Beyond has been producing and distributing television content for more than 25 years. Its first international success story was Beyond 2000 which was produced for Australian broadcasters and Discovery US. Since then, it has gone on to produce thousands of hours of programming across various genres for broadcasters around the world, Television Asia Plus talks with its General Manager, Fiona Crago, about how Beyond packages its contents for Asian audiences. TVAPlus: How did Beyond perform in 2010 in terms of distribution deals? What are the new markets being explored? While kids and factual provide much of the Asian distribution revenues for us lifestyle-themed content has plenty of potential right now. There are now halfa- dozen Asian channels either wholly dedicated to it or have big lifestyle blocks and we do have great lifestyle content from our Australian and Canadian partners that we’ve been able to place in Asia. We have a cooking series Chuck’s Day Off with second seasons recently placed with Asia Food Network and PCCW and LI TV has home renovation show Love It Or List It and we’re in negotiations on another home property series at present. We were on track with our projections for Asia. TVAPlus: Are the types of programmes which are working for the Asian market, similar to that of other territories? What challenges have you faced in this area? The Asian region is diverse but in general we can say our children’s and factual content has and continues to work well overall. In our experience children’s content is fun, entertaining, unique and combines educational elements, sells well into Asia. Our series Backyard Science, for instance, is a few years old now but is still being acquired or renewed in this region. Clients love that it also targets older kids. We’ve also recently finalised deals for our pre-school series Wild Animal Baby Explorers (52×30’) to PTS in Taiwan, this quarter, MediaCorp-owned Okto TV in Singapore has also acquired science-themed kids game show Lab Rats Challenge. In terms of factual content our series Mythbusters continues to perform well for Discovery Asia, as does Taboo for National Geographic. How To and Science based series are popular and our series Engineered, which sits on BBC Knowledge in South East Asia, has recently sold to Wuhan TV in China; our topical one off documentaries, from our Canadian producers, also fare well with recent sales of Hyper Parents Coddled Kids to AETN Asia and TVB Hong Kong. TVAPlus: You’ve launched a number of new programmes in 2010, such as The Will, Toybox and Addiction. What has Beyond got planned for 2011? What about localization/format TV? We are definitely interested in pursuing localization of our existing content. We see India as a good market for this and are in discussions to produce a local format of one of our new children’s series. Currently the main area of localization is in shooting local hosts, ensuring any audience participation reflects the demographic of that territory we are producing for and of course adapting scripts, even music to be relevant to that audience. Cost is usually the biggest challenge. For next year, we are representing a beautiful new pre-school property called Iconicles which is produced by Create Media Ventures in the UK for Cbeebies. Astro are a partner in this programme and there will be localized Asian versions of the series. TVAPlus: Distribution in the Asia-Pacific is dominated only by a few big players, how does Beyond differentiate itself in this market? Also, would you say it’s saturated? Beyond is known for consistently delivering high quality factual and children’s content. We are very clear on our strategy and focus for growth in this region and our clients trust that each year we’ll be able to provide a new slate of content, which will include these two key genres for the region. It also helps that Beyond is not only a distributor of third party content but we produce many hours of our own content each year. And yes absolutely it is a saturated market especially preschool programming but again it is combining entertaining and educational in a unique, fresh way, which helps our content to stand out from the many, many other shows out there. TVAPlus: With the volume of original content/co-productions increasing, would Beyond consider moving into developing a channel on its own or as a joint venture, traditional or online? We have looked at various business opportunities and we would certainly not rule out a move into this space but we are not actively focusing on this at the moment. TVAPlus: What about new media, how is Beyond tackling new technologies and platforms? There are a few issues with new media in Asia. Digital piracy is still a problem and this issue needs to be sorted before we start running headlong into the non-linear area. We need to be assured that the digital rights management systems are in place to manage our IP. The other key issue for us is that revenues need to justify any non-linear deals. So we’re being cautious and waiting for the market to mature further.