Simple coproductions (those that provide financing in return for distribution rights) offer significant advantages to the production partners and have been undertaken for many years. Having multiple partners means more money for a project, and in an era of escalating production costs, the financial needs of television production can be tremendous, particularly for certain genres. Most coproduction arrangements address the level and source of resource contributions, what each partner receives (such as distribution rights in certain territories), the controls and approvals each partner can wield (such as choice of actors and locations), and how the venture’s credits will appear on the final product.

Coproductions have been especially popular with television networks that require long-format programs or films but do not have a sufficiently large budget to produce programs of their own. In the United States, for example, coproductions first became common between the public broadcasting stations in major markets (Boston, Maryland, New York City) and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Coproductions offered U.S. public television stations the opportunity to produce high-quality products at a fraction of the costs of creating such programs independently. In return, the arrangements offered the BBC, with its huge expenditures on production facilities, a means of stretching its budget with no threat to its other distribution rights or its own primary market, the United Kingdom. The first such coproduction, a 1971 U.S. public broadcaster/BBC venture called The First Churchill, was a BBC period saga that won an Emmy. Since then, such ventures have become common fare for PBS stations.

In the 1990s coproductions also became popular production vehicles for numerous U.S.-based cable services such as A&E (Arts and Entertainment), Bravo, TLC (The Learning Channel), and Discovery. Since many of those networks have sister operations based in numerous countries, their use of international coproductions is increasingly common. Similarly, as so many American commercial broadcasters have merged with other companies and become integrated into global enterprises, international production arrangements have become more common. U.S. commercial television producers have typically partnered with other English-language broadcasting systems, but since the late 1990s, U.S. TV producers also have turned to partners from non-English-language countries, notably Germany and Japan, to stretch finances and reach broader markets.

Coproduction treaties serve to regularize the government benefits that accrue to undertaking international coproductions. Such treaties establish terms that, when met, enable productions to qualify for various forms of government support. While the specifics of such treaties vary, they generally ensure that creative, technical, and financial contributions will be balanced, over time, among the participating countries; the treaties may scrutinize crew composition, investment, actors, sites, and perhaps even the language of the production. For countries such as Canada and France, as well as other European Union (EU) members, coproduction treaties ensure that the resulting product qualifies as “domestic,” a category crucial in meeting legally established quotas determining allowable amounts of imported television content. The treaties also ensure that coproduced material is eligible for government financing or investor tax credits in terms of the national policies. Organizations such as Eurimages, a Council of Europe production fund, have been created specifically to foster increased coproductions among European countries, thereby encouraging the vitality of filmmaking throughout the continent.

The increase in cable, satellite, and commercial television channels that occurred around the world in the 1980s and 1990s prompted an intensified search for affordable programming and made coproductions even more attractive for maximizing production and distribution. The international aspects of television programming now receive greater scrutiny from the outset of program planning; no longer are domestic markets the sole or even necessarily the primary consideration in the planning process. Making television programs that can cater to multiple audiences across national boundaries increasingly requires care and an awareness of audiences as well as broadcasting conventions around the globe. France’s Canal Plus is a leader in this effort, crafting production arrangements with numerous European pay-TV operations as well as Hollywood ventures.

Another notable consequence involves the range of content accommodations that coproductions entail when the products must satisfy different national audiences. A great deal of scholarly interest and some attention by policymakers have been directed at the perceived threat to “national” television that international coproductions may represent. In its most extreme version, this threat invokes a scenario of homogeneous, global programs driving out national television production that caters to and captures what is meaningful to local audiences. In a sense, some concern over coproduction joins the worry focused on “Americanization” or “cultural imperialism” of international television programming. Selection of the primary language in which to record dialogue and the choice to dub or subtitle also figure into this issue. The response of the European Union to such problems to date has included a loosely worded 1989 Broadcasting Directive urging members to ensure that at least 50 percent of their television programming originated from within the EU. The EU also established several programs (such as the MEDIA program) to support and invigorate the production and exhibition infrastructure within member countries. In 2001, for example, the European Commission and the European Investment Bank assembled a $445.2 million financial support package to nurture the European film industry for a few years, and one initiative that received funding was the digitization of film archives belonging to Canal Plus. The program specifically did not request that the financers retain copyright to the funded projects, a possible sticking point in encouraging production.

As financing vehicles, coproductions have emerged as particularly significant means for smaller-market countries to ensure that some local production remains possible. Insofar as the television schedules in many countries rely heavily on films (indeed, in certain countries, such as France, broadcasters are major investors in film), the financial clout available through coproduction is almost mandatory for film production destined for television airing. The ability to produce high-budget feature films is moving out of the reach of single companies, but with partners from several countries or companies the opportunities still exist.

One consequence of the demand for more video product has been intensified competition for coproduction partners, a factor that has driven up the cost of coproductions and threatened arrangements for financially strapped public broadcasting in the United States. Moreover, the process of coproducing is itself not without problems. On the one hand, coproductions offer a mechanism for films and higher-budget television to garner the capital they require, as well as ways to penetrate other markets, but coproductions may also create production headaches emerging from the very difficult process of being accountable to multiple funders and multiple audiences. Coproductions also must deal with issues related to multiple styles and cultures among the cast and crew. Many efforts have floundered when partners could not agree on script, production technique, cast, or postproduction issues. One of the earliest and most notorious failed coproduction efforts was Riviera, a $35 million project involving several European broadcasters. This soap opera, set on the Côte d’ A zur, ultimately pleased none of its backers (nor their audiences), and it has gone down in history as a costly lesson in the frailties of joint production efforts. On the other hand, when coproductions use known actors and actresses and have a firm hand guiding their creative effort, tremendous success can be achieved. The 1999 production of The Count of Monte Cristo—a $20 million miniseries sponsored by France’s TF1, Germany’s KirchGroup, and Italy’s Mediaset, and starring well-known French actor Gerard Depardieu and Italian actress Ornella Muti—was a huge success in its European markets and an ideal example of the pan-European production and distribution network arrangements that are becoming popular in the early 21st century.

Coproductions will continue to figure into the growth of international media corporations looking for ways to maximize their investments in productions; partnering with local media companies in various countries has become a way to guarantee broad distribution, as well as a method of obviating certain national restrictions on “imported” television product, and that trend shows no evidence of slowing. However, coproduction does seem to be yielding some production lessons, with the consequence that partners and contracts are more carefully initiated now than was perhaps the case in earlier years. The “Euro-puddings” and failed efforts that garnered trade press headlines in the late 1980s have given way to growing understanding that coproduction makes most sense only under certain conditions, and only for certain types of projects.

Coproduction’s partner vehicle, format licensing, has also became more popular since the 1980s, and it is now pursued actively by many networks with active production schedules. Format licensing represents a useful scheme for adapting tested, lower-budget formula programming (especially quiz shows, such as Jeopardy or Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and soap operas) for new markets in a way that allows such programs to be tailored to local tastes and styles. For example, Skyquest Television of Miami, Florida, produced the telenovela A Todo Corazón for broadcast in Venezuela and later sold the format to television networks in Argentina and Spain, which hired their own actors but used Skyquest’s directors and sets. Format licensing eliminates many of the production problems coproduction may present and effectively domesticates a successful content and a format originated and tested elsewhere.