There are people, the meetings with who charge with optimism and tranquility for the future of the Ukrainian market. One of these people is Ivan Bukreyev, CEO at NLO TV. In the new season, the TV channel released a record number of sitcoms like “Curators”, “Charged”, “The Defectives”, new “Super Cops”; just 110 premiere episodes and all of them in Ukrainian.
About a year ago we talked with you about quotas for the Ukrainian language. You were planning to film totally in Ukrainian. So you did it?
Yes, we did it. We meet the established quotas. We are looking forward to show 75% of our broadcasts in Ukrainian.
We met the production target of 200-250 episodes of sitcoms per year. It’s a lot and hard, but possible. However, such a high rate of TV series production make some allowances for other production targets, for example, we reschedule filming “The Infoholik-2”, while the actors (Oleg Maslyuk, Yevgeny Yanovich) are engaged in “Curators”, and they still have to star in another 70 episodes. Moreover, we plan to produce 2-3 rollout films annually. This year we have already started filming one of them, and are about to start the second one in the summer or autumn. There are a lot of film ideas, and even including money. The main missing thing is manpower and time, so today our main task is to manage implementing our ideas.
Do you film Ukrainian actors or the Russian ones too?
Only Ukrainian, and no Russian.
Do you have any marketing plan for how to sell your content abroad?
Unfortunately we have not any. Dubbing makes no economic sense, since neighboring countries will not bring so much profit to pay it off. If film dubbing can still be discussed, then the voice-over of TV series definitely does not make any sense.
How is “The Infoholik”? Did you manage to find foreign buyers?
Not yet. In Dubai, there was a screening for expats, and the rest of the world is still underway. But we primarily focused on Ukraine. Recently, we have sold inflight broadcasting rights to “The Infoholik” to UIA.
Do these rights apply only to Ukraine?
The TV ones yes, but VOD already exists in many other countries.
How would you estimate in general the dynamics of the Ukrainian market development over the last year?
There is much more Ukrainian-language content, but the channels are not so in a hurry, since they have enough time until the autumn, unless, of course, the quotas law comes into effect earlier.
Now there is too much emphasis on satellite encryption, how will this affect NLO TV?
We are looking forward to this encryption and analog cut-off. Since we launched our channel on satellite later than the rest of the channels, we are less dependent on it and we will have less rating loses in this situation.
Good luck to NLO TV! We are waiting for new films and TV series!
