Signals change for National Geographic
Mars must evolve if they are going to survive in a rapidly changing media environment.
The overhaul is Murdoch’s first major entertainment initiative. “It’s not really a linear ratings game anymore,” he said about the channel, which is majorityowned by Fox. “It’s about creating demand across platforms, and part of the way to do that is to have programming that is big and commands attention.”
After sauntering along for years without posing any real threat, National Geographic and other lightly viewed channels – CMT, Oxygen, truTV – are now facing a survival-of-thefittest future. Younger viewers increasingly live in an on-demand world, where networks don’t matter.
“National Geographic has not been considered a must-have network,” said Anthony DiClemente, an analyst with Instinet.
Higher-quality series repre- sent National Geographic’s effort to avoid getting squeezed out. Fox also hopes to persuade distributors like Comcast and AT&T to pay more to carry National Geographic. The channel, available in 91 million homes in the US, receives about 23 cents per subscriber per month. Discovery Channel, in comparison, receives almost double that amount.
In many ways, the new National Geographic plan is similar to the one Fox has long used at FX, home to prestige dramas like Fargo. “Premium is a word we are using exhaustively now,” said Courteney Monroe, a former marketer for HBO and others who was named chief executive of National Geographic Global Networks last year. “Entertaining and smart are not mutually exclusive.”
Mars marks the hairpin turn. The $20 million miniseries, produced by a team that includes the Oscar-winning pair Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, mixes scripted drama and documentary sequences in a story about efforts by humans to colonise the red planet. The fictionalised portion looks at a crewed mission to Mars in 2033. Interviews with scientists and footage taped at SpaceX, the aerospace firm founded by Elon Musk, make up the rest.
Grazer said he first pitched the expensive project to Peter Rice, chief executive of Fox Networks Group, over lunch.
“It was the fastest ‘yes’ I think I’ve ever gotten,” he said, emphasising that Rice has played an important role in National Geographic’s turn. Grazer described Monroe, who has limited programming experience, as “high quality, a big thinker, the opposite of petty, someone who will forgive the little things to get to the big things”.
National Geographic execu- tives acknowledge that they will not make money on the film; rather, they always saw it as a brand-building effort. National Geographic, after all, got its start in 1888 as an academic society dedicated to spreading geographic knowledge. A company spokesman, Christopher Albert, said the film was viewed, at least in part, by roughly 64 million people worldwide. “We see this as a really big success,” he said.
National Geographic Channel has a long history overseas, where it reaches 350 million homes. But it became a standalone network in the US only in 2001. There was no real cable niche left to fill, so the channel, then a partnership between Fox and the National Geographic Society, copied the reality show playbooks of competitors. It worked only modestly, and serious society members recoiled at efforts like Taboo and Meet the Hutterites.