The French company BetaSeries offers an analysis of series projects, helping producers and writers understand their potential and target audience, and better pitch the projects themselves. It does this by using marketing data to enhance and customise sales pitches to commissioners at co-producing partners. The firm’s general director, Rémi Tereszkiewicz, tells us more.

Cineuropa: Why is your “Forecast” marketing evaluation becoming necessary for producers?
Rémi Tereszkiewicz: With the growing usage of SVoD and AVoD platforms, but also of TV channels developing their own platforms, series have become an essential part of their catalogues (representing 70% of the viewing time) and have become important levers for the platforms to recruit and retain their subscribers in a tense competitive environment.

When you sell a series to a platform, you must know how to position it so that the commissioner understands what audience it is targeting and how the series can contribute to attracting or retaining their users, over and above the artistic quality of the show. The indicators we produce allow the commissioner to give their green light more easily, thanks to factual elements such as the target audience, comparable titles and genre demand, thus reducing their risk and facilitating their internal budget negotiations.

Does Forecast also help the producer with other aspects of his or her project?
Yes, on top of strengthening and customising the sales pitch, we also deliver other indicators that help with defining the TV series’ main themes, choosing the series length (per episode and per season), identifying casting options with filters per country, genre or the audience’s preferred series, and so on. We also share financing models adapted to the project, plus financing tools in the shooting and production locations (coming in 2024).

Is Forecast only for producers?
No; the solution can be very useful for commissioners when it comes to selecting their pre-sales or co-productions. In 2024, we are also planning to evaluate IPs like books in order to bring projects with high potential to the TV-series market: in that specific case, we are targeting producers looking for projects and book writers selling their adaptation rights.

What is on the horizon for Forecast?
In addition to what I mentioned above, in the coming months, we will be developing trend indicators to assess the potential interest in a theme in one to two years’ time – enough time to produce a TV series. We are also working on writer-scouting tools, as one of the keys for success in a project is the “right” package combining the writing and the acting teams.

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Click here to access the Forecast service.