ITV plc today announced that it has bought Scandinavian independent producer Silverback. The cash-based deal (£5.2 million changes hands now, with additional payments of up to £8.8 million over the next three years dependent on profit performance) gives ITV exclusive distribution rights over Silverback’s portfolio of programmes and programme formats.
The Silverback show best known to Stage readers will be West End Star, the show with which Swedish viewers selected Nina Soderquist to play the Lady of the Lake in the Palace Theatre’s Spamalot. The concept of casting West End actors by TV show is certainly a familiar one to our shores now, but this deal secures the rights for ITV to distribute Silverback’s show format worldwide. While ITV had its own Grease is the Word last year, the format (itself a clear derivative of The X Factor) belongs, I believe, to the show’s indie producers TalkbackThames and Simon Cowell’s SycoTV.
Some of the other formats Silverback created, and therefore that we may see cropping up on ITV’s screens soon enough, are Missing Link, Office Nightmare, Prospect Dads, Stable Stars, Stars on Air, Trucker — King of the Road, The Gone Show, Where the Hell is my Band and the intriguingly named God Bless Jew Allah.
Silverback also acts as the Scandinavian representative for Joost, the P2P-powered internet TV platform from the creators of the Skype internet phone system. Whether this signals a similar collaboration in the future between ITV and Joost is unclear, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the chances of a tie-up hadn’t just increased.
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