BritBox International announces Diederick Santer as first Chief Creative Officer

BritBox International announces Diederick Santer as first Chief Creative Officer 

BritBox International (the ITV & BBC Studios owned joint venture) today announced that Diederick Santer has been appointed to the new role of BritBox International Chief Creative Officer. 

Diederick will join BritBox in September and will oversee all aspects of programming on the SVOD service globally, including commissioning and acquisition across all genres and for all markets outside of the UK. 

Formerly CEO of Kudos, one of the world’s leading television production companies, Diederick oversaw programmes including the International Emmy Awards-winning Man in an Orange Shirt, Channel 4 and AMC returner Humans, International Emmy-nominated Apple Tree Yard, Gunpowder for BBC One, BBC Two’s The Boy With The Topknot, and the Sky Atlantic hit, Tin Star.

He began his TV career in 1996 at ITV, joining the BBC in 2000 and became Executive Producer of EastEnders in 2006. He has recently worked in BBC Drama Commissioning overseeing a number of their 2021 titles, and previously set up his own production company, Lovely Day, a label within Kudos, which produced the hugely popular crime series Grantchester.

Diederick will be part of the BritBox International leadership team, working under BritBox International CEO Reemah Sakaan. His role will include building production and distribution relationships with the UK Creative sector to secure a future pipeline of shows to accelerate BritBox's international growth in the SVOD world as part of its planned roll-out to multiple countries worldwide.

The ad-free subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) streaming service first launched in March 2017 in the US, and earlier in the year surpassed 2 million global subscriptions. Since 2017, it has launched in Canada, the UK, Australia and is due to launch in South Africa this summer.

Building upon this success, BritBox will seek to broaden its global footprint across multiple territories. BritBox boasts the largest collection of British TV boxsets and has stepped up its Originals strategy, recently announcing Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, Murder in Provence, Sanditon Series 2 and Marlow. The BritBox proposition is broadly consistent in each market but allows for regional variations reflecting consumer demand.  Internationally, BritBox operates as a 50/50 joint venture between BBC Studios and ITV.

Reemah Sakaan, BritBox International CEO said:

“Diederick is a critical new appointment for us as we drive the scale and editorial ambition of BritBox International. His unrivalled relationships, experience, and superb taste make him perfectly positioned to create and curate the best of British programming for fans around the world.”

Diederick Santer said:

“I am hugely excited to be joining Reemah and her team at BritBox International. I’ve been obsessed with British TV for as long as I can remember, so to share the very best of it with the rest of the world - and to work with the finest UK producers - is something I am very much looking forward to.”

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Notes to editors

Available across multiple screens and devices, BritBox delivers the most comprehensive service dedicated to the UK’s favourite programmes and is the home of the largest collection of British boxsets. Co-branded by ITV and the BBC, the BritBox offering in each market showcases the depth and breadth of British creativity, on demand, ad free and all in one place, with favourite content from ITV and the BBC, as well as from other British broadcasters and production companies, across a variety of genres, including critically acclaimed drama, crime thrillers, classic comedy and powerful documentaries alongside reality hits and entertainment.

Both ITV and the BBC will also provide a new and regular flow of fresh programmes as soon as they come out of their broadcast and catch-up windows. This will provide viewers with hundreds of hours of new ITV and BBC content every year. Many of these shows will be exclusive to viewers through BritBox and the flow of programmes will ensure that the content on BritBox is refreshed every week.  BritBox will also commission original content from British production companies specifically created for BritBox.