The series sold to niches – Kommersant FM

Russians did not like Turkish and Korean TV series – this content was never able to attract a mass audience, online cinemas admitted. Streaming platforms began to sharply increase purchases of films from these countries in the summer of 2022. The number of such projects on the most popular platforms has increased by one and a half to two times, writes RBC. Increased demand from buyers also caused an increase in prices for film products, market players said.

However, the hype turned out to be an imitation, and TV series from Turkey and South Korea remained only niche content, explained Ekaterina Martynova, director of licensing at MTS Media, which developed the Kion platform: “Everyone is talking about a huge surge in purchases in 2023 and at the end of 2022 . From my point of view, this is not entirely correct. We purchased Korean and Turkish content before the majors left, and it worked for us.

Maybe the platforms don’t start buying it anymore, but simply highlight it even more in their windows, somehow promote it. They thought it was a kind of import substitution when major content left Russia. In principle, this is a different segment; it cannot be a replacement.

The audience also watched major content, but to say that everyone who watched Hollywood films switched to Turkey and Korea is disingenuous, this is not true.”

Over the past year, streaming services have expired many contracts for previously purchased projects. The number of films and TV series from major companies by the spring of 2023 decreased by one and a half to two times. In particular, online cinemas lost the right to show the series “Friends”, the films “1+1”, “Interstellar”, “The Lord of the Rings”, as well as the film franchises “Harry Potter” and “Fantastic Beasts”.

At the same time, online platforms are interested in exclusive content, and buying the most popular TV series from Turkey justifies itself, noted PR Director of Start Group Victoria Denisova: “Over the past six months, Kingfisher and Cranberry Sherbet have been included in the overall top 10 on our platform, and this is a very good result.

Thanks to Turkish content, we relaunched Start World, and the channel is experiencing such a renaissance.

We always choose only hits, focus on ratings, don’t take everything, and that’s why the projects we buy work very well.

At the end of 2023, the number of unique views of Turkish shows increased fourfold compared to 2022. These series are a little bit soap operas, they are a little bit about isolation from reality, love and some ups and downs. There are a lot of stories about the poor and the rich, Cinderella stories. Their audience is predominantly women 25-45 years old.”

But the most popular content today is Russian-made, as all Kommersant FM interlocutors noted. The reason is in topics that are close to the viewer, explained Denis Kuskov, CEO of the analytical agency TelecomDaily: “The growth of Korean and Turkish content happened after the departure of the majors. People stopped watching their usual films, and the services immediately purchased a large number of TV series and films from these countries, as well as from Latin America and India.

But the surge was quite short-lived during 2022; in 2023 it already leveled off and, in general, did not grow.

Despite the significant acquisition of content, viewers still currently give preference to Russian projects, which have shown significant growth in recent years and attract the attention of users so that they pay monthly money to their online cinema. Of course, this is close to us. For example, the action in the series “The Boy’s Word” takes place in the nineties in the regions.”

Despite the fact that Turkish and Korean films are no longer the focus of online cinemas, the platforms do not plan to completely abandon them. On the contrary, they intend to expand the geography of their search. On the Start platform, for example, they see potential in projects from Mexico, Brazil and Argentina.

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Svetlana Belova