Melanie Leach is CEO of South Shore Productions, one of ITV Studios’ leading independent labels. London- and Cardiff-based South Shore is behind some of the UK’s most successful unscripted formats, such as The Floor (ITV), Worlds Apart (C4) and DIY SOS (BBC One), and Leach has built a reputation as one of the most entrepreneurially minded executives in the UK production landscape.
In this conversation, the former CEO of TwoFour Group offers a refreshingly optimistic view of the future, not despite the disruption facing the industry but because of where producers now sit within it.
The UK’s terms of trade, the legislative framework that gave independent producers the right to retain their IP, are widely credited as the foundation of British format dominance. Leach agrees that the Communications Act of 2003 was transformative, but she argues the position it created is now under serious pressure from two distinct directions.
The first is erosion from within. The Act applies to UK broadcasters, but its protections can be circumvented through commercial financing arrangements. Leach describes how certain broadcasters are using third-party financing deals to effectively transfer rights away from producers without formally announcing a change in policy.
“One of the major broadcasters is doing it through a backdoor, through a financing arrangement where you basically lose your rights if your show is externally financed. And if it’s a big show, they will always put that financing on it because they can’t afford to buy it. So you’ve effectively lost your rights without them publicly announcing you’ve lost them,” she says.
South Shore’s response is to walk away. If a broadcaster insists on this kind of financing for a big show, Leach says the company will typically decline and find another buyer. But she acknowledges this option is becoming harder to exercise as the number of viable buyers shrinks.
The second pressure is structural: international streaming platforms are not covered by the Communications Act at all. Netflix, Amazon and Apple operate outside the legislative framework that governs UK broadcasters. They apply their own global rights model, typically a full buy-out, without any obligation to share IP with producers.
Together, these two pressures are reshaping the rights landscape from both sides simultaneously. Leach expects the formal terms of trade to be renegotiated over the next two years as a result. Her expectation is not a return to the 2003 model but a movement towards a 50/50 split between producers and platforms, closer to the Dutch model, which has sustained a healthy creative ecosystem.
She does not see this as catastrophic, but she is clear about what it means: “When you change the incentives, you change the outputs.”
Leach’s account of the two-sided pressure on UK producers’ rights position is one of the most analytically precise in our research. The Communications Act created a framework. But frameworks can be eroded from within through commercial arrangements, and bypassed from without by platforms that fall outside their jurisdiction.
What Sir Peter Bazalgette described in an earlier Creative Leadership Insights interview as the dismantling of the ecosystem is, in Leach’s telling, already well under way, quietly, deal by deal on one side and structurally absent from the other. Her observation that changing incentives changes outputs captures the core of what the ecosystem research identifies as the engine of the UK’s format success. If that engine is running down, the output will eventually follow.
In response to these changes, Leach’s most distinctive strategic move is her investment in a fundamentally different business model: branded entertainment produced directly for major retailers, distributed on YouTube and commercial broadcasters without the traditional commissioning structure.
South Shore is currently producing several brand-funded series. The model goes well beyond traditional product placement. In one show, every item featured is shoppable via QR code, with accompanying digital content driving viewers directly to the retailer’s website. “The integration is deeper,” she explains. “We have teams embedded in the retailer’s organisation. The sheer logistics of working out how you get all of that product here in time to make a show where everything is available on the shelves when it airs is no mean feat.”
The next step is moving this model directly to YouTube, removing the broadcaster entirely and creating branded channels with audiences built through paid advertising. Leach describes brands achieving a million streams on live broadcasts, equivalent to a strong commercial channel overnight. Her ambition is that branded content could represent 40-50% of South Shore’s business within five years.
The strategic logic is clear: by building direct relationships with major advertisers, South Shore is reducing its dependence on broadcasters and streamers as the primary route to market. “We are commissioning ourselves. And it’ll never be all of the business. But it’s an interesting business and it’s a growth area,” says Leach.
Leach’s branded content strategy represents one of the clearest examples in this research of a production company actively restructuring its business model in response to the disruption of the traditional commissioning system. Rather than waiting for broadcasters or streamers to define the terms of the relationship, South Shore is creating a parallel revenue stream in which it controls the commissioning, the client relationship and the distribution.
The IP question in this model is different since branded content is not designed to travel as a format. But the underlying principle is the same as the terms of trade argument: whoever controls the client relationship controls the value.
On the question of consolidation, Leach is direct: she would not want to be an independent producer without the backing of a studio group in the current market. South Shore is 25%-owned by ITV Studios, and she argues that minority stake provides negotiating leverage a fully independent producer simply cannot access.
“If you don’t have the might of a studio behind you, it’s becoming very, very difficult,” she says. “You need to be able to lean into the strength of a large organisation when you’re negotiating in order to get stuff over the line. And when we’re negotiating with the streamers, there is wonderful precedent throughout all of the ITV Studios labels globally for us to be able to say, ‘Well, these are the terms that you’ve previously agreed to.’”
But she draws a sharp distinction between two types of studio label: those that were truly independent before being acquired, with the entrepreneurial hunger that comes from having survived without a parent company, and those that were always part of the network infrastructure and never had to develop that instinct.
The former she describes as “labels that, when you look across the group, have remained incredibly hungry to go out and create new formats because that’s their DNA. They’ve grown up in an independent world where they didn’t have a parent company to rely on, and it’s just embedded in them.”
Her observation on large, consolidated groups is pointed. Despite their scale and catalogue, she notes they have often struggled to generate significant original format development of their own. This is consistent with the argument that consolidation around a financial catalogue creates gravitational pull away from original development.
Leach’s distinction between entrepreneurial DNA and institutional dependence connects directly to the ecosystem research’s findings on the conditions that produce original format output. The Communications Act created the structural incentive. But the creative culture that responds to that incentive, the hunger to develop original IP, the willingness to take creative risk, the instinct to look internationally, is not simply a function of ownership structure. It is shaped by the history and identity of the organisation. Scale provides leverage; it does not guarantee creativity.
Leach’s most striking observation is her assessment of where power now sits in the media ecosystem. Contrary to the conventional narrative, in which platforms and streamers are the dominant forces and producers are structurally disadvantaged, she argues that independent producers are currently in the strongest position they have ever occupied.
“I’d be more worried trying to run a traditional network than running a production company because we hold all the cards,” she says. “There is no diminishing of demand for the thing that we do at all. In fact, if anything, it’s exploding with new platforms.”
Her reasoning is structural: broadcasters are burdened with legacy infrastructure, declining audiences and rising costs, making them slow to adapt. Production companies, by contrast, are small and nimble, able to respond quickly to changes in the market, diversify their revenue streams and move towards wherever the audience is going.
She is equally optimistic about AI, not as a threat but as a tool that reduces the cost of production churn and frees up resources for creative investment. South Shore is already trialling AI-assisted offline editing, and she describes the impact on development pitches as transformative: the ability to show what a programme will look like through AI visualisation, without ever getting a camera out of a bag.
“AI is effectively taking out some of the churn work from the production side of the business and freeing up the money to be spent in a more creative way,” says Leach.
Leach’s optimism is not naive. It is grounded in a clear-eyed assessment of where the structural advantages now lie. Broadcasters are large, slow and burdened with legacy. Producers are small, fast and in demand from an expanding universe of platforms. Our ecosystem research has focused primarily on the structural conditions that enable format innovation. What Leach adds is a forward-looking argument about where value will concentrate as those conditions continue to shift.
Her conclusion is that content creators hold the strongest position in a fragmenting market. It is the most optimistic reading in this research. Whether it holds depends on whether producers can maintain their rights position as the pressure on broadcasters intensifies.