Top broadcasters, streamers, producers and creatives head to Cologne this week for SerienCamp (June 9-11), arriving at a moment when the foundations of TV drama are shifting beneath everyone’s feet. Commissioning budgets are shrinking, audiences are spread across social platforms and games, and the cultural heft that prestige television once carried must now be gained automatically – often for less money than before. From micro-drama to artificial intelligence, world-building IP and new funding models, here are five issues that will be on everyone’s minds this year.
1. Survival in a post-commissioning world
For decades, the logic has been simple: producers pitch to broadcasters, broadcasters commission and finance, and the marketing and distribution problem falls back to the channel. This model is now structurally ill-suited to the ambitions – and economics – of high drama. Commissioning budgets have shrunk, the window between green light and audience discovery has narrowed, and the channels that once guaranteed cultural access can no longer reliably deliver it.
“I don’t think the quality in general has decreased. There are still a lot of great performances,” says Gerhard Mayer, artistic director of SerienCamp. “I think for the ones that do exist, it’s become very difficult to find their audience. Cultural influence.” [of social media or games] It is often much higher than high-end drama series.
He argues that the producers who survive the next five years will not be those waiting for the next commissioning round, but rather those who can build direct relationships with audiences – by owning distribution, treating intellectual property as a long-term asset rather than a one-time license, and developing B2C capabilities that the traditional B2B model did not require them to have. “Think about what your business model could look like if operating no longer existed, or no longer played a major role,” says Mayer. “How do you shift from a B2B business model to a B2C business model?” The question that SereneCamp puts on the table is not whether this shift is coming, but rather the extent to which European production infrastructure – with its deep reliance on producer-broadcaster relationships – can achieve it.
2. The Moment of Micro-Drama – What the Creative Economy Can Teach TV
SerienCamp has been ahead of the content vertical curve — the conference held its first talks on Microdramas in 2018, inviting executives from China and Snapchat Originals to present this radical format cell-first. Beyond the hype, vertical drama demonstrated a new way of production – working quickly, often with small teams of just 2-3 creators, using data and audience response to drive creative decisions – that traditional television had been slow to adopt. Instead of seeing Microdramas as a threat, Mayer believes producers can learn from the lessons of the creator class.
“I think it would be helpful for TV producers to adapt to what successful creators do when distributing across TikTok and Instagram, and how they test what works on the platform and optimize it to move up the algorithm to reach the largest possible audience,” he says.
Online content creators can also offer tips on storytelling, “how to create all the emotional content in one minute that some series don’t achieve in twenty,” notes Mayer.
3. Series as trademarks: How to build an intellectual property world
One of the more ambitious talks that SerienCamp 2026 is likely to host concerns a model that has proven very profitable in Asia and the English-speaking market, but remains largely theoretical in European TV: the 360-degree IP world. The idea – building story worlds with multiple touchpoints across series, games, social content and live experience, rather than simply adapting a single property across formats – has long been standard practice in Japan and Korea. “But the question for me is to what extent the system in Europe, especially in Germany, allows something like this to emerge – through the commissioning system, through the relationship between production, creators and broadcasters,” says Mayer.
Structural experiments began to emerge. Studio 112 in France combines talent agency and production activities to package projects before approaching a commissioner, giving creators skin in the game and more control over their content. In Munich, Alan Greenspan, ICM’s long-time packaging agent and partner at British production company 6 Degree Media, is a producer (Fever degree) has teamed up with investment lawyer Tom De Gaulles to launch Bridge MP, a British/German production and management company that will effectively take stakes in the products it packages.
“These are examples of companies that are trying to practice some form of vertical or diagonal integration a little more aggressively,” Mayer says.
4. AI as an existential promise and threat
The European film and series industry has largely responded to AI as a set of production tools to be evaluated in terms of cost efficiency, an approach, according to Mayer, that misreads the potential for disruption in the technology. “I’m often surprised by how relaxed many parts of the film and TV industry are – because if you don’t adapt to that, I think it can be an existential threat,” he says.
While much of the media focus has been on AI replacing individual writers or directors, Mayer sees a more structural threat in industrial-scale AI-powered production generating volumes of “good enough” content that crowds out culturally ambitious work across every distribution channel. In China, AI-driven pipelines are already running, and displacement, especially in vertical production, is becoming measurable.
SerienCamp’s dedicated AI conference, Plot Next, will focus on concrete hybrid production models already in use and on practical frameworks for integrating AI into cutting-edge workflows without compromising the creative and cultural ground that distinguishes prestige drama from algorithmic regression.
Right now, there is a backlash from the public towards AI-generated content. “But this is largely due to the fact that people can identify this content as artificial intelligence,” Mayer warns. “What happens when you can’t tell?”
5. Works in Progress — The next generation of must-see TV
Amidst all the discussions around disruption and data-driven innovation, SerienCamp remains a showcase for TV drama, and a home for best-in-class series from around the world. The “Works in Progress” series has a strong track record of discovering German-language series that will go global. Shows like Babylon Berlin, Charité, 4 blocks, and Maxon Hall They all went through WIP before the premiere. “We would love to follow the show through the full arc of development, from pitching the writers’ vision to funding international co-productions on the Story Exchange marketplace, to the first industry pitch at Works in Progress, to the festival premiere,” says Mayer. Among the must-see titles at this year’s WIP Expo is the upcoming Netflix thriller from director Isabel Kleveld The trap And the dystopian drama of the new future Dronenland From ZDF/Magenta TV.
