Commissioners

Meet the UK Factual Commissioner: Dan Korn, SVP Programming, Discovery Networks UK

By TV Mole ⋅ May 1, 2010 ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ ⋅Post a comment

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

Dan Korn, Senior Vice President, Programming, Discovery Networks UK recently outlined his commissioning needs to attendees of the Broadcast Factual Forum (March 2010). Dan oversees programming on thirteen Discovery channels in the UK: Discovery HD, Discovery Knowledge, Discovery Turbo, Discovery Science, Animal Planet, DMAX, Discovery Real Time, Discovery Home & Health, Discovery Travel & Leisure and Discovery Shed.

Dan's overview of Discovery UK:

Photo by Torres CC BY-SA 2.0

• Onscreen talent is one of the way that a channel can stand out from its competitors, so attaching talent to a proposal is very important;
• Talent needs to work in the USA as well as the UK – Bear Grylls is very popular in the USA;
• Programmes need to be UK-centric – could be a UK-based programme or feature UK talent travelling abroad;
• Discovery UK can act as conduit between producers and Discovery channels in the US;
• He is genuinely open to hearing ideas from small production companies with good ideas.

Programmes that work on Discovery UK: 

• Bear Grylls: Born Survivor
• Predator X
• Solving History  with Olly Steeds
• Stephen Hawking’s Universe

Looking For:

• Talent – strong new faces for the channel that also work in the US;
• Proposals with unique access;
• Proposals with unique archive;
• Single documentaries, such as Predator X, with which he can build a strand;
• Programmes that would be just as at home on terrestrial channels, such as Brian Cox‘s programmes.

Source: Broadcast Factual Forum 10th March, 2010

Be Sociable, Share!

•