The MD of Sidemen Entertainment, Victor Bengtsson, has teased a new season of the UK version reality competition Inside. The show is the brainchild of the hugely popular creator collective the Sidemen and recently switched from YouTube, with UK and U.S. versions rolling out instead on Netflix.
“My hope is that we’re releasing the next season in the UK in early to late spring next year,” Bengtsson said at the Digital Content Forum in London today. “We are in conversations, let’s say that we’re in a good place. We also want it to feel fresh and new, so there are things that we want to do to it.”
The Big Brother-esque series Inside corralls a group of influencers into a locked house for seven days as they battle it out in ludicrous challenges while a £1M ($1.34M) prize fund dissipates. Sidemen Entertainment handles the business side of the creative’s prolific outfit and Bengtsson talked about the move from creating for YouTube to producing for Netflix. We analyzed the ratings earlier this year.
“The idea was let’s take what we have learned from our world and what you have learned from your world and try to find the middle spot,” he said. “So, we’ve done it…we ended up being number two on the rankings across Europe, Nordics and UK. And then when we released the American season about a month and a half ago now, we claimed number one on Netflix.”
He continued: “It’s been a trial and error, for sure, but it’s also been a question of finding out what it’s like to make a format in the TV space using digital-first and YouTube rules.”
He admits there was a learning curve crossing over into the more traditional world of making and releasing shows. “We have to wait for a commission and if you don’t get it, it’s like ‘Oh God no, we’re not going to hit our targets’ and everything feels like a must deliver or we will be in trouble. For us, it’s like, if it doesn’t work, then we’ll try something else.”
“If we had not gotten the viewership and reception that we did for a season, it would have been killed on the Monday morning.” It didn’t, however, get killed, and there is more Inside to come.
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