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Saturday saw the kick-off for this year’s MIPDoc conference, with a ‘View From the Top’ session on what kind of documentaries buyers and commissioners are looking for in 2018. The panel included Steve Burns, chief programming officer at CuriosityStream; Christian Drobnyk, EVP of programming strategy and acquisitions at National Geographic Channels; and Thierry Mino, deputy head of documentaries, international coproductions and acquisitions at France 5. The moderator was Anna Carugati-Guise, group editorial director at World Screen.

Among the talking points: Mino giving a public-service broadcaster’s perspective on factual. “Sometimes, the ambitions, the angles, the explanations that the public can expect to find are in the public channels,” he said. “When we are doing shows about violence against women or women living on the streets, what we want to explain, to introduce to the audience will be completely different from what a private company would do. The angles would be different.”

Burns explained what kind of audience that CuriosityStream is drawing to its on-demand documentaries subscription service. “Our subscriber base is 34% millennial, which in our former TV worlds is pretty remarkable. And 40% of all the people who come to us are either cord-nevers or cord-cutters. These are people who TV can’t reach, for the most part… They’re craving science and history,” he said.

As for what the commissioners are looking for, Mino said science, space, ancient civilisations and archeology are currently doing well for France 5, while it’s also looking for discovery and wildlife acquisitions for daytime slots. Burns, meanwhile, warned of the importance of finding new ways to cover familiar topics.

“We’re always looking for a new production technique that allows people to revisit those topics. And science is always changing, so that’s something great: we can continue science indefinitely. It’s that substance matched with a very entertaining storytelling style that we’re looking for,” said Burns.

Drobnyk addressed a question about whether there’s enough content to sate the appetites of the big linear channels and VOD services. “There’s enough content. I think there was a period when there was a big creative crisis, frankly, in non-fiction television. And reality television took us there,” he said. But this crisis has eased, he suggested. Burns agreed: “When all networks went to reality, the people who normally came to Discovery and National Geographic for history and science could no longer find it. We’re getting a lot of those people coming to us now,” added Burns.

All the commissioners are looking for a balance between series and one-off specials, although Burns suggested that a digital service has more need to provide variety for its subscribers through specials, rather than blowing most of its budget on just a few series. All are also focused on ensuring younger viewers find their way to documentaries. “Making the content relevant to a new generation of viewers. That’s really the key, because ultimately it’s about the content,” said Drobnyk.

Burns noted the competition in the online-video space, with an estimated 900 SVOD services worldwide. “Only a handful have factual programming like we do, so that reduces the competition,” he said, before citing another problem that’s on his mind: “The rights issues. A broadcaster that originates a film, naturally they’re going to want to maximise the broadcast of that programme in their own market, so we have to geo-block here and there around the world,” he said.