Viewpoints: acquisitions strategies

Gideon Summerfield
Managing Director
Pioneer Online

What are your acquisition strategies?

Our FirstScience.tv venture is a special interest online video retailer. The appeal of our service to content owners is that we are finding a new audience for older TV material and generating new, incremental revenue from programming that' s essentially gathering dust. So it' s not disruptive to existing revenue streams. We seek programming that will have been broadcast previously, for which we can easily license online distribution rights. Margins for this type of product are tight so we are targeting what we describe as " low-hanging fruit " : a quick review of a contract will reveal that online rights are clearly held by the producer or distributor, with no need to renegotiate or uplift rights for contributory content such as music and archive.

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What programs are you looking for?

Pioneer Online has spent 7 years building an online audience who are interested in science with its established FirstScience.com website. We are now looking to sell them TV shows on subjects we know they' re interested in. We want to offer them top-quality, accessible science documentaries of the sort our sister company Pioneer Productions has made for so long for the likes of Discovery, National Geographic and Channel 4.

What are your acquisition plans?

As we move out of trial in the coming year, we will be ramping up our acquisitions. We currently have just over 80 titles on the platform and will be building to around 400 for our full-scale launch, so there' s a lot of work to done. In the short term, we' re keen to get the ball rolling with more partners; distributors and producers so that they can become familiar with our business, identify suitable material and initiate the rights review process. We need just a handful of titles from each initially. We have around seven partners to date, with at least seven more who have indicated a firm interest in joining us. One area we are keen to grow is high-definition, which is not much harder for us to distribute that standard TV. Most HD material that suits our remit is still too new and we' re finding that much is unavailable in our key territories. All the same, we are hoping to carry 20 or so HD titles at the full launch.