then, to brighten the mood of an otherwise sombre MIPTV send-off.