MIPCOM 2015, Cannes: Sales record for Terra Mater Factual Studios

October 2015: MIPCOM, Cannes: Sales record for Terra Mater Factual Studios

At this year’s MIPCOM in Cannes, the world’s most important TV market, productions by Viennese production company Terra Mater Factual Studios were high in demand. Buyers from Germany, France, the US, Sweden, China, South Africa, Russia or Poland were the big spenders of 2015. All in all, deals covering a total of over 250 hours of programming were made.

German broadcaster WDR secured the rights to air the visually stunning four-part production ‘Wild Canada’ and the two-part series ‘Wild France’. German n-tv will broadcast the innovative two-parter ‘Killer IQ – Lion vs. Hyena’.

Swedish public broadcasting channel SVT knocked on TMFS’ doors with quite an extensive shopping list: 22 hours of Terra Mater Factual Studios’ best of the best will soon air in Europe’s far North; among them ‘Wild Canada’, three-parters ‘Wild Sri Lanka’ and ‘Nile – The ultimate River’ and five-part work of opulence ‘Brazil – A natural History’.

Winners of this year’s shopping marathon are VOD-services Multichoice from South Africa and CuriosityStream from the US. 28 hours of programming will soon be available with the former, and 23 hours of programming with an emphasis on science and history documentaries with the latter; programmes include two three-part series presented by Richard Hammond covering the topics of bionics and weather respectively, both multi-awarded; the historical economy-thriller ‘The Tulip Bubble’ and the forensic one-off ‘The Mona Lisa Mystery’ will soon be available to subscription customers as well.

The broadcast of the TMFS titles ‘Wild Sri Lanka’ – the three-part portrait of this fantastic island in the Indian ocean – and ‘The Model and the Bushmen’ about a stunning cross-cultural encounter can be expected soon in France.

South Africa’s public broadcasting station SABC shopped TMFS’ famed series on ‘Doctors without Borders’, its cinema-production ‘Among Wolves’ as well as the three-part doc series on the continent’s longest river – ‘Nile’. Chinese CCTV did not stop short after acquiring the three-parter on the ‘Nile’ – they added four-parter ‘Wild Canada’, conservation portrait ‘Leap of the Lynx’ and the high-speed drama ‘Hummingbirds’ to their list just as well.

‘Series are this market’s top sellers, be they three- or up to five-part productions’, says Sabine Holzer, Head of TV at Terra Mater Factual Studios. “Nature, Science or History: all of our genres appeal to the most different markets. Quality comes with a price, though – however, over the last couple of years we have managed to secure stable and mutually rewarding business relationships with big channels such as National Geographic or PBS in the US, France Télévisions in France or NDR in Germany. All of them are today some of our most reliable co-production partners, and that’s an outright must-have for being able to guarantee the realisation of blue-chip docs at the absolute top level of quality for which we’re known.”

Terra Mater Factual Studios specialise on spectacular stories covering the wildest places on Earth, exploring the greatest mysteries of our time and depicting the most fascinating stories in nature. Since the company’s founding in 2011, the Viennese production house has become one of the most successful players in the international documentary market.