Warner Bros. Discovery‘s streaming service Max launched in Turkey today, April 15, as streamer BluTV, which the conglomerate acquired at the end of 2023, made way for broadened content offerings under the new Max brand amid promises of stepped-up investment in local productions.
Turkey becomes the 77th Max territory as the service looks toward expansion. The company hasn’t disclosed how many streaming subscribers it already has in Turkey but is clearly seeing it as a growth market. Deniz Şaşmaz Oflaz, WBD’s vp local original productions, local channels and streaming operations lead for Turkey, previously served as CEO of BluTV since January 2023.
The executive talked to The Hollywood Reporter about the importance of original content, its potential to travel and how to differentiate Max in the competitive Turkish market.
How important is original Turkish content for Max and its Turkish viewers, and how do you think about also bringing it to audiences in other countries given the increased appeal of Turkish content?
Şaşmaz Oflaz One of the key reasons Warner Bros. Discovery wanted to invest in BluTV is that Turkey is a hyper-local market, and the data shows that in order to be successful, a global company needs to invest in local content. That’s the only way for global streamers to be able to be successful in Turkey. Warner Bros. Discovery, instead of starting from scratch, had all the existing successful BluTV IP and will now keep producing more.
When we talk at Warner Bros. Discovery, we are talking about a huge ecosystem of content because not only is there a lot of volume coming from us but also from Latin America, from Europe, from the rest of the world. And one missing element in that was the Turkish content.
We know that Turkish content is now in the top three in terms of exporters of scripted shows. And it’s not only about producing for our own platform, but having this Turkish content in the ecosystem will be very valuable because you can monetize it – you can license the content to other media, but you can also utilize it on other linear channels or platforms of the company.
What kinds of content has the BluTV audience traditionally been passionate about?
The service was launched in 2016, a couple of months even before Netflix in Turkey. In Turkey, the free TV offering is quite extensive. So we have premium dramas every night on every free TV station, and we have a lot of free TV stations. So for BluTV, the key priority was to differentiate the service from the free TV offering because that was the only way we could attract a different audience.
So for us, it was really important to try new things and also stay local. We thought that there are untold stories of our own geography that we wanted to focus on, but maybe try different genres. We started with more male content because the free TV offering was more female and more about family dramas. We started with some crime shows and tried some horror, etc. Once we started building a certain subscriber base, we also complemented the offering with some foreign content. We started acquiring shows such as A Handmaid’s Tale and The Young Pope. We focused on shows that we felt were not easy to air on linear – more edgy, more controversial – to attract a certain audience.
In Turkey, a lot of people are also watching content via pirate sites, so it was also very important to attract this audience and find a way to basically migrate it to make it pay money. So we not only acquired more content, but we also spent a lot of money to protect this content from pirate sites.
How have you and your team in Turkey thought about adapting IP for the streamer?
We have always been successful, and we will continue doing it, chasing for IP in all kinds of media, whether it comes from YouTube, podcasts, even Instagram or Tiktok, etc. When you have content that has its own [built-in] audience from day one, once you invest more and get it to a more premium level, then you don’t need to wait for subscribers to come to the platform and get to know this content.
The BluTV brand was very successful in bringing different genres and top-quality shows to people. And after the Max launch, we’ll continue producing the same kind of quality and mix of genres. We will have some successful returning shows coming to Max, and we will increase our investment to have even more scripted and unscripted series on our platform. So, we will be having even more original shows in the upcoming years.
Can you say how much you spent on originals last year or any targets?
We don’t give exact numbers in terms of dollars spent, but we will have a minimum of eight scripted shows and four unscripted shows on a yearly basis, along with Max and HBO originals that will come to our platform day and date. So, it will be a wide catalog of fresh content.
What local original has been particularly successful?
One show that is extremely successful is our series Prens, or Prince. It looks like a comedy, but it’s more of a dramedy. We will be bringing out the third season of the show just after the launch of Max. It takes place in a fictional kingdom called Bongomia. The lead character is the prince, who doesn’t want to be on the throne and is not really that smart. And then we see all these typical things happening in this kingdom that we’ve been seeing in such series as Game of Thrones. So it’s a satire. We feel that the new season will be phenomenal.
How do you think about the potential for your Turkish originals to travel to other markets?
On one hand, we will try not to change the editorial drastically, but on the other hand, we will make sure that our content can travel even better. The typical Turkish telenovelas sell and work outside of Turkey. But they typically have more than 100 episodes for each show. For us, it’s not easy to produce hundreds of episodes at one time, but we are planning to develop models, maybe co-production models, to find a way to be able to produce these kinds of shows that would service our platforms and linear channels outside of Turkey.
Magarsus [a Succession-type show set in the world of the citrus fruit business whose second season will finish on the newly launched Max in Turkey] was a nice bet. It was our first family drama. The starting point was to do a family drama that slightly differentiates us from what we are seeing in typical Turkish series. It mixed elements. You have this kind of Succession drama about a family and who’s going to inherit the business, and on the other hand, we have [themes] around illegality, a bit closer to Ozark. There is some money laundering and drug trafficking.
The most important thing is that we are very focused on bringing audiences character-driven stories, whether it’s local or Max and HBO shows. Our audience really likes to watch these characters. With Succession, some people are more Kendall, some people are more Roman, and others like Shiv. For Magarsus, we also have a fan base for each character, and we believe that we can have more seasons in the coming years. It’s a very successful show, so we picked Magarsus as the show to help us transition from BluTV to Max, releasing the first episodes of the second season of the show on BluTV and having the last two episodes on Max after the Max launch. So, people will be organically transitioned to Max.
How about non-fiction programming?
Investing in unscripted was also not easy for us, again because we have a lot of competition from the free TV space. So what we’ve tried was going more into social issues and topics that are entertaining but also edgy and controversial. Our most successful show has been Pavyon (Pavilion), which is the name for traditional nightclubs in Turkey. They have their own culture. You also have some prostitution behind them, and it’s very controversial. So it was a “what’s happening behind the curtain” kind of show, and it was extremely successful. We will be doing the next season in the coming months. And, of course, like we see overall across the world, true crime is always very successful, so we want to develop [shows about] serial killers and the like in the coming years.
Has there been any Turkish show from your team that has made it to Max or HBO in the U.S.?
Not to Max U.S. yet, but we are adding some of our originals in Latin America, Spain, Italy, and other countries in the Europe/Middle East/Africa region. Previously, we also licensed two BluTV originals globally to Netflix. But because of their volume, it’s not easy to compete with the typical Turkish shows that have hundreds of hours of content. One of the shows we licensed was [murder mystery] Innocent, the other was Börü (Wolf) [about a special operations police unit]. We also had on Max Latin America 7 Faces [a drama featuring different yet intertwined stories of modern life in Istanbul].
Any new genres or types of original Turkish content you expect to push into?
We will be experimenting with, in the coming months, entering the zone of adult animation. We are starting with a [just-announced] show called Feride that is based on a character that was created for an Instagram account that has already reached 100 million views. That will a very exciting experiment for us.
Is there anything important to know about Turkish audiences and content that’s different from what people might expect or know that you feel is worth highlighting?
One thing that we are very good at is really expressing emotions on screen, not only with dialog and character building but also with the music, the scoring of a show. Turkish scoring is very significant in bringing these emotions to life.