Endemol UK, one of the biggest TV production firms worldwide, has recently set up a 15 million GBP (about $27 million) investment fund to develop gaming and gambling TV services and evolving platforms including mobile, IPTV and VOD. Our European contributor Peggy Anne Salz spoke to Peter Cowley, Endemol UK’s Director of Digital Media, to discuss the group’s growth plans and transition to multi-platform entertainment.
[by Peggy Anne Salz]  Give users what they want? The advance of user-created content and the rise of the empowered consumer turn up the pressure on production companies to deliver more interactive mobile content that involves users and encourages their participation.
Endemol can read the writing on the wall - which is why it is currently producing a mobile interactive reality show exclusive to UK mobile operator O2 and creating stand-alone content for the gaming industry through its newly-launched Endemol Gaming division. Last week Endemol UK set up a £15 million investment fund to an investment fund to help develop and promote digital media projects. I caught up with Peter Cowley, Endemol UK’s Director of Digital Media, to discuss the group’s growth plans and transition to multi-platform entertainment. One thing is clear: tapping into user-created content - either at the source (through increased interaction with users) or through funding activities aimed at it (through the Digital Media Investment Fund) is critical to future growth.
Unlike Freemantle, which has announced a project to harness user-created content, Endemol is shifting it’s thinking to “make user-created more central to the editorial,” Crowley says. “There is so much user generated content out there, there is a role for someone to package it up, aggregate it together and really make sense of it and create storylines around it, drama and narrative around it, which is really what the skill of a producer is today.”
Ad-funded content: “Not every mobile operator is prepared to fund in total the money to produce this sort of content, so we have had to look to diversify our revenues into getting money out of advertisers and getting the consumer pay as well as the distributor in this case, an operator to pay. We’ve really had to extend our business model to fill the financing gap for the video.”
MoCo key learnings: [In the case of the reality soap opera Get Close to the Sugababes] “It is so important with this made-for-mobile content to get very, very clever strategic marketing because no-one’s used to this content, (users) have to be told about it, told how to get it, how to interact with it…”
Search: It’s part of the new distribution model. “These new destination sites - which are maybe driven out of search or other forms of peer to peer recommendations and things like that - are distribution channels for our content in many ways and we need to understand how their users behave.  That’s critical for all types of media.”
Social networking: “Companies like Endemol really need to get to grips with (it), find a model of where we sit in that world. We can certainly distribute our back catalogue and use these social networking and search-based tools to promote our new shows … or even be the place where we break new talent that could go onto TV later.”
Made-for-mobile growth areas:  Tailor-made mobile content is U.S/U.K. centric for the moment. It “can only really survive in some of the more mature media markets around the world, with the UK being an early leader. We’ll see the U.S. really accelerating … as mobile becomes a bigger video proposition in the U.S.”
such a different place”).
You can download the audio of the interview here (8.16 MB, 35 mins).
Or you can stream it here ... click on the arrow: [audio:http://www.moconews.net/audio/endemolmob.mp3]