Titles include two seasons of Studio Lambert’s globe-trotting adventure “Race Across the World,” and another travel show “Our Guy in Japan” from North One Productions; multiple cookery programs including hit “Gordon Ramsay’s 24 Hours to Hell and Back” (Studio Ramsay for Fox, U.S.); Raw TV’s special “Drowning in Plastic”; and the two most recent series of BBC Studios’ “Fake or Fortune.”
“Huanxi Media continues to build its new non-scripted offering in China. This bulk deal highlights the impressive breadth and depth of our factual portfolio… helping (Huanxi) to ensure that their brand stands out and appeals to a wide range of new viewers,” said sales manager Asia Pacific at All3media International, Kit Yow.
Listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Huanxi is a production studio controlled by leading Chinese filmmakers Ning Hao and Xu Zheng. It has built its streaming activities as a boutique or curated offering, rather than a mass market platform which would put it in direct competition with iQIYI, Tencent Video and Alibaba’s Youku. Earlier this year, it claimed 11 million monthly active users and more than 2 million paying subscribers.
Huanxi.com offers a combination of films from its own talent pool and selected acquired content, claiming exclusive China rights to films including “The Whistleblower” and Cannes competition film “The Wild Goose Lake.” Its documentary strand was launched in December 2019.
The platform has a close association with Maoyan, one of China’s leading film ticketing businesses and itself a streamer. And in March, after a radical experiment with the direct to streaming release of “Lost in Russia,” Huanxi cemented another alliance with Bytedance, owner of Tiktok (outside China) and Douyin (within China), for its films to play on Bytedance’s Xigua and Toutiao platforms.
Source: Variety by Patrick Frater