De Vijver is best known as the owner of Woestijnvis, the most innovative and successful production house in Flanders. Wouter Vandenhaute is their managing director.
Vandenhaute, 49, started as a sports journalist with the Flemish public broadcaster, then called BRT, before moving on to work with star producer Mark Uytterhoeven, who was also a sports reporter but soon showed a talent for dreaming up comical and popular show formats.
Uytterhoeven and Vandenhaute were two of the founders of Woestijnvis, whose name comes from a celebrated mistake by a contestant on the Flemish game show Rad van Fortuin (Wheel of Fortune); the clue was pointing to woestijnvos ("desert fox"), but the contestant said woestijnvis ("desert fish").
The production company's first hit was Man bijt hond, and to many it's still their best: a daily digest of the more offeat things going on in Flanders, broadcast just after the news. They also dreamed up De mol (The Mole), a format that has travelled the world. But the biggest success has been De slimste mens ter wereld (The Smartest Person in the World), an annual quiz show that features the biggest names on the Flemish scene - from media to entertainment to politics.
Critical success, too, has not eluded Vandenhaute: the series Van vlees en bloed (Of Flesh and Blood) is considered a high- point of Flemish TV drama; it aired in 2008, the same year that Woestijnvis produced its first feature film, Loft, which holds the record for the most tickets sold for any Flemish film and is now undergoing remakes in both the Netherlands and Hollywood.
Corelio and Sanoma, by all accounts, will provide the deep pockets in the latest venture. But they don't know how to run TV stations and have, frankly, enough on their hands to defend their newspaper and magazine businesses against the onslaught of new media.
If there's someone who does know about TV, on the other hand, it's Vandenhaute. Now delivered into the hands of his production company are two TV stations that will allow Vandenhaute, to use Orson Welles' phrase describing the gift of getting to make films, a train set to play with - and the landscape on which to run it.
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