Acquisition Strategies

Graeme Ballard
Managing Director
Devolution Media Ltd
United Kingdom

What are your acquisition strategies at the beginning of 2010?

2010 is Devolution's sixth year.  We have been extremely fiscally prudent in our operations and our acquisition strategy remains to pursue the deals we need strictly on terms suitable for internet broadcast.

The film and TV industries have been amazingly slow to move with what is essentially a worldwide second industrial revolution but we have all been in it for at least 15 years now.  This industry inertia means people are still largely taking their products to market using horse and cart or a canal barge, when supersonic aircraft are available.

What products are you looking for?

In terms of the content itself, we are looking for high-end, short and long-form content that will appeal to a young(ish), male-skewed audience while remaining inoffensive to women. We are also looking for production and co-production possibilities for our own product slate.

What rights are you looking for?

For 2010, I would hope to see much more high-end content, on good business terms, where internet broadcast is considered more than merely an adjunct to DVD and plain old television. We felt the industry only really began taking internet seriously towards the end of last year – and probably only because of the economic downturn and falling advertising revenues. For those distributors and rights holders that did take it seriously, the problem, however, remained a lack of understanding of the rights for each of their products coupled with the perceived high risk associated with something supposedly “new”. To help alleviate these issues, we have narrowed our focus in 2010 and are primarily pursuing rights in the UK & Western Europe. I hope 2010 will continue the good progress being made in late 2009.