Banijay is one the founders of the London TV Screenings alongside All3Media, Fremantle and ITV Studios, and the event is now a firm fixture on the international TV calendar.
As the 2026 Screenings get underway it can’t be ignored that two of that quartet are in merger talks. Cathy Payne, Chief Executive of Banijay Rights, has seen several of international TV’s mega deals at close quarters, but does not get into the weeds of a potential Banijay and All3Media tie-up when she talks to Deadline. She is clear, however, that in TV distribution, size matters.
Big Boutique
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“I’ve always talked about the big and the boutique,” she says. “If you have a business that has 50,000 hours and a business that has over 100,000, there’s not much difference in your overheads. There’s no doubt there are synergies come with scale. But the big doesn’t mean that you’re not boutique in the way that you approach people and in the way that you sell. It just means you have a different infrastructure, a different amount of people, and people working on different types of content. ”
The London TV Screenings, meanwhile, have become a spot for both the big and boutique sales houses. Buyers now flock to London, but the event has a different cadence to something like MIPCOM. “Rather than a trade market, it’s an opportunity to have a more intimate conversation with buyers about what’s coming through and touch on things that may be soon-to-launch,” Payne says. “We’ll be touching on some titles that have already launched and pre-sold, but haven’t broadcast yet, like A Woman of Substance, Half Man and Falling, which are all coming through. We’ll also be talking about brand new titles that haven’t been announced yet.”
Industry Trends
Banijay has stakes in dozens of production companies and its Rights division sells the shows these labels make around the world. Across the industry there has been a squeeze on commissioning, which has a ripple effect. In the UK for example, factual and fact-ent producers used to hope for a greenlight from Discovery in the U.S. and then to place the show internationally. “A number of those producers have not had new commissions and some of those shows haven’t come back; Discovery is still in a bit of flux, and even more so now that they’re going to be sold,” Payne says.
In scripted, meanwhile, the pipeline of U.S. coproduction money is no longer flowing freely. “There are some areas that are opening up and we are looking at who might be coming back in,” Payne says as she surveys the scene. “You’ve got your regulars like PBS Masterpiece, Acorn, AMC, Sundance and BritBox. Everyone’s waiting to see with Paramount+ and their moves under Cindy Holland, but of course that’s all now tied up in what’s going on over at Warner Brothers Discovery. HBO Max closed down their co-production, Hulu aren’t doing as many now, and FX has only ever done very few. MGM+ still do them at the right price point.”
How you get a U.S. sale or funding partner on board against that backdrop? “The buyer will say: ‘How am I going to sell that to my audience? Who’s the face on the poster?’ We used to take out shows and sell them based on scripts, and we can still do that, but we need to have talent packaged to it,” Payne says.
The New World Of Distribution
As the production and platforms landscape changes, so does the world of TV distribution. As well as selling to the execs who are buying programs or formats for their channel or platform, the likes of Banijay Rights can now have a more direct relationship with the people watching their shows.
“Even though we don’t maybe have as much of the basic cable business anymore that’s been replaced in a meaningful way. Whether it’s on a VOD platform such as Tubi, Roku, Pluto, what we do on Amazon Prime Video Direct, all that has grown into a very substantial business for us.”
Payne continues: “One thing that we’re really focusing on this year is improving the quality of our ad revenue, our ad sales on publishing platforms. For example, we can do our own ad sales on FAST in some territories now, whereas before we couldn’t do that. We can control it more, and we can run our own campaigns and control things.”
London Rush Hour
With over 40 distributors now part of the London TV Screenings, it’s a fight for the attention (and checkbooks) of the buyers as they crisscross Soho and the surrounding parts of town. Banijay is expecting over 400 buyers at its event, but is also invested in the wider health of London TV Screenings.
“We don’t own it, we’ve been very clear our remit is to be a facilitator and we have really tried hard to make sure that there’s room and time for the smaller distributors,” Payne explains. “We have our morning session and we have a formats-specific one in the afternoon, but we’re also very mindful of trying to make our session as efficient as possible, because everybody has got other things to go to, other screenings and other meetings.”
When it comes to Banijay, however big its catalog is today – or becomes in the future – Payne has a reputation for being across the particulars. “Just because we got bigger, our sales people don’t think that I’m not reviewing every deal in a lot of detail,” she says. “I’m very big on the way we sell. I’m big on people knowing the product, because, ultimately, that’s what makes us who we are.”