Ian Jones of The Creative Farm attended The Singapore Asia Television Forum, from 5-9 December 2011

I have been attending the Asia TV Forum every year since 2005, as well as both the MIP markets 2005 – 2007 respectively. While not as productive as MIP’s (nor as frenetic) the ATF is a good market for business and I was surprised that there are so few Australians going. I don’t think Austrade even had a presence this year. The market is now quite large and much more dynamic than in 2005 with very large contingencies from Korea, Japan, China, Singapore, Malaysia, France, Germany and even much to our shock, Finland. There is a strong emphasis on animation and there tends to be more sellers than buyers but the big regional buyers like FOX, HBO, Viacom, MTV and all the in country broadcasters are there and easy to meet.  Because we are well established in the region the market tends (for us) to be a renewal of acquaintances and a “what’s new” discussion.

Our focus as a media producer is to move our properties off TV and onto the internet and gaming platforms which is a massive shift in the business, production and distribution models. As such a lot of our discussions in 2011 were around “why are we doing this and how does this affect how we can work together”.

The last minute agreement with FCCE NL just prior to the market that we would JV with them in Asia on their new crowd sourced feature film Entertainment Experience was a big development as this is a format that is creating a major impact in the Netherlands already and it sits perfectly into our internet based gaming strategy.  ATF is probably the only decent market to go to in Asia but it is worth going to and to be effective you need to be there each year.

Market Trends

To us the big growth opportunities lie in Asia but not necessarily in the traditional media model so pursuing an outside the box strategy to create interactive social entertainment platforms that are mobile and location focussed is the core strategy – and Asia with its great mobile penetration and motivated youth is the ideal market (difficult though). It has taken us over a year + to understand and remodel our company and the properties but this is absolutely the future we believe.

Benefits

One of the key opportunities is the ability to meet the Singapore Media Development Authority and to a lesser extent Malaysia’s MDEC to work out co-pro structures and partners between Singapore and Australia (which have a co-pro treaty) and from there China, which is difficult but the MDA has a good positioning there so can help.