How Bluey pitch won ABC licence fee.

More detail on Bluey‘s commission at ABC was revealed at Australian Content in the Streaming Era Symposium this week.

Mary-Ellen Mullane Acting Head of Children’s and Family Content recalled how ABC was instrumental in the project’s life, but only with the minimum input required.

“That was a tiny little project that was pitched into the ABC. At the time it was a very unknown team,” she explained. “The person who was in the commissioning job at the time said, ‘Why don’t we give it a licence fee only?’ which is just the smallest amount of money you can put into a project.

“Because, we wanted to help the filmmakers, but you know, we (didn’t) see its huge potential that it turned out to be. So there you go. This is a risky business.

“So that project got going. It was actually kind of a quiet little project, and it got picked up by the BBC commercial arm, called BBC Studios. They picked it up as the distributor, and they sold it to Disney internationally. So everywhere else in the world, Disney’s got the footprint.”

Ludio Studios producer Daley Pearson previously told TV Tonight, “At that time, there was a real hero with ABC called Michael Carrington. He was running Kids at the time and gave us the licence fee, to then unlock Screen Australia finance, which hadn’t been done for a long time in Kids.”