Series against the clock, the new audiovisual trend

Something inevitable happens with State of the Union , the series created by Nick Hornby and Stephen Frears that currently broadcasts HBO Spain : it is impossible to see the ten chapters that make it up and not want to see them again as soon as they finish. And this happens, first, because the series is very good. There is a certain magnetism in that history of indefatigable losers, ready at all times to fail again. And in the way they have their two protagonists of being emotionally falling apart from each other, chapter by chapter, always in the same bar.

But there is an even more important reason: the series is so short that putting it on again from the beginning is practically a natural act. It barely lasts an hour and a half. None of its chapters exceeds ten minutes . It can be seen a couple of times in one afternoon and there is still time for some chapter of House of Cards .

And that seems to be the horizon towards which a large sector of the industry directs its investment. Statistics tell us that we consume more and more series over the phone . We do this while waiting for the bus or having coffee or just before bedtime. But in addition, the average time we remain attentive to the screen has been adjusting to that kind of scenarios. The way of consuming audiovisual content has changed and so has the way of producing them. From an era in which most of the series were made up of movie-chapters - think of Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad -, we move on to another in which the chapters will last around ten minutes and their kingdom will be that of the platforms digital

And that audiovisual landscape is closer than it might seem. The former president of Disney and co-founder of DreamWorks, Jeffrey Katzenberg , and the CEO of HP - and before eBay - Meg Whitman , have founded a platform called Quibi that will only host ten-minute series designed for the mobile. Its investment has been one billion dollars and will be launched in April 2020. Among its investors are companies such as Sony Pictures, Warner Bros or 21st Century Fox, and it has also been confirmed that it will have series of renowned directors such as Guillermo del Toro , Sam Raimi or Steven Spielberg . That of the latter, specifically, will be titled After Dark and can only be seen on the phone when the sun has set. It does not seem that Quibi are taking the format of ten minutes as a joke.

But your case is no exception. Another platform that will be launched later this year is Ficto . It will only have series with short-lived chapters and one of its great bets is the adaptation of literary bestsellers . As a peculiarity, Ficto series will be recorded and broadcast in vertical format , directly to be seen on the phone. Netflix also begins to bet on the super-reduced duration, as it happens with the chapters of the series The walks of Bruno , Special or Bonding . And there is no need to explain that State of the Union , on HBO, is being a success.

On the possibility that this format ends up eclipsing the rest, the director and screenwriter Jorge Coira - responsible for films such as The Year of the Tick and series such as Hierro , which currently broadcasts Movistar Plus - believes that rather there will be a coexistence of different formats: "The radical change in the form of consumption begins to break the traditional models and that is why new ones appear, but it is unlikely that the ten-minute format will become the only standard. Especially since we take more and more seriously, content is king and there are many stories that cannot be told in that format. "

In any case, the filmmaker understands that this new model will occupy a large space: "Very few new options tend to undo the previous ones, but thinking about the new supports and platforms, it makes perfect sense that the ten-minute series are ideal for certain very juicy contents "A circumstance that will make the industry have to rethink the way they tell many of their stories and that will especially affect the work of the authors and their economic interests.

In this regard, the director of public communication and territorial network of SGAE, Juan Carlos Fasero , explains that it is an arithmetic issue: "If, depending on the collection, one hour corresponds to X euros for rights, for a only one hour chapter the author will receive those X euros. But in a series with six chapters of ten minutes, for each one of them the author corresponds to those X euros divided by six ". That is to say, for one hour both authors will charge the same, but the ten-minute series will have already run out at that time and, nevertheless, the traditional series will have many more hours left. "Although the work to be done in one series and the other is not comparable," Fasero points out.

The only thing that seems certain at this point is that the model is about to undergo a substantial change and, as it happened with the music industry, everyone will have to adapt if they don't want to disappear. Although, as Jorge Coira warns, "it has been a long time that the cinema was going to end, it also happened with the book and the same thing was said about the radio, but in the end nothing disappears." We will have to see, in this case, how are the traditional formats of the series that leave room for the new. Just in case, a warning: there is less and less space.

Facebook Watch: four series for Spain

Facebook Watch, the video on demand service created by the popular social network, has been involved in several European countries in the financing of fiction series whose chapters follow the trend of extra reduced duration. In the last edition of the Mipcom held a few days ago in Cannes the company of Mark Zuckerberg announced an agreement with the Spanish group 2btube to produce four series of this model, exclusive in Spain. Each production will have a total of eight episodes of four minutes each that will be published in November and December of this year. 'Menu a 20' will be a cooking program in which different 'influencers' and celebrities will participate in time trial challenges. 'Gifted love' will be a fiction about young people with a bright mind but who, despite their extreme intelligence, have a lot to learn about feelings. 'Intercepta2' will be a contest of telephone jokes among comedians. And 'Epic Roomates' will be an animated series that converts historical figures like Cleopatra, Frida Kahlo or Albert Einstein into roommates.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

• SGAE
• Disney
• Netflix

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