MIPCOM runs 12–15 October this year, and most distribution teams are already deep in the familiar routine: locking the slate, briefing the designers, chasing the showreel edit, booking the dinners. The stand will look immaculate. The trailers will be cut to the second.

And then, three weeks before the market, a buyer in Seoul or São Paulo will click a screener link from last year's campaign and find it expired. Or they'll be asked to reset a password they never knew they had. Or the episode will buffer, or the metadata will say "TBC", or the sales sheet won't download. They won't email you about it. They'll just close the tab — and arrive at your meeting with a quietly formed view of how your company operates.

Here's the uncomfortable truth about market prep: buyers form their impression of your professionalism from your screening room long before they reach your stand. The stand gets a four-day window. Your screening room is working — or failing — for the six weeks either side of it, which is when serious buyers actually do their viewing. The weeks before Cannes are when acquisition teams build their meeting lists and decide who's worth an hour of their schedule. The weeks after are when they evaluate properly, away from the noise of the Croisette.

So before another euro goes into the stand, it's worth auditing the thing buyers will actually spend the most time with.

Walk in as a buyer, not as an admin

The single most valuable hour you can spend before MIPCOM is this: get a colleague who doesn't work in your platform every day, give them a fresh buyer login, and watch them try to find, watch and download your three priority titles. Don't help them. Just watch.

What you're looking for is friction — every extra click, every login wall, every moment of confusion. Buyers at market time are reviewing dozens of catalogues from dozens of distributors. They will not fight your system. If a rival's screener plays in one click and yours takes a password reset and two emails, you haven't lost on content. You've lost on plumbing.

The pre-MIPCOM screening room checklist

Run through this with your team at least four weeks out — early enough to actually fix what you find.

Access and playback

• Every priority title has a working screener — actually click them, don't trust the CMS status
• No expired links anywhere a buyer might still have one (old campaigns, old emails, old collections)
• Playback starts in seconds, without clunky logins, plugin warnings or registration walls
• Access permissions are correct by territory and rights status — nothing visible that shouldn't be, nothing blocked that should be open

Content and metadata

• Every title page answers a buyer's first four questions instantly: what is it, who is it for, how many episodes, what's the duration
• Genres, formats, episode counts and runtimes are complete — no "TBC" on anything you're actively selling
• New slate titles are clearly flagged as new; returning series show the latest season
• Trailers are current — last year's trailer on this year's priority title sends its own message

Assets and materials

• Sales sheets, press packs and images are uploaded, current and downloadable for every priority title
• File names are professional — buyers forward these internally, and "FINAL_v7_amended2.pdf" travels with your brand on it
• Anything a buyer needs to make an internal case — episode availability, delivery formats, rights windows — is either on the page or one ask away

The market experience

• Your MIPCOM slate exists as a clean, current collection a buyer can be sent in one link
• The catalogue works on an iPad, because that's what it'll be shown on in half your meetings
• Search works — try the obvious terms a buyer would actually use and see what comes back
• Someone owns the inbox for access requests during the market, with a response time measured in minutes, not days

The part most teams skip

There's one more question, and it's the one that separates a tidy screening room from a commercially useful one: when a buyer does all of this — watches, browses, downloads — will you know?

Most distributors put real effort into making content available and almost none into seeing what buyers do with it. Which means the most valuable weeks of the year, when acquisition teams are quietly shortlisting before Cannes, pass by invisibly. A buyer who watched forty minutes of your priority screener in late September is telling you exactly which meeting matters. If nobody sees that, the signal is wasted.

We'll come back to that — it changes how your sales team should walk into every meeting at the Palais. For now, the job is simpler: make sure that when buyers come looking in the next few weeks, what they find is fast, complete and effortless.

Because at MIPCOM, every distributor's stand looks professional. The screening room is where buyers find out who actually is.

ONE helps TV distributors present, manage and screen complex catalogues for global buyers — before, during and after every market. Book a discovery call to see your screening room the way buyers do.