Award-winning factual producer Proper Content is ready to shutter amid tough market conditions.
Founder David DeHaney, who arrange the corporate in 2016, announced the choice to stop trading and appoint an administrator on Thursday.
“This has been a really difficult decision,” says DeHaney. “We’ve had nearly 10 years of creating a few of the industry’s most talked-about shows; entertaining programmes with social purpose. And that is precisely what I got down to do. But we would like to do more, so rather more, and the present environment doesn’t support us in making that step-change.”
Proper Content, one in every of the industry’s few Black-led independents, was known for a wide-range of factual content starting from recent BBC documentary “P Diddy: Rise and Fall” to royal docuseries “The King’s Guard” for Channel 5, which ran for 2 seasons, to the multi-award winning Channel 4 show “The School That Tried to End Racism,” which took home a BAFTA, a Venice TV Award, a Rose d’Or and a Grierson Award.
Despite growing the corporate to a turnover of £6 million ($8 million) the economic landscape proved too tough to proceed.
“We’re extremely happy with what we’ve got achieved with Proper Content,” said DeHaney. “We’ve held up a lens to society in so many alternative ways, and to such quite a lot of audiences. As a growing indie, we couldn’t have done more. Yet, for a corporation like ours, at this stage in its development, going to the following stage is incredibly difficult. There simply isn’t the commissioning risk, or the time or space to let firms stretch their wings in latest ways. And, because of this, firms get ‘stuck’ – which doesn’t feel like a superb, or a creative place to be.”
“We’ve achieved what we’ve got achieved despite this,” he added. “It just isn’t the central reason for our decision. We feel we’ve got so rather more to supply and aren’t fulfilling that potential. That’s the reason we’re closing. The truth is that the market has modified dramatically lately. Commissioning budgets have tightened, development cycles have lengthened and the opportunities for growing indies to scale have grow to be increasingly limited. Those pressures have affected many firms across the sector and have undoubtedly contributed to the position we discover ourselves in today.”
“My priority in the mean time is constant to work proactively with our freelancers and staff, in addition to our broadcasting customers and collaborators, to make sure that the closure has as little impact as possible. I desired to say a heartfelt thanks to everyone who has worked with and supported us over the past decade. Together we’ve got told some incredible stories, built a remarkable company and achieved excess of I could ever have imagined after we began in 2016.
“While Proper Content is coming to an end, my passion for storytelling and creating ambitious latest projects stays undiminished. I’m enthusiastic about what comes next.”
In addition to a downturn in commissioning budgets that has roiled the industry over the past three years, the U.K. – like other major markets – is grappling with a surge of consolidation, from the recent Banijay/All3Media merger to the continuing acquisition of public-service broadcaster ITV by Sky and Warner-Bros. Discovery, which owns quite a lot of free-to-air and pay networks within the U.K., being bought by Channel 5 owner Paramount.