The NATPE-Realscreen Collapse and Where to Go Sell Your Show Now
A brutal autopsy, the rival cashing in and where IRL buyers and producers are heading next
I cover global TV and film from London. I wrote about HBO Max invading the U.K., the Iran war’s impact on Mideast deals and production, and the antitrust challenges for Paramount-WB in Europe. Email me at manori@theankler.com
“The party was over. We just didn’t want it to go.”
That’s how one long-time attendee describes the demise of the Realscreen Summit, a 28-year-old unscripted market that quietly shuttered alongside NATPE last month when their Canadian parent company, Brunico Communications, pulled the plug on its U.S. events portfolio citing “a period of market change.”
It marks not just the end of two big conferences, but the collapse of an entire dealmaking ecosystem once vital to the industry.
For decades, NATPE and Realscreen weren’t just networking stops — they were where TV business got done. Shows were pitched, financed and sold in hotel lobbies. Careers were launched in hallway conversations. Entire slates took shape over 72 frantic hours.
Now, there’s a NATPE- and Realscreen-sized hole in the calendar, and for the first time in modern TV history, there is no major U.S.-based market where unscripted producers can reliably travel to sell. (NATPE, 62 years old and focused on syndication and Latin America, was largely a scripted market.)
At the height of reality TV in the late 2000s and mid-’10s, Realscreen in particular was booming. “It became this mobile hub of network activity,” says former Discovery Channel exec and producer Stephanie Angelides. “The networks were having greenlight meetings at the end of the day. They were all there. We would run through the best pitches of the day and decide what we wanted to invest in.”
Global formats — from Big Brother to The Masked Singer to Traitors — spread across markets like these, where ideas and rights moved quickly between buyers and territories.
Still, the slow erosion of cable, Covid and an era’s wave of consolidation shrank the number of active buyers, even with the boards stacked with high-profile leaders such as Amazon MGM’s Brad Beale, Lionsgate’s Kevin Beggs, Apple TV’s Brandon Brito, Netflix’s Lori Conkling and Roku’s Olivia LaRoche.
“The buyers didn’t have the money any longer,” says veteran producer Jenny Daly. “And even if they liked something, the layers you had to go through to get it greenlit changed.”
Now, of course, that leaves opportunity in the market for sellers whose bags are still packed to go somewhere.
Today I get into:
Where producers are actually going now, from London to Lisbon to Latin America
Why NATPE and Realscreen were on borrowed time — and the moment the deals stopped happening
The ugly backstory: How Brunico “won” NATPE and still couldn’t save it
The rival cashing in — and expanding into the U.S. vacuum
The new global map of unscripted dealmaking and how to navigate it
Why even Brunico employees were blindsided by Realscreen’s demise
The producers who will struggle without Realscreen and NATPE
 | A guest post by
|