Ukrainian TV content - who will be on top?

Yesterday, Den has held an unprecedented round table discussion "Ukrainian series vs Russian: prospects of creating our own content and refusing the Russian TV". This important media event had gathered much attention from the TV establishment – as much as 8 channels arrived to make a news report. The principal question raised among the participants of the round table was the reason that prevents Ukraine from producing its own television content? Den has long been producing such content as a newspaper, but is there anyone up to the task among our TV broadcasters?

The participants who discussed the general understanding of changes in the Ukrainian TV included: Yurii Artemenko, chairman of the National Council on Television and Radio Broadcasting; Andrii Yashchyshyn, Deputy Chairman of the State Cinema Agency of Ukraine; Oleksandr Tkachenko, CEO of “1+1 media”. Some of the invited media persons, including top managers of leading Ukrainian channels, have informed Den that they would not be able to attend the event, so the organizers offered them to speak in correspondence, which the newspaper will publish as comments.

The issues of the domestic TV-series production and of the distortions in the information space in general are long overdue. The law on, figuratively speaking, the "ban of Russian TV series" indicated how dependent our channels are in regard of legal and ideological aspects of the content. Has anyone thought about transforming our history into a popular product and produce a successful series on this basis?

“Channels do have to think about their own series production,” says Yurii Artemenko. “At the last meeting of the National Council, the representatives of the channels, including  TRC ‘Ukraine’, ‘1+1’, and the StarLightMedia group, have claimed to have increased the domestic production threefold... And one might even depict not a political hero of the past in their series — take, for example, Sikorsky. His planes fly all over the world. If you take the right story and relate it beautifully – the product will have its demand. Even the very situation in our politics prompts us to manage on our own."