EXCLUSIVE: Last year’s labor strikes may have convinced big players to renew transmission residual copyrightbut debates over compensation are either far from over or unique to the US.

Through their fledgling consulting businesses, British television veterans Adrian Wills and Simon Brown They are on a mission to help producers, talent, and agents get a fairer slice of the streamer pie.

Working closely with analytics firm Digital-i, the pair, who have several decades of experience working for companies such as BBC Studios and UKTV, have developed a formula to roughly calculate how much certain shows are worth to a streaming service on terms of monetary value: potential gold dust for content creators in the dark.

While streamers, especially netflixhave become more transparent with data visualization lately, Wills and Brown are now taking data and leveraging it.

“We’re kind of on a mission to help content producers get their fair share of SVoD revenue,” Brown said when Deadline caught up with the duo in Soho a few weeks ago. “The margins for a streamer are now enormous. If I were a content producer generating that level of income, then I could expect to get a slightly larger share.”

Wills and Brown’s ‘content rating service’ works by taking ratings data from 20,000 streamer subscribers provided by Digital-i and then rating a show based on its contribution to total subscription revenue and total content spend. from the streamer. When negotiating the price of a future season or acquisition of a show, producers, talent or agents can later put this on the table and provide streamers with what Brown calls a “capped valuation,” which actually They are two figures that act as a floor and a ceiling to know how much a project could be worth.

“We appreciate that Netflix can make ‘X amount’ from your show, but they have to run a business so you don’t get your full cut,” Brown said. “But we give the producer a range: you come in with an aspiration about subscriber value and you have a ‘we shouldn’t go below this’ number in your pocket.”

Ironically, streamers would have a hard time denying the validity of the data, as many subscribe to Digital-i to “look over the fence at their competitors,” according to Brown. Digital-i data maps Netflix, main videoDisney and max.while an extension to AppleTV+ It is planned for next year.

Wills and Brown have spent the last few months promoting independents, talent, media law firms and agencies such as CAA, Avalon, All3Media and Banijay. For CAA, they recently completed a valuation estimate for Bridgerton and Queen Charlotte, while using the BBC Peaky Blinders, which has been licensed by Netflix for years, to prove its worth to producer and distributor Banijay. “We asked if it would be valuable to know how much the streamer made from his show and the answer was ‘yes,'” Brown said.

Notably, Wills and Brown are also advising a company on the valuation of EU rights statutory remuneration for 2022, which aims to ensure that creators of intellectual property receive fair compensation for their works and which is currently being challenged by streamers in court.

Subs, engagement, retention

The Pair’s Formula examines a program’s performance through a triple lens: subscriber acquisition, engagement, and retention. Contributing to this is Digital-i data covering the 20 largest markets comprising 80% of global subscribers, giving clients a global perspective. “The market is relatively saturated in the US and UK, so a high-performing show here might not drive subscriber growth but rather solidify audiences,” Wills said. “But it could work well in other places, for example in Japan or Latin America, where penetration is lower. So what struck me initially was how many different ways we can create value around this.”

given as dominated the residual demands of the streamer Following dual labor strike negotiations in the United States last year, the duo say now is a good time to try to help the industry earn its fair share. “There’s a ‘cost plus’ tradition in this industry of taking, say, £1.2 million ($1.6 million) an hour if your show is worth £1 million, but we question that and say, ‘Well, if a program generates £4 million, so is £1.2 million really the right level?” Brown said. “Without wanting to sound too altruistic, supporting grassroots creativity is in everyone’s best interest.”

Going forward, Wills and Brown will continue to spread the word about their work. They hope to improve the formula so that a figure can also be conjured up that applies to new programs based on similar projects that have had good results, although they acknowledge that they are not there yet.

“When you become predictive, you open a chink in the negotiating armor, so we haven’t perfected it yet,” Brown added. “If it’s a returning series, you can watch previous seasons and that makes it pretty black and white, but when you start thinking about new shows, that’s where the streamer might question (the formula).”

As more is invested in what could eventually become a lethal formula, the conversation about streamer compensation seems louder than ever.