Nicely Entertainment Gears Up to Celebrate a Milestone

This January will mark five years since the launch of Nicely Entertainment, which Vanessa Shapiro set up just before the world shut down due to the Covid-19 pandemic. “I’m incredibly proud of all we’ve accomplished,” says Shapiro, CEO. “As hard as any company’s first year can be, the pandemic was a unique challenge for us but ultimately one that provided Nicely great opportunities.”

In that time, the company established strong co-production relationships in Australia that allowed Nicely to co-produce and distribute the two Netflix original series Dive Club and Gymnastics Academy: A Second Chance, as well as the destination romance film This Little Love of Mine—“which is a business model we’ve continued to utilize to this day, including [with] our hit movie A Royal in Paradise, which has a sequel coming up this holiday season on Great American Family, A Christmas Castle Proposal—A Royal in Paradise 2,” says Shapiro.

Another major milestone is that Nicely has amassed a catalog of over 100 feature films in under five years. “This has allowed us to secure direct ad-supported VOD deals with major U.S. players and has allowed us to increase international revenues,” Shapiro says. “But above all, Nicely Entertainment has grown from a team of one—myself—into a fully staffed one-stop shop managing development, production and global distribution for our growing list of clients. And even though 2024 has been another challenging year for our industry, we have a lot in the pipeline heading into 2025.”

Shapiro’s vision for Nicely has been to create a boutique distribution company, one that specializes in female-driven, advertiser-safe programming. “For me, it’s important to focus on inspiring, motivational and uplifting content,” she says. “Feel-good programming. Whether as a holiday-targeted film like Christmas on the Ranch, which we will premiere on Hulu this Christmas, or our latest production, Technically Yours, which we’re just bringing to market this MIPCOM, we simply focus on content that can make our audience enjoy the experience.”

Romance has been a strong focus; it’s a theme that also runs throughout its holiday films. “Truthfully, what drives our quality is our audience; the marketplace is competitive, and it’s critical to never take our client base or direct-to-consumer audience base for granted,” says Shapiro. “We spend a great deal of time as early as possible in the process—at the concept stage—to develop and produce content we feel will satisfy what our consumers want to see.”

This year has been a challenging one by all accounts across the industry, but as a smaller company, having both production and distribution capabilities in-house allowed Nicely to react quickly to market changes, Shapiro points out. “We immediately went into production on a slate of titles we knew would be relevant with our brand but also with our clients,” she says. “A Country Music Christmas, starring Jonathan Stoddard and Alexandra Harris, is a great example, as is Heartstrings Attached, with Morgan Bradley. Additionally, we put a major emphasis on targeted acquisitions and locking new co-production partnerships in Canada and Europe. This has allowed us to maintain our volume of on-brand and quality content but also to keep our sales pipeline flowing. Our priority remains to provide the marketplace with a steady flow of quality feel-good films, and we are proactively working on the development and production sides to keep the volume needed to satisfy our clients’ needs.”

The content strategy has been unwavering: to ensure a quality experience and focus on the core genres of holiday romance, destination romance and feel-good advertiser-safe programming. “From TV series to movies, our main focus remains delivering a quality story, one that exceeds our audience’s expectations,” says Shapiro. “But that’s not to say we don’t also acquire out-of-the-box projects if we feel there’s an opportunity. Quality content is quality content.”

That’s where the year-old Darkly Entertainment label comes into play, she adds. “When we’ve acquired edgier thrillers like the new MIPCOM release Seclusion, starring Nicky Whelan, or our disaster movie Super Icyclone, we’ve been able to reach a different set of clients with thrillers, dramas and overall darker, edgier and premium content under Nicely’s sub-label Darkly with a clear separation of genre. This allows us to keep Nicely focused on its strategy of being one of the leaders of feel-good TV movies while simultaneously diversifying our client base.”

The short-term focus is on continuing the company’s growth curve in terms of content development, production and output. “We’ve grown at a very rapid pace in the last five years, with over 100 titles now in our catalog,” Shapiro says. “The main focus will remain on expanding our footprint in the ad-supported VOD marketplace. We’re already direct with major players in the U.S., but as a worldwide company, we’re preparing for the AVOD trend to expand internationally.”

Longer term, Shapiro has some big ideas about where to take Nicely next, and “digital is a very appealing next step,” Shapiro says. “Of course, if my first five years running Nicely have taught me anything—namely navigating through Covid and through 2024—it’s that being proactive, paying attention to the market’s trends and continuing to deliver quality programming to our clients are all critical and very important to the continued growth of the company.”