Streaming giant to open Manchester production hub with pledge of 30 British series a year
Salford base will house commissioning, post-production and a 200-strong team, as the company commits to spending £1.1bn on UK programmes over three years
One of the world’s largest streaming services is to open a production and commissioning hub in Salford, its first outside London, and has committed to spending £1.1bn on British programmes over the next three years, with at least 30 original series a year.
The company said on Monday that it would take two floors of a building on Salford Quays from next spring, housing a 200-strong team covering commissioning for unscripted and drama, post-production and a new training scheme for 60 entrants a year drawn from the north of England. It described the move as “a recognition that the UK industry does not stop at the M25”.
The streamer’s UK head of content, Louise Darnell, said the company had made 24 series in Britain last year and that more than half had been shot north of Birmingham, “usually with a commissioning team that had to get on a train to visit them”. The hub, she said, would be given its own budget rather than a share of London’s. “We are not opening a regional office. We are moving half the decisions.”
The announcement follows a two-year slowdown in which several streamers cut UK spending sharply after a boom that peaked in 2022. Figures from the British Film Institute show that spending on high-end television in the UK fell 27% in 2024 before recovering partially last year. Producers in the north have been particularly exposed: a survey by the producers’ trade body in the spring found that 44% of its members in the north-west had made redundancies in the previous 18 months.
Jonathan Weir, whose Bolton-based company makes factual series for the BBC and Channel 4, said the move was “very welcome, with the caveat that we have heard commitment before”. He said the test would be whether the hub commissioned from companies in the region or simply relocated London-based staff. “If the 30 series a year come from the same 10 suppliers who have always had them, it is a change of postcode, not of policy.”
The mayor of Greater Manchester said the city region now had the second-largest cluster of television production in Europe, employing an estimated 9,000 people, and that the hub was “a vote of confidence that is also a challenge to the rest of the industry to follow”.
The company said it would announce the first commissions from the hub in January.
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