Gepke Nederlof is MD of Be-Entertainment, the format distribution arm of Antwerp-based Belgian broadcaster DPG Media. She has spent her career at the intersection of the Dutch and Flemish television markets and has been one of the key figures behind Flanders’ emergence as a format export market.
In this conversation, she explains why Flanders and Wallonia are two completely different countries, how Dutch expertise changed the way the Flemish market navigates the international arena, and why building strong IP brands is the only durable strategy in an industry facing disruption on every front.
When people talk about Belgium in the context of the global format industry, they are almost always talking about Flemish-speaking Flanders. Nederlof explains why.
Belgium is, in practice, two entirely separate markets. Wallonia, the French-speaking south, is oriented toward France with French channels available locally. RTL TVI, the dominant commercial broadcaster there, has historically operated within the French-speaking group and still maintains an output deal with suppliers of French content such as M6 Group. The budgets are smaller and the proximity to France makes original development less financially rational.
“To understand Belgium, you have to treat it as two distinct television landscapes,” says Nederlof. “Wallonia relies so heavily on French content that original local development struggles to find oxygen. The market scale simply isn’t there to achieve a strong return on development investment.”
Flanders is a different story. With a more competitive broadcaster landscape, a more developed independent production sector, and better gross rating point monetisation, it is a market where original format development is both possible and, increasingly, commercially worthwhile.
Nederlof’s characterisation of the Belgian market confirms what 3Rivers’ ecosystem research identifies: market size matters, but it is the effective market size that determines format development capacity. Wallonia’s proximity to France removes the structural incentive to develop original exportable IP.
Flanders, by contrast, sits in the Dutch-language zone that has been one of the most productive format ecosystems in the world. Language and cultural proximity shape not just what audiences watch but what producers develop.
One of the most candid observations in this research came from Fremantle and Endemol Shine veteran Gary Carter, who said: “Belgium doesn’t matter.” His point is structural: if a format succeeds in Flanders, it does not carry the same international proof of concept as a success in the Netherlands or the UK. The market is simply too small and too removed from the main international circuits to generate the kind of attention that drives global licensing.
Nederlof does not fully dispute this. But she argues that the dynamic has shifted and that the change is partly the result of deliberate intervention.
Her analysis is direct: the Flemish market already had enormous craft and creativity but in the past lacked the outward-looking mentality that comes from growing up in a production ecosystem like Endemol or Talpa. The Dutch people who came to Flanders, including at Be-Entertainment, brought not just sales expertise but a way of thinking about formats as international products.
“Everyone who learns the business at Endemol or Talpa under John de Mol is schooled in an organisation where format creation and exploitation are the core of the company. The conversation is never about managing budget, it’s about engineering scale. The mandate is always, ‘How do we make this bigger, and how can we take over the world with it?’”
The result, she argues, is that Flanders now has something it did not have before: a story to tell. The formats were always there. Formats like Peking Express and Benidorm Bastards, and more recently Destination X, have been internationally successful for years. But the story of Flemish format success was never properly told to international buyers. Dutch expertise helped change that, not by changing the creative output, and not by changing the ecosystem itself, but by changing the international lens through which that output was presented.
“The nice way to put it is we gave the world a view of Flanders and Flanders a view of the world,” Nederlof says.
Nederlof’s account of Flanders’ transformation illustrates a dynamic that our ecosystem research identifies as the agency dimension of format export capacity. Structural conditions create the possibility of success. But the actual translation of creative output into international results requires individuals with the knowledge, networks and mentality to navigate those conditions internationally.
The Dutch contribution to Flanders was not the construction of a new ecosystem, since the creativity and the craft were already there. It was the ability to navigate the existing ecosystem differently, to read the international market, build the right relationships and tell the Flemish story in a language that global buyers could act on.
On the question of streaming platforms as partners for format adaptations, Nederlof’s position is nuanced and market-specific. Her experience with Amazon and Netflix has been fundamentally different.
Amazon, she argues, operates with considerably more flexibility than Netflix. Be-Entertainment’s format The Way Out (aka Code van Coppens) is now in production for its second season on Prime Video in Germany, with other Prime markets in discussion. The format exists in many other markets independently of Prime; it was not a global buyout. Amazon was willing to work within a model that preserved Be-Entertainment’s ability to license the format territorially.
Netflix is a different story. The model is more rigid. If you do something with them, they request everything for the world. That is, by definition, incompatible with a territorial distribution model. “Netflix’s global buyout strategy is incredibly powerful for their platform, but it runs counter to our model of retaining territorial rights and long-term asset value,” she says.
But Nederlof’s critique of Netflix goes beyond the rights structure. She identifies a more fundamental difference in how streamers approach the commissioning relationship. Traditional broadcasters, even the most commercially focused ones, had people who fell in love with content, who made decisions based on instinct as well as data, who were willing to have a creative conversation about what a format could become.
Studio Lambert CEO Stephen Lambert made a similar observation about the UK commissioning culture: the premium placed on discovering something new was institutionally embedded in how commissioners built their careers and their reputations.
Nederlof sees that quality disappearing at streamers: “I am used to people falling in love a little with a new title. With streamers the main question is, ‘What will it do exactly and how does it fit our plan?’ That leaves almost no room for a conversation about the content itself.”
Nederlof’s observation connects to something Lambert identified in the UK ecosystem: when commissioners build their reputations on discovering something new, the incentive structure rewards creative risk-taking. When commissioning becomes a process of data optimisation and box-ticking, that incentive disappears.
The quality of the commissioning conversation is not incidental to format innovation – it is one of the conditions that makes it possible. Platforms that have removed the human creative relationship from their commissioning process may produce content that fits their algorithm. They are unlikely to produce the next format that changes the industry.
The creator economy presents Be-Entertainment with a specific and immediate problem: format theft. Nederlof describes discovering that one of the company’s formats, Finder$ Keeper$, a show in which money is hidden in a house and contestants have to find it, had been replicated on YouTube, one-for-one, by a creator who had no licensing agreement and no intention of paying for one.
“We discovered a direct, one-for-one copy of our format Finder$ Keeper$ available on YouTube. We immediately reached out to address the rights infringement, and the issue was promptly resolved. However, proactively managing IP protection across such a massive platform is an enormous challenge.”
The traditional format industry operated within a relatively small world of broadcasters who knew each other, made deals with each other, and maintained a kind of informal code about what could and could not be copied. YouTube creators operate entirely outside that world. They are not in the business. They do not think in terms of IP rights. They see something that works, they make their own version and they post it.
“The international television market was historically a tight-knit community bound by professional courtesy and mutual respect,” says Nederlof. “Today’s digital-first creators exist completely outside of that framework. They aren’t bound by legacy industry rules. To them, format adaptation isn’t a rights issue, it’s just a form of being inspired.”
The format licensing system was built on the premise that IP could be controlled. YouTube has created a distribution environment in which that control is extremely difficult to maintain. If a format can be freely replicated on the most-watched platform in the world without consequence, the economic premise of licensing, that exclusivity has value, is undermined. The question this raises for the format industry is not just legal – it is existential.
When asked what Be-Entertainment’s strategic response to these disruptions will be, Nederlof’s answer is clear and consistent: build strong IP brands. Not formats but brands. The distinction matters.
A format is a structured creative idea that can be licensed. A brand is a format that has become a cultural property with value beyond any single production, something that can generate revenue through multiple channels, multiple markets, multiple forms. The formats that have survived the shifts of the past decade are those that became brands: The Voice, Survivor, The Traitors.
“If you have strong IP and you have really created a brand, then your commercial strategy naturally extends far beyond the constraints of traditional linear television,” she says. “It unlocks a comprehensive monetisation framework. Ultimately, the objective is converting that audience loyalty into a diversified revenue model, which is why I believe that developing brand-led IP is so important.”
She is candid about the uncertainty ahead. Nobody knows exactly where the money will come from in five years. The traditional model of a percentage on a format licence will not be sufficient. Direct-to-consumer, advertising, live experiences, merchandise – all of these are possibilities. But they only work if the underlying IP is strong enough to anchor them.
“Content appetite is still there; the model is just going to change. And if production budgets go down dramatically through AI, then the revenue model automatically changes too. The challenge is how do we get a piece of that pie. In a world of cheap production, strong brands become the only defensible assets left to monetise,” says Nederlof.
Nederlof’s brand strategy argument is the most forward-looking conclusion in this research. Our ecosystem research has focused primarily on the conditions that produce original format IP. What Nederlof adds is the question of what happens to that IP once the traditional licensing model erodes.
Her answer – build brands not just formats – implies a fundamental shift in how the format industry needs to think about value creation. A format is a product; a brand is much more. And in a world where distribution is concentrated in the hands of a small number of platforms, the only leverage available to independent producers and distributors is the weight of what they own.