OCTOBER 2025

What's in this edition?

• Our MIPCOM 2025 team attendance and sessions
• Spring/Summer 2026 Content Wishlist
• Introduction to Marco Maggio, new Digital Rights Lead
• New channel and podcast announcements 
• Success story around Diddy in Plain Sight
• Industry trends and insights from Jacob Philips, Senior Insights Analyst

It's that time again: MIPCOM 2025 is just around the corner and we are excited to be sending a fantastic team to the Cannes market! 

In attendance from the UK Acquisitions team will be the familiar cohort of Connie Hodson, Director of Content Acquisitions & Partnerships, Darren Asamoa, Senior Acquisitions Manager, and Rachel Carson, Acquisitions Executive (who is currently taking care of all Sophie Hunt's clients whilst she is on maternity leave), as well our new team member, Hetal Limbachia, Senior Acquisitions Manager. And from the Little Dot German Network – also looking to acquire content in the German language – Thomas Konnerth, Platform Manager VOD. 

You will also be able to meet Richard Young, Managing Director History Hit & FAST to discuss channel partnerships and strategic opportunities around our Ad Network business. And in attendance from our Agency team (and making his MIPCOM debut) is Tarif Rahman, Senior Content Strategist who is looking for partners interested in channel management across YouTube and social media.

Be sure to catch our Little Dot sessions at MIPCOM!

Have you seen our Spring/Summer 2026 Content Wishlist? In it, we summarise the key genres of long-form content that we are looking to acquire across the Digital Media Network and our History Hit SVOD platform.

The semi-annual release of the Content Wishlist allows us to continually review how content is being consumed across the Network, ensuring we're acquiring what our audiences want to watch – ultimately increasing revenue for our content partners.

At the same time we are thrilled to announce that Marco Maggio has been promoted to Digital Rights Lead and will take the reins heading up our Digital Copyright Management services. Marco will continue to work closely with the Acquisitions team supporting our content partners on all their DCM needs. 

If you haven't met Marco and would like to know more please reach out at marco.maggio@littledotstudios.com

We are excited to announce our latest channel launch: Anime Vault, the new home of unmissable anime shows and films, where new episodes are uploaded every week – from cult classics to your old favourites. 

Since launching earlier this year, Anime Vault has reached almost 50k subscribers and generated 18.8M views and 4.7M hours of watch time and represents one of our fastest growing channels.

Please reach out if you have Anime content that appeals to adult super fans! 

In 2025, we took our German-language network to the next level – expanding to 26 channel brands across a broader range of genres than ever before. Alongside our new offerings in film, fiction series, health and blue light, our core pillars remain stronger than ever: true crime, wildlife and nature, history, and science and engineering. Across these four key genres, we now operate an impressive 15 dedicated brands.

It’s also been a landmark year for performance. On YouTube alone, our German Network hit more than 125 million views, with an average watch time of around 30 minutes per view – a record-breaking achievement for views, engagement, and revenue. 

We also strengthened our presence beyond YouTube, extending our long-standing collaboration with New Dominion Pictures to launch the official FBI Files Deutschland podcast – a weekly German-language series hosted by renowned voiceover artist Stephan Bultmann and produced by the Little Dot Studios team.

The success of The FBI Files Deutschland across YouTube, Waipu, and Joyn proves there’s a passionate and loyal audience for this content. And with true crime consistently ranking among the most popular podcast genres in German-speaking territories, expanding into podcasting was the natural next step.

Pompeii and Colosseum

Our production team at History Hit continues to produce premium history documentaries for Channel 5 to great success.

The latest productions are the two-part special, The Colosseum with Dan Snow, which tells the real story of the Colosseum, how it was built and the truth about the Gladiators. Additionally, Pompeii Life in the City with Dan Snow and Kate Lister is a four-part series that takes viewers into the preserved Roman city to show what life was really like.

Pompeii Life in the City averaged 766k viewers, with a 5.5% share, matching the primetime benchmark and ranking 4th in the slot on Channel 5. The Colosseum attracted an average of 936k viewers with a share of 5.3%, also matching the primetime average and ranking third in its slot on Channel 5. 

Diddy in Plain Sight

We were thrilled to work alongside All3 and Lion TV to launch the US premiere of Diddy in Plain Sight, the documentary exploring the rise, success and dark secrets of Sean 'Diddy' Combs.

Our strategy was to reach the broadest audience across the US via our YouTube Channel, Real Stories, which is part of our suite of Little Dot Channels that has over 6.5M subscribers. We timed the release around the trial, which was making global headlines, driving additional traffic to the documentary.

The show has generated over 2.2M views and almost 1M hours of watch time on Real Stories since releasing in May 2025. The video has performed well above benchmarks, with viewing up over 2,000% and revenue up over 3,000% in the first 30 days after publishing. This represents one of our most successfully launched programmes on the Network this year. 

Tracking audience

loyalty on YouTube:

The addition of viewer types in analytics now allows the tracking of audience loyalty. Within analytics there is now the capability to break viewing down by New, Casual and Regular viewers. The more detailed viewer categories provide a more nuanced understanding of engagement and performance. From initial findings, regular viewers represent a smaller proportion of views, however, have much higher watch times. In fact, the average view duration of regular viewers is over double that of new viewers. This analysis can also be done at a video level, meaning targeting content by viewer category is possible.

Binge Blocks on FAST

Throughout 2025 our FAST scheduling team have been creating ‘binge blocks’ at weekends on our FAST channels, which means scheduling multiple episodes of the same series in one large block to encourage binge viewing. This has been a successful tactic with many of the days featuring the blocks reaching record levels of watch time.

New YouTube Features

New long-form features are coming from YouTube and we are excited to be part of the testing phase. With these updates in mind, we have launched The Full Series Channel which is the ultimate destination for full episodes of your favourite TV series across every genre. 

Insights brought to you by Jacob Philips, Senior Insights Analyst

Thanks for diving into the latest edition of our newsletter – we hope it’s sparked a few ideas and given you plenty to think about. If you’ve got questions, thoughts, or exciting content to share, we’re all ears! Just drop a line to your acquisitions contact and let’s keep the conversation going.

And if you’re curious to learn more about what we’re up to, you’ll find plenty of extra info and inspiration over on our website.