Rio2C: The Market where we pretend to sell and they pretend to buy

Rio Content Market was concentrated in the Windsor Barra Hotel for a time until it exploded to larger premises. I remember the excitement of creators before pitching sessions, focused, sweating nervously, revising their slides. There was always a strong contingent of  Executives from international media outlets from the US, Japan, France, Germany out en force to hear pitches from Brazilian creators. It was impossible for buyers to hide in the tight corridors of the Windsor Barra Hotel. It was an excellent hunting ground. It was a conference for a continent, the best place to meet colleagues from all over the country and also the place to pitch your project. 

Up to 2017 the event was organised by BRAVI, the association of TV producers. The running of the event was transferred to a conglomerate of other APEX projects, the Brazilian exporting agency. The idea was to bring these incentives together at a time of a strong tightening of the federal public purse due to a deteriorating political environment. The event was moved to the modernistic and impractical Cidade das Artes in Barra. I remember before Covid, the buyers would simply stay at the hotel and have their meeting at the Hyatt.

The change to Rio2C and Cidade das Artes coincided with the arrival of Netflix enforce in Brazil. In a sense, the American streamer entered the country in a nick of time, acquiring best pickings on Brazilian IP projects at a time when the political environment had changed drastically against public policies supporting the local independant audiovisual sector.  With the entrance of the North American corporation and the adoption of the streaming model by the other players, Brazilian production companies effectively became production services outfits serving the insatiable online demand. 

All the efforts to have a striving independent production sector allowing some IP ownership for the creators have been effectively put in check by events and politics.

There is a gathering movement internationally to regulate streaming.  In Brazil, there are currently two parallel  pieces of legislation being discussed in congress. I will write about this more in detail some other time.  The current regulatory uncertainty in Brazil coupled with other global challenges affecting the audiovisual industry is not conducive for a booming commissioning environment to say the least. 

“We pretend to sell, and they pretend to buy” as a director friend put it so well. Pitching sessions have effectively become follow up networking sessions and serve to check out who the current acquisition teams are.  On the positive side, liberated from the urge of pitching and meeting buyers that are not buying, the venue grows on you.  This year it felt as if the event had somehow come of age. After the alienating experience that was Covid, to stroll around in a building shaped like a spaceship was a wonderful exercise in serendipity through the Brazilian creative village.

Everything was on a larger scale, the number of presentations, the size of the queues, the number of interactive stands and thankfully an evenly spread number of gelato kiosks. The fonts on the printed schedule had an inverse relation to the size of the event making it extremely difficult to read what was on offer.  Once sat in the chairs, the presentations were too often facilitated by enthusiastic Club Med style moderators as opposed to media journalists, resulting much too often in shallow debates, with no Q&A time. There was also a much more discreet international presence this year. Is the event too large and trying to serve too many audiences? Would a series of more targeted events not be more productive?

Anyway, you might ask: was it worth attending the Rio2C event in 2024?

I would say a resounding yes. 

From the moment I was on the plane to Rio I met fellow travellers in the wonderful world of content creation.  If you want to understand the current environment Brazil finds itself, there is no better place to be to take the pulse.

I have to say that I do have a bee in the bonet, and for the first time really I wanted to ask my colleagues directly what is going on and try to make sense of it all.  Brazil should be an international cultural heavyweight in the audiovisual world. It has a recognizable brand in music and football. All round the world, people are excited about the notion of Brazil.  It has a very strong natural appeal. For example, Brazilian creators dominate the advertising world. In design and animation, Brazilian creators are king (Ferdinand, Carlos Salanha and Ze Brandao, creators of Jorells Brother..) Brazilian music travels and is an industry.

The question I had for my colleagues was: What is stopping Brazil from competing with South Korea in the cultural sphere? For example Netflix believes that South Korea is worth more than 10 times as much as Brazil if you compare the investments the multinational is placing in South Korea (2.5BL USD) as opposed to Brazil with around 200 million USD for 2023-2024. Brazil is the third market for Netflix in terms of  subscribers after the US and the UK.

So Why is Brazil not punching at its cultural weight? And what can be done about it? This is the question I will strive to investigate in the next few weeks.