Markets

NTV Russia is set to participate in MIPCOM 2020, the world’s largest entertainment content market to be held on October 5 to 16. This year the event’s slated to take place online through the MIPCOM ONLINE+ platform. NTV offers a virtual booth and showcase featuring the channel’s best projects, including Secret for a Million and TV series such as Fatherland, Missing, Noble Detective, Sunshine Investigations, as well as new seasons of Shepherd, In Pursuit and Beyond Death.

Secret for a Million is one of the key offerings in NTV’s MIPCOM 2020 lineup. The show has repeatedly been the smash hit of its timeslot and the best broadcast event, becoming 1 weekend entertainment format in Russia. Secret for a Million is popular on the Internet as well as on the air with over 200M views accumulated to date at the official site and YouTube.

In 2020 Secret for a Million was included in the Content Innovation Awards short list in two categories: Entertainment Format of the Year and Factual Entertainment Programme of the Year. Also in 2020, ARB TV, an Azerbaijani TV broadcaster, acquired the rights to the format, with the first episode airing on September 26 under the title Onun sirri (His/Her Secret). The first episode earned a viewership share of 7.5% and rating of 1.9%.

One of the main new TV series presented by NTV at MIPCOM 2020 is going to be Fatherland. It’s a dramatic story of an honest journalist and writer whose views have been a little too non-conformist for the paper and the city he lives in. Due to mounting problems, he loses his job, gets behind on mortgage payments, his relationship with his daughter becomes rocky. Our hero decides to take the side of those he’s spent his life fighting. He gets a job as a press secretary at the city council. That leads to a series of events he tries his best to handle, but the line between good and evil, truth and lies becomes blurred very fast indeed.

Another new offering is Missing, an action-packed story of the Zorins, father and sonwhose jobs are to find missing people: the adult and distinguished Oleg is a policeman, the young and independent Pasha is a volunteer. They buttheads all the time, professionally and personally. The show features real father and son as protagonists. The main feature of the series is that it stars real father and son: Aleksandr and Arseny Robaks, both popular Russian actors, lead the cast as protagonists. Missing was their first joint project.

Additionally, NTV enters MIPCOM with period series Noble Detective’set in the early 20th century in the capital of the Russian Empire, St. Petersburg. The story is centered around Nikolay, a young man from the noble Bezsonov family who follows his heart to become a crime detective. Several large Asian players have already expressed their interest in the project.

Sunshine Investigations is another story of a hard-boiled policeman Sergey Sotnikov, nicknamed Hot Rod for his love of motorbikes and racing. His aptitude for solving crime cases is unparalleled in Sochi. The series premiered on NTV in late August and remained the primetime leader among Russian TV shows earning the average viewership share of 16.6%. It accumulated 45 million online views in less than a month.

In addition to the shows NTV plans to present new seasons of some hit series, including the second season of action-packed crime thriller In Pursuit. The show is set in St. Petersburg and features an experienced detective getting involved despite himself in a feud between a crime boss and the officers from his own department. The show aired on NTV for the first time last spring with excellent ratings. Its maximum viewership share reached 15.6%, while the number of views at NTV official website and YouTube exceeded 100 million.

Another returning series is action-packed crime thriller Shepherd (The Dog), the most popular TV series in Russia. Its leadership position has been confirmed not only by Mediascope ratings, but also by VCIOM surveys proclaiming that last year ‘Shepherd’ was unquestionably the top dog. The show has become an indisputable sensation in the time it’s been on air: it was the primetime leader multiple times with the viewership share going as high as 20.5%. The series scored over 300 million views at the official site and YouTube. Its IMDb rating is 8.0. With four seasons out since 2016, the fifth one is now in production. Dori Media Group, a global distributor, acquired international broadcasting and digital rights to the show in spring of 2019.

Another sequel is the new season of Beyond Death, a supernatural thriller made by NTV. The first season aired two years ago to become the best prime time TV series on Russian TV. The number of Internet views reached 65 million. In the first season Gleb Tochilin, a detective from the Investigations Committee, and Yulia Demina, a research fellow at the Brain Institute, teamed up to solve cases where the natural and the supernatural were indistinguishable from one another. In the new season, our heroes will have new mysterious crimes to investigate.