Exclusive Interview with PBS
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SSD26
PBS as a Silver Sponsor
We’re thrilled to welcome PBS as a Silver Sponsor of this year’s market. We sat down with Geoff Daniels, Senior Vice President of Global Development at PBS, to discuss their new perspectives on documentary storytelling, partnerships and international collaboration.
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1/ International Priorities
In a sector undergoing major transformation, where are you focusing your strategic efforts internationally, and with what objectives?
Coming out of a challenging year, we’re feeling optimistic about the future. PBS has received an outpouring of support from local communities, foundations, donors, and fans of public media. That is enabling us to focus on developing new high-quality, high impact projects across a wide range of unscripted genres that have clear affinities with our most beloved franchises and strands. Central to this effort is forging new content partnership models with best-in-class producers who understand streaming and digital platforms and who can generate the kind of innovative program ideas that can bring new viewers into the PBS family.
2/ What Is Changing Your Decisions
What is the one editorial, technological, or market change that is having the greatest impact on the way you select documentary projects today, and how?
We are staying true to our core values: distributing inspiring and culturally impactful fact-based programming across the genres of science, nature, history, the arts, culture, and independent documentaries. If anything, we’ve spent the last year streamlining our decision-making and project management processes to make PBS more accessible and responsive to producers as we explore new growth opportunities that align with our mission and wider programming goals. To that end, we’ve reorganized our content teams into well-defined genre verticals to help empower our editorial leads, who will continue to prioritize the linear television service while expanding development of digital first content to fuel the phenomenal growth and engagement we are seeing across those platforms.
3/ New Collaborations
The theme of Sunny Side of the Doc 2026, “The Right Move / Le Bon Élan,” encourages the creation of new alliances. What kind of partner are you hoping to meet in La Rochelle that you have not yet found?
We are primarily hoping to connect with two types of partners at Sunny Side – visionary producers and flexible production partners who share our commitment to elevating independent storytelling that is widely accessible to global audiences. Since PBS rarely commissions content outright, co-productions will always be a hugely important part of our content plan as we look to build new relationships and funding models to meet the challenges we all face without sacrificing creative ambition and our values. Sunny Side is no doubt the right place to build all those connections…and will help PBS make the right move.
Plus don’t miss In Conversation with Geoff Daniels, PBS on Tuesday, June 23 at 12:00pm in the Auditorium.
