Main broadcasters, streamers, producers and creatives descend on Cologne this week for SerienCamp (June 11th of September), arriving at a second when the foundations of TV drama are shifting below everybody’s toes. Commissioning budgets are shrinking, audiences are scattered throughout social platforms and video games, and the cultural weight that status television as soon as carried mechanically now needs to be earned — typically with much less cash than earlier than. From microdramas to AI, IP universe-building and new financing fashions, listed below are 5 points that will probably be on everybody’s thoughts this yr.
1. Surviving the Put up-Commissioning World
For many years, the logic was easy: producers pitch to broadcasters, broadcasters fee and fund, and the advertising and marketing and distribution downside belongs to the channel. That mannequin is now structurally insufficient for the ambitions — and economics — of high-end drama. Commissioning budgets have contracted, the window between greenlight and viewers discovery has narrowed, and the channels that when assured cultural attain can now not ship it reliably.
“I don’t think quality overall has declined. There are still a lot of great shows out there,” says SerienCamp inventive director Gerhard Maier. “I just think that for those that exist, it’s becoming much harder to find their audience. The cultural impact [of social media or games] is often much higher than that of high-end drama series.”
The producers who will survive the subsequent 5 years won’t be these ready for the subsequent commissioning spherical, he argues, however the ones who can construct direct relationships with audiences — by proudly owning distribution, treating IP as a long-term asset quite than a one-time license, and growing the B2C capabilities that the normal B2B mannequin by no means required them to have. “Think about what your business model could look like if commissioning no longer exists, or no longer plays a major role,” Maier says. “How can you pivot from a B2B business model to a B2C business model?” The query SerienCamp is placing on the desk shouldn’t be whether or not this shift is coming, however how far European manufacturing infrastructure — with its deep dependency on producer-broadcaster relationships — is able to making it.
2. The Microdrama Second — What the Creator Financial system Can Train TV
SerienCamp was forward of the vertical content material curve – the convention held its first talks on Microdramas again in 2018, inviting execs from China and Snapchat Originals to current this then-radical cell-phone-first format. Past the hype, vertical drama has demonstrated a brand new technique of manufacturing — working shortly, typically with small groups of simply 2-3 creators, utilizing knowledge and viewers response to drive artistic choices — that conventional TV has been sluggish to undertake. As a substitute of seeing Microdramas as a risk, Maier thinks producers can be taught from the teachings of the creator class.
“I think it would be helpful for television producers to adapt to what successful creators do when distributing via TikTok and Instagram, how they test what works on the platform and refine it to rise up in the algorithm to reaching the largest possible audience,” he says.
On-line creators may give tips on storytelling, “how to generate emotionally complete content in one minute that some series don’t achieve in twenty,” Maier notes.
3. Sequence as Manufacturers: How To Construct an IP Universe
One of many extra bold conversations SerienCamp 2026 is more likely to host issues a mannequin that has proved enormously profitable in Asia and the anglophone market, however stays largely theoretical in European TV: the 360-degree IP universe. The thought — constructing story worlds with a number of touchpoints throughout sequence, video games, social content material and dwell expertise, quite than merely adapting one property throughout codecs — has have lengthy been customary apply in Japan and Korea. “But for me the question is how far the system in Europe, and especially in Germany, even permits something like that to emerge — through the commissioning system, through the relationship between production, creatives and broadcasters,” says Maier.
Structural experiments are starting to look. Studio 112 in France is combining the actions of a expertise company with manufacturing to bundle tasks earlier than approaching a commissioner, giving creatives a pores and skin within the sport and extra management over their very own content material. In Munich, Alan Greenspan, longtime ICM packaging agent and accomplice at UK manufacturing firm 6 Diploma Media producer (Fever Pitch) has joined forces with funding legal professional Tom De Gols to launch Bridge MP, a British/German administration and manufacturing agency that may actively take stakes within the productions it packages.
“These are examples of companies attempting to practice a form of vertical or diagonal integration a little more strongly,” Maier says.
4. AI As Promise and Existential Risk
The European movie and sequence trade has largely responded to AI as a set of manufacturing instruments to be evaluated for value effectivity, an strategy, in response to Maier, that misreads the expertise’s potential for disruption. “I’m often surprised by how relaxed many parts of the film and series industry are — because if you don’t adapt to this, I think it can be existentially threatening,” he says.
Whereas a lot of the media focus has been on AI changing particular person writers or administrators, Maier sees a extra structural risk in AI-enabled manufacturing at industrial scale producing volumes of “good enough” content material that crowds out culturally bold work throughout each distribution channel. In China, AI-driven pipelines are already operational and the displacement, significantly in vertical manufacturing, is measurable.
SerienCamp’s devoted AI convention, Plot Subsequent, will give attention to concrete hybrid manufacturing fashions already in use and on sensible frameworks for integrating AI into high-end workflows with out ceding the artistic and cultural floor that differentiates status drama from algorithmic slop.
In the meanwhile, there’s a sturdy viewers backlash to AI-generated content material. “But that is largely driven by the fact that people can identify this content as AI,” warns Maier. “What happens when you can no longer tell?”
5. Works in Progress — the Subsequent Gen of Should-See TV
Amid all of the discussions of disruption and data-driven innovation, SerienCamp stays a TV drama showcase, a location for best-in-class sequence from all over the world. It’s Works in Progress strand has a formidable observe document of discovering the German-language sequence that may break via globally. Reveals like Babylon Berlin, Charité, 4 Blocks, and Maxon Corridor all handed via the WIP program earlier than their premieres. “We like to follow a show across its full development arc, from a Writers’ Vision pitch to international co-production financing in the Story Exchange market, to first industry presentation in Works in Progress, to the premiere at the festival,” says Maier. Among the many titles to observe at this yr’s WIP showcase are Isabel Kleefeld’s upcoming Netflix thriller The Entice and the dystopian new-future drama Dronenland from ZDF/Magenta TV.
