This guide cuts through that confusion. Whether you’re a content seller trying to get your project in front of the right person—or a buyer building a supply chain and trying to understand who you’re actually negotiating with—this is the map you need.

The Creative Leadership Tier: Showrunners, EPs, and Series Producers

But here’s what matters for buyers and sellers: the showrunner is often the person whose attachment—or departure—determines whether a deal holds. When you’re acquiring a series or packaging a project for sale, the showrunner’s track record is the single most bankable creative credential on the table. A showrunner who’s delivered 3+ seasons for Netflix or HBO is a different commercial proposition than a first-time series creator, even if both have exceptional ideas.

The executive producer title—in TV—covers an enormous range. At the top, it’s the showrunner or lead creative. But “EP” credits are also frequently given to financiers who put money into the project, to talent managers who brokered key attachments, and to producing partners who brought the IP to the table. When you see a project with six executive producer credits, don’t assume all six are creatively driving the show. Two might be. The other four might be financial or packaging arrangements.

The series producer—more common in UK and European television—is closer to what Americans would call the showrunner’s operational deputy. They manage the production machine while the lead creative focuses on the editorial. For international co-productions, series producers often handle the logistics of multi-territory shoots while the lead writer’s vision remains consistent.

As a seller, when you’re packaging a project, you want to be able to answer one question before you walk into any room: “Who is your showrunner or lead EP, and what have they delivered at scale?” That question will come—usually before the second meeting. Have the answer ready, and ideally the person available to attach a conversation to.

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The Commissioning Side: Who Actually Greenlights Your Show

The commissioning editor is—without question—the most important relationship a content seller can build at a broadcaster. They control the content budget for specific genres or territories. They have the authority to greenlight development and often hold final approval on series orders. Miss them and you’re working two steps below the decision.

At the BBC, Channel 4, or ITV, commissioning editors are organized by genre: Drama, Factual, Entertainment, Children’s. At streamers, the equivalent role often carries titles like Head of Content, VP of Originals, or Director of Programming—by genre or by territory. At OSN, which covers 23 countries across MENA and North Africa, Rolla Karam (Senior Vice President, Content Acquisition) sits at the exact equivalent of this role—negotiating deals across Western, Arabic, and Turkish content simultaneously for both OSN TV and OSN Plus. That’s a single decision-maker with multi-territory authority over a platform that reaches the entire Middle East.

And that’s the critical insight: at regional streaming platforms like OSN, the content acquisition lead isn’t just buying for one country. They’re buying for a region. That shifts your pitch strategy dramatically. You’re not selling a UK drama for the UK audience—you’re positioning it for 23-country reach, premium platform placement, and competition against Turkish content that, as Karam notes, “does amazingly well” on OSN’s platform.

The Head of Content or Chief Content Officer sits above the commissioning editor tier. These are strategic roles—they set the overall content vision, manage the annual budget, and make calls on anchor programming. You don’t pitch to them first. You build to them. The commissioning editor is your entry point. The CCO is your validation.

One distinction that trips up sellers regularly: many streamers—particularly the majors—have both an originals team and an acquisitions team. Originals commission new productions. Acquisitions buy completed or near-completed content. Your pitch strategy, your materials, and frankly your pricing model are different depending on which door you’re walking through. Pitch a finished series to an originals exec, and you’ll be redirected. Pitch a development idea to the acquisitions team, and the same thing happens. Know the difference before you book the meeting.

Rolla Karam (Senior Vice President, Content Acquisition, OSN) walks through how a 23-country regional platform approaches content acquisition—an essential perspective for sellers targeting MENA:

Development Roles: Where Projects Live or Die

Development is the limbo between “great idea” and “greenlit project.” And the roles inside development teams shape which ideas survive that limbo—and how.

The development executive (also called a “development producer” at indie companies) evaluates incoming pitches, manages the development pipeline, and acts as the internal advocate for projects they believe in. They’re often the first person you’ll actually speak to at a prodco or broadcaster—because they’re the readers of unsolicited material and the takers of first meetings. Don’t dismiss them. A development exec who champions your project internally is worth more than a brief meeting with the commissioning editor who hasn’t had time to read the treatment.

The VP of Development or Head of Development manages the overall pipeline and prioritizes which projects get resources—script commissions, treatment fees, attached writers. At a major studio, this role sits between creative executives and the content leadership. At an indie, the head of development might be one of two or three people, with significant decision-making authority. At Banijay, one of the world’s largest content groups, development heads operate at both the group level and within each label—which means the same project might need to navigate two tiers of development conversation before reaching a commissioning decision.

One concept that matters for sellers specifically: blind script deals and put pilots are greenlight mechanisms that development roles manage. If a production company secures a blind script deal with a major network, the development exec is your internal contact for what that network’s current programming priorities look like—which genres, which demographics, which slots need filling. Sellers who understand how blind script deals work can position their projects more precisely against a buyer’s live content needs.

The Fragmentation Paradox hits development teams particularly hard. With 600,000+ companies in the global film and TV ecosystem, development executives at large platforms are fielding inbound from an opaque, fragmented supplier base. They can’t verify credits efficiently. They don’t have capacity benchmarks. And their outreach to independent producers is equally blind—referral-dependent and relationship-constrained. This is exactly where intelligence tools that surface verified project histories and company track records compress what used to be months of due diligence into days.

Production Management Roles: The Budget Keepers

Once a project moves from development into production, the creative leadership hands significant operational authority to the production management layer. These are the roles that buyers and sellers rarely think about—but vendors and service providers absolutely must.

The line producer owns the day-to-day budget. They translate the creative vision into a practical production plan, manage crew, coordinate departments, and make real-time decisions about where money goes. If you’re a post-production company, a VFX studio, or a service vendor selling into a production—the line producer is often your contracting counterpart. They control vendor selection at the operational level.

The production manager (PM) works beneath the line producer to manage logistics: scheduling, location agreements, contracts, daily production reports. At international co-productions—increasingly common as Sovereign Content Hubs in MENA, APAC, and LATAM drive more multi-territory shoots—the PM’s job involves coordinating across jurisdictions with different labor laws, tax incentive claiming deadlines, and currency exposures.

The production accountant is someone sellers almost never engage with directly, but who exerts enormous structural influence. They track every line of the budget in real time, flag overages, process vendor invoices, and manage the tax incentive claims that can represent 25–40% of a production’s effective financing in territories like the UK, Canada, or Saudi Arabia. If your invoice is sitting unpaid, the production accountant knows why. If you want to understand a production’s financial health before signing a multi-year service deal, the accountant’s reports are the ground truth.

As reported by Deadline, international co-productions are growing as a share of total production output—driven by tax incentive stacking across territories. This makes the production management layer more complex, with multiple accountants managing multiple incentive regimes simultaneously. For service vendors, knowing which production management structure you’re working within is essential for understanding payment timelines and contractual obligations.

Sales and Distribution Roles: Who Buys and Sells Rights

This is the tier that directly controls the commercial future of every project—and where buyers and sellers spend most of their energy. Let’s break down the key roles without the confusion.

The sales agent represents a producer’s finished or in-development project in the market. They package the project for international buyers, attend markets like MIPCOM, AFM, and Cannes Marché, and negotiate territory-by-territory licensing deals. A strong sales agent—with relationships in key territories—can be the difference between a project that sells to 20 markets and one that sits unsold. Their commission is typically 15–25% of international sales revenues.

The content acquisition manager or acquisitions executive sits on the buying side—at broadcasters, streamers, or distributors—and is tasked with sourcing completed or nearly-completed content that fits the platform’s programming needs. This role evaluates finished pilots, buys broadcast rights from rights holders, and recommends licensing decisions to the commissioning team or content leadership. They’re frequently the first buyers a new seller should meet—because their mandate is to acquire, not to commission from scratch.

The rights manager or rights executive deals with the legal and structural layer of content ownership: clearing rights for each territory, managing windowing schedules (theatrical first, then streaming, then home entertainment), and handling secondary markets. When a content deal gets complicated—overlapping rights, expired options, competing claims—the rights manager is the person who untangles it. Understanding our detailed guide to distribution rights and content licensing is essential reading before engaging any rights negotiation.

The distribution executive manages the physical and digital delivery pipeline once rights deals are closed: delivering masters in the correct specs, managing metadata, handling localization requirements, and ensuring content is live on-platform on schedule. As Variety has noted in coverage of streaming’s expansion, the volume of required deliverables per title has increased dramatically—with platforms often requiring separate masters for HDR, SDR, multiple language versions, and accessibility tracks. The distribution executive ensures all of this ships clean.

The Buyer Perspective: Who to Pitch and When

Here’s the Vitrina Buyer Contact Matrix™—a framework for knowing which role to approach at each stage of your project’s development:

The Fragmentation Paradox is real here too—but it runs in both directions. Buyers face 600,000+ potential supplier companies globally, making quality verification a constant challenge. And sellers face the same opacity from the other side: who is actually buying right now, in what genres, for which territories? Static databases—old festival catalogs, IMDb credits, outdated LinkedIn profiles—can’t answer that question. Real-time intelligence can.

For instance, the shift at OSN from linear to streaming-first means the content acquisition priorities have changed. Rolla Karam’s team at OSN is actively enhancing its Arabic catalog under a “from the region, for the region” mandate. If you’re a seller with Arabic-language content or a production company with co-production capacity in MENA, that’s a live window—but you’d only know it’s open if you had current intelligence on the platform’s strategic direction. Our guide to global content acquisition strategy in 2026 maps the current buying landscape across major territories.

The Seller Perspective: How to Package for Each Role

Knowing who holds which role is half the work. The other half is knowing what each role needs to say yes—and what format they need it in.

Development executives at major prodcos and broadcasters receive hundreds of pitches per quarter. They’re not reading 40-page treatments from unknown companies. They’re scanning for the hook—the core premise, the tone, and the key creative attachment—in the first two minutes of a conversation or the first paragraph of a document. Your pitch deck for a development exec should be 10 slides maximum, leading with the premise and the showrunner’s track record.

Commissioning editors need to see the full package—but “full” means something specific. They need the creative vision locked down, a budget range that’s realistic for their slate, and a clear sense of how the project fits their current programming priorities. A drama pitch without a budget won’t get past the first read. Neither will an unscripted format pitch without performance data from a comparable show.

But here’s the insider reality about packaging that most sellers get wrong: commissioning editors aren’t just evaluating the project. They’re evaluating your ability to deliver it. The question behind every commissioning meeting is, “If we say yes today, can this team actually make this show?” Your EP or showrunner attachment, your production company’s track record, and your understanding of delivery requirements all speak directly to that question. As our insider guide to the TV development process details, the packaging conversation often matters more than the creative pitch itself.

For acquisitions executives evaluating finished content, the package is almost the inverse: less creative pitch, more commercial data. They need screeners, ratings or streaming performance figures from existing territories, available rights by territory, and a clear sense of what the ask is—licensing fee, MG against backend, or revenue share. Acquisitions decisions are made faster than development decisions, but they require more concrete information upfront.

The Vitrina Smart Pairing approach changes how sellers navigate this. Instead of relying on relationship networks that cover maybe 3–5% of the relevant buyer universe, you can surface which specific acquisition executives at which platforms have recently closed deals in your genre and territory range. That’s the insider advantage—knowing before the market that a window is open, and knowing exactly which title in your portfolio fits the gap they’re trying to fill.