Attendance at the Serielizados TV Fest is rising as Europe’s TV industry hurts

The numbers are in. In Serielizados, Barcelona’s vibrant online/online TV festival, the number of in-person visitors increased by 80% to 16,000 between November 3 and 12. The online version, hosted by luxury SVOD service Filmin, ran from November 13 to 23 and attracted 194,000 viewers. This makes Serielizados the second most watched film-TV festival in Spain, after San Sebastián, the organizers announced on Tuesday.

“In this 12th edition, we have made the definitive leap to become the most important series festival in the country, with growth both in number of viewers and in content, with more than 35 premiere series and with an international congress for professionals, Serielizados Pro, which further positions the festival as a driving force in the Spanish series industry,” said Betu Molero, co-director of Serielizados, on Tuesday.

The presence of Serielizados also brings with it a paradox. Won by Sweden’s ‘Pressure Point’ last year, Serielizados was launched in 2014 and has built a reputation for excellent taste. The 2025 festival line-up also included a masterclass from Alan Ball, 20 years after ‘Six Foot Under’, ‘The Danish Woman’ and a masterclass from creator Benedikt Erlingsson, ‘Reykjavik Fusion’ and ‘Nepobaby’, plus a screening of Sally Wainwright’s BBC One series ‘Riot Women’.

Serielizados Pro proved just as popular, delivering high-quality debate, blessed by a large Nordic presence, with executives from SVT, DR and YLE, plus also representatives from BBC Studios, Arte France, Germany’s Beta Film and Paris-based Slot Machine.

The speakers also included a range of producers from Barcelona – notably almost all of them women – plus representatives from TV operators Movistar Plus+, 3Cat, RTVE, Atresmedia and Filmin.

Who wouldn’t want some Barcelona sun in November? However, there were other reasons for the presence of top class in the sector. If this year’s Serielizados Pro conveyed a message, it was that Europe – and Canada – are still producing series of the highest caliber, but the industry needs to connect, like in Barcelona.

That’s because of the sobering state of the international TV industry. Symbolically, Serelizados Pro, which took place on November 6, did not start with sunshine, but with an almost Biblical downpour.

Following are a few takeaways:

What the Serelizados PRO debate said about the state of the international TV industry

The short answer was yes, the industry is in a state. “Nearly 18 months after we first identified the trend, we are still at ‘75% Peak TV.’ In other words, the market has shrunk to 75% of the size of Peak TV,” said Guy Bisson of Ampere Analysis at the Mipcom fair in Cannes in October. Much of the downturn is being driven by streamers pulling out, down more than 100% from early 2024 original series commissions, he added. Add to that several factors, outlined in Serielizados Pro. First, production costs have skyrocketed. Furthermore, “streamers have great libraries, windows are getting much shorter, and they are not as insistent on exclusivity and open to selling their own content. MGM is selling Amazon, which makes normal distribution much more difficult,” said Christian Glockel of Beta Film in Serielizados. The big issue discussed during Serielizados is how players can respond.

What buyers want

One response: players are playing it safe. “Everyone is feeling the pressure and is supporting programs they know will be successful,” says Rebecca Ransley from BBC Studios. What buyers want is crime, whether it’s “fun crime” or “where you sit back in shock,” she added. “Returnable crime series with talent attached to them” are also pluses, Ransley said, citing “Death Valley,” starring Timothy Spall, sold to 100 markets. “There is definitely a resurgence of hunger for hyper-local, authentic stories that reach the entire world,” she continued, calling it the “Adolescence Effect.”

There is also a demand for uplifting entertainment, Gockel argued. “The world is a mess, a litany of bad news. ‘Maxima’ is about how a young woman becomes a princess and then a queen. If you had thought of that five years ago, there probably wouldn’t have been any interest.”

Buzz titles

Serielizados Pro had no formal market. That said, the speakers talked about shows. Arte France’s Alexander Piel and Movistar Plus+’s Susana Herreras peeked at excerpts from “Killing a Bear,” a fact-based wild bear murder mystery that exposes deep social conflict in the high Pyrenees, suggesting one of international TV’s great appeals: a sense of stunning local place. Of the completed series, four of the Serielizados’ biggest titles turned out to be the eventual winners: ‘A Better Man’ from Norway and ‘Empathy’ from Canada in the international competition, ‘The Anatomy of a Moment’ and ‘Jakarta’ in the national competition.

Co-production: The Get Out of Jail key card

In many ways, co-production is now seen as the most important step forward for the European TV industry. First and foremost, it serves an essential purpose in the so often director-driven European industry: for “The Danish Woman,” produced by Paris-based Slot Machine and Iceland’s Gullslottid and Zik Zak Filmworks, the “main goal has always been to protect the very original and unique voice of Benedikt Erlingsson and for that we needed independent financing somehow,” says Slot Machine’s Marianne Slot. Basic funding came from Slot Machine itself and the Icelandic public broadcaster RÚV, then from European broadcasters and funds, including the EU Creative Media Program.

Maintain IP

Open market patchwork financing can also enable producers to achieve what until recently was seen as the Holy Grail: retaining IP. Sold by Beta Film, ‘Pubertat’ was backed by Catalan pubcaster 3Cat, HBO Max for Spain, soft money including a €1.5 million Catalan government grant () and a tax break, as well as financing from Eurimages and Media Program, said Miriam Porté of Distinto Films. “We are fortunate to be able to retain about 99.5% of the IP, which is quite amazing. The main question, of course, is whether the series sells, and sales are not a piece of cake these days,” Serelizados PRO suggested.

Co-production: a standard mode

“At SVT we hardly make fully financed projects: without co-production there is no show,” says Sonja Hermele of Swedish SVT. As Jarmo Lampela of Finland’s YLE noted, the five national public broadcasters in Scandinavia have been working together for years. They launched the Nordic 12 in 2018 to produce twelve premium dramas per year, and added ZDF (Germany), NPO (Netherlands) and VRT (Belgium) to create the New8 in 2023, to co-produce eight series annually. ZDF also collaborates with France Televisions and RAI in The Alliance, Lampela noted.

Let’s hear about the global streaming services: how they can help co-production

Disney+ and Hulu went head-to-head internationally with SVT and Stockholm-based Dramacorp’s Cold War comedy thriller “Whiskey on the Rocks,” which won the 77th Prix Italia in the TV Drama category in late October. The series revolves around an incident in 1981, when a Soviet submarine of the U-137 ‘Whiskey’ class ran aground on rocks deep in Swedish territorial waters – in the middle of a sensitive Swedish naval exercise. That context is hardly known to today’s Swedish audience. “Whatever Disney felt was the global appeal of an audience to the show, it was actually something that Swedish audiences benefited from as well,” SVT’s Hermele said..

Partnerships

In such a pressured market, “it’s really about partnerships. You know, our whole business is about relationships,” Ransley said, citing BBC Studios’ relationship with Germany’s ZDF, which has produced ‘Famous Five’, ‘Chelsea Detective’ and ‘The Good Girl’s Guide to Murder’.

The opening session of Serielizados Pro delved deeper into one of the most important consolidating alliances in Europe, between Spain’s Movistar Plus+ and France’s Arte France, co-producers of ‘Hierro’, ‘The New Years’, ‘Anatomy of a Moment’ and ‘Killing a Bear’. It’s a like-minded title-for-title alliance. “At Movistar Plus+ we talk a lot about what is commercial. Often it is not the most open series. It is more about social conversations, about people who think they should watch our series. Finding someone in Europe who understands things like us is very important,” says Movistar Plus+’Herreras.

For Arte France, partnership is also about access to talent, says Piel. “It was about talent and content. Talent with a vision, a different vision of how to make TV series and with something so deep inside that creates unique and unique content. So we probably had two dreams. To get to work with Rodrigo Sorogoyen and Alberto Rodríguez,” said Piel.

And the future?

Looking to the future, “streamers will focus on big IPs that bring in subscribers and increasingly co-produce with good distributors or studios that take responsibility for packaging the productions,” Glockel said. Beta Film is therefore increasingly involved in upstream production. “We used to wait until a product was ready and then choose whether or not to distribute it. Now with co-production we get into action much earlier, in the script phase,” he said.