06 December 2019, 12:06 / Media

Yandex is going to produce TV series and films based on BBC scripts

The Internet company signed a big agreement with the British studio Ksenia Boletskaya

Still from Doctor Who / BBC

Yandex has concluded the first deal to purchase formats for TV series and films for their future production, a representative of the Internet company told Vedomosti. This is part of a larger agreement with the British BBC Studios. BBC Studios Vice President for Central and Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean and Africa Salim Mukaddam expects that Yandex , with its scale and attention to the quality of content, will be able to attract new viewers from Russia to the studio’s series and films.

The companies agreed that from 2020, Yandex will be able to exclusively show more than 100 hours of BBC Studios content annually. In particular, users of Kinopoisk (this is a Yandex video service) will be able to watch all seasons of the series Doctor Who by subscription; its new season will be released here on January 2, the day after the premiere on the BBC. “Doctor Who” is already one of the most popular series among Kinopoisk users, a Yandex representative points out. And in general, Russian audiences like British TV series, he adds: for example, “Sherlock” from BBC Studios is one of the most popular foreign series over the last three years on Russian television. This project was shown in Russia by Channel One.

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Also, as part of the agreement, Yandex received the opportunity to create content in BBC formats, says Kinopoisk content director Olga Filipuk. She did not answer questions about whether Yandex has chosen specific formats for future production and who exactly will produce such series or films.

Russian TV channels regularly produce series and shows based on the formats of foreign studios, which have already become popular with viewers in other countries. TV channels take the characters, the main plot or the rules of the show and adapt them for Russia. Among the projects made in foreign formats are the shows “The Voice”, “One to One”, “How to Become a Millionaire”, the series “Voronin”, “Bhound”, “The Good Wife”, etc.

Russian video series have only recently started producing content. Yandex is going to show its first series in the spring of 2020, sources told Vedomosti; a company representative does not comment on this. In addition, Yandex was the first Russian video service to announce plans to use foreign content formats.