Copyright Deadline
The worlds of digital production, the creator economy and traditional media collided at the Digital Content Forum at the BFI on London’s South Bank this week. There’s a lot of introspection in legacy media about how to make the numbers stack up as the world of entertainment changes. Meanwhile, the creator and digital sectors are coming from a smaller but fast-growing base and have a different energy; the focus is on growth and expansion. Here are some of the highlights as creators, digital producers and folk from traditional TV rubbed shoulders. Ford’s Production Line: Sony Preps YouTube Channels Matt Ford joined Sony Pictures Television earlier this year to set up a new digital division and said the studio is now working out which creators it will work with. “We’ll go into production in December with our first channel and launch in Q1 ideally, with the next launches staggered throughout next year,” he said. “Our current plan has us launching three or four channels a year.” The former BBC Studios exec added that SPT are in this space for the long-term and will build a broad portfolio of YouTube channels. ‘The Diary Of A CEO‘: Steven Bartlett Gets Animated Steven Bartlett’s Steven.com has just raised an eight-figure investment valuing ‘The Diary of a CEO’ podcaster and Dragon’s Den star’s company at $425M. Bartlett talked about building “the Disney of the creator economy,” so maybe a move into animation is a natural step. Jason Fisher at Bartlett’s podcast prodco FlightStory set out the plan. “What if Stephen Bartlett was the next [educational YouTuber] Miss Rachel? There’s a subset of our audience who are approaching a point in their life where they’re starting a family… if we can continue to engage them in a way that they need, we can continue to be a touch point in their life. So, we are now working on educational content and 20-minute animated cut-downs of The Diary of a CEO.” 200K Reasons European Micro-Drama Is Big The European take on micro-drama is taking shape and the DCF heard seasons are being budgeted in the £100,00-300,000 ($130K-390K) range, taking about eight weeks to produce, and leaning heavily on AI. Matt Campion dished details of Spirit Studios’ debut micro-drama. Vertical drama director Dan Lowenstein (The Mafia Boss) is on board, Campion said, and the project will be a time-machine period-drama set in the UK but tuned to U.S. audiences. Metrotone Media’s Katharina Gellein Viken, meanwhile, revealed a new micro-drama in the works, a mockumentary about the making of a low-budget British gangster flick. Creating Creator Value: Super Fans Needed Creator businesses often start out as one or two-person outfits and scale up. For those looking to raise money, the finance experts set out what’s required. The back of the envelope valuation for creator businesses is six times profit, Claire Geddie, Director of Creator Partnerships at investment outfit Electrify told the crowd. The former YouTube exec set said it’s also about hitting the right kind of numbers. “Historically, particularly with YouTube businesses, there was like a correlation between what we viewed as successful and the number of subscribers. We now operate much more in a ‘1,000 true fans’ model, where we want to see a really dedicated group of audience members, fans who are potentially portable to different ways that the business might evolve.” ITN Staffing Up For New Digital Division News was on the agenda for the first time at the 2025 DCF, with Sam Barcroft moderating and some healthy on-stage sparring between Ian Rumsey, Managing Director of content at ITN, and Kate Sullivan, Acting Head of Digital at Sky News. Rumsey talked up a new ITN digital division and seemingly set about staffing up in the room. “I’m really here today to learn…and also to recruit some people, because we are launching a digital division and the [people we need] are probably sitting out there,” he said as audience members quickly updated CVs and LinkedIn profiles. Rumsey explained he wants six or seven digital natives for the new unit: “We make documentaries for Netflix and all the PSBs and we are about to bring together the sort of disparate elements of what has existed in the digital world together and invest and really drill down in this area.” The Fellas Creating A New Female Collective The Fellas are a creator collective and their studio business makes some of the UK’s top audio and video podcasts. Elliot Hackney, COO at The Fellas Studios, teased a new idea being worked up in-house. “We’re working on one right now, which is a female collective group that we hope will be massive,” he said. On the same panel, Katja Perry, Senior Strategic Partner Manager, YouTube, explained how the platform is promoting content from creator groups with a feature that allows talent to tag and share videos. “If you look at some of his latest videos on KSI’s channel, you can see him using this feature,” she said. “You can be like, ‘I’m doing a video with Angry Ginge,’ as he did, and they can tag each other and help give each other more traffic.”
