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NHNZ Worldwide is an Emmy award-winning documentary production company with 30-plus years’ experience in the international television market.
Originally established as the natural history division of TVNZ, NHNZ was privatised in 1997 and subsequently grew to embrace multiple non-fiction genres of television for international broadcasters.
NHNZ entered the China market in the late 1990s because of the rapid growth the country was experiencing and the fact that at that time there were no other foreign producers making documentaries in China.
NHNZ’s CEO Michael Stedman had always been interested in Chinese culture and the company’s then shareholder, Fox Corporation, was supportive of a strategy targeting China and helped facilitate introductions.
The initial focus was on building relationships with state agencies like the State Information Council of China (SICO) and China Intercontinental Communications Centre (CICC), and these relationships led to direct relationships with Chinese state broadcasters like CCTV.
Most recently NHNZ has made sales to privately owned streamers like Youku and Bytedance reflecting the appetite of Chinese audiences for international television content.
China has been important to NHNZ both as a market for its programmes and a setting for many documentaries. Typically NHNZ funds its programmes through contributions from broadcasters who may be co-producers providing creative input into the content of the programme.
Many programmes filmed in China have been funded by a combination of funding from Chinese broadcasters, and funding from western broadcasters like National Geographic or Discovery, with NHNZ putting together a consortium of broadcaster/co-producers, and the programme being shown globally.
Michael Stedman was the initial key driver of the entry into the Chinese market and after his retirement the relationships were led by John Crawford who was NHNZ’s General Manager and Kyle Murdoch who was initially head of Beijing office and subsequently CEO. There were many key individuals on the Chinese side including Madam Yuan at CICC, and Mr Wang and Wei Bin at CCTV.
In 1998 NHNZ established an office based in the Fox’s office in Beijing. Several years later, in 2000 NHNZ produced “Tibet, Wheel of Life, Winds of Change”. In 2001 a CCTV film crew visit New Zealand and we assisted them to film a documentary series here and between 2007-2011 NHNZ filmed episodes of “Megastructures” (Nat Geo) and “Man Made Marvels” (Discovery) in China.
Over the five years that followed, NHNZ and CICC co-produced China Revealed, an innovative 3D television documentary, in 2014 we supported the China-New Zealand television co-production treaty and shortly afterwards entered into several official co-productions including Zoomoo and Panda Kiwi. And in 2017 NHNZ and CCTV9 co-produced Big Pacific a blue chip natural history series about the wildlife of the Pacific Ocean with a coalition of international broadcasters including PBS(US/Canada); NHK (Japan); ARTE (France); ZDF (Germany); and Discovery (UK).
In doing business in China, communications can be challenging, ensuring that each party understands the other party’s perspectives and objectives, and that mutual expectations are clear. This has been overcome by:
Building trust through longstanding personal relationships – personal relationships require face to face meetings (not just at the office but outside the office)
Involving cultural intermediaries who can understand the perspective of both sides, New Zealanders based in China, Chinese based in New Zealand
Even with large state broadcasters a lot comes down to personal relationships and these take time. Michael Stedman made multiple visits to China before making any deal, telling his Chinese contacts that he was “just here to learn”.
Additionally Chinese and international audiences have different audience needs and preferences around story telling styles. This has been overcome by creating separate China specific and International versions of the same production.