Viewpoints: acquisitions strategies

Michele Schofield
Director, Content - Programming, Acquisitions & Production
AETN All Asia Networks Pte Ltd.
Singapore

 What are your acquisition strategies?

We cover a broad range of factual content in acquiring Pay TV rights for South East Asia, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau for our three very different factual channels: The History Channel, Crime & Investigation Network and the Biography Channel. We look at one-off one and two hour documentaries, as well as factual series for any of our networks. We take a strong interest in Asian content but are not limited to only Asian.

Rescue Mediums (RM)

What genres are you looking for?  

We look at broad genres of history, crime, investigation, reality, lifestyle, moving stories of real people, and biographies.

Can you give us several titles of domestic and international products that you acquired this year?  

"Behind Forgotten Eyes" was a US production but covered the subject of the Korean comfort women to the Japanese during WWII, "John Rabe: The Unlikely Hero of Nanking" was from United Docs (Germany) but was set in China in 1937, "Very Bad Men" was a Canadian acquisition for CI and "Rescue Mediums" came from ID Distribution (UK) for Bio.

How many hours of programming will you acquire this year?

Across our three networks we will acquire just less than 300 hours to supplement our original production and the content from A&E Networks.

Products from what countries are important for you?  

We are open to content from any part of the world, so long as it has a high-quality English language version and broad appeal (or Asian appeal).