HEY YOU, IT’S HAYU
New streaming service from NBCUniversal has access to reality TV shows, like Keeping up With the Kardashians,
Finding it hard to keep up with the Kardashians? NBCUniversal’s Hendrik McDermott has the answer. The Canadian got his start in the media business as an analyst for Rogers Media in Toronto.
One mission was to figure out how to best increase and retain subscribers for Macleans, Canada’s national news magazine. Decades later, that old school print training has served him well, even as legacy media, including the Star, adopt a subscription model in a digital world.
After stints in the U.K. and the U.S., the NBCUniversal International executive returned home this week — not just to have lunch with his parents, which was a bonus — but also to launch reality streaming service hayu (pronounced heyyou), which officially debuts in Canada on Thursday and features complete series of reality shows from the Comcast library, such as Keeping Up With the Kardashians.
“The publishing business is quite similar to the video-ondemand industry, especially magazine publishing, which has a recurring subscription model,” says McDermott, who is the managing director of the service.
After launching in 2016, first in the U.K. with rollouts in Ireland, Australia, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark, hayu is now available for Canadians for $5.99 a month.
But do Canadians really need another streaming app?
It depends if you’re a fan of critic-proof franchises such as the Kardashians, The Real Housewives or Million Dollar Listing. For your money you get more than 6,000 episodes of glossy reality shows culled by NBC parent company Comcast Corp. from channels such as Bravo, E! and Oxygen.
McDermott hosted a launch party on Tuesday night with special guest Dolores Catania of The Real Housewives of New Jersey to get Canadians on board.
This is the second major U.S. network to make a move into Canada following CBS All Access, also at $5.99. CBS announced last week it was opening up a 260,000-square-foot studio space in Mississauga as competition for eyeballs, as the era of peak TV heats up.
“In terms of the competition, there are obviously a lot of services on the market, but we don’t feel we are directly competitive,” says McDermott. “I don’t think it’s a choice between subscribing to hayu and then cutting off your other service. We feel we own the reality TV genre and, at that price point, about the cost of using the TTC to get back and forth from work, we think it’s a sharp proposition.”
Online streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu and Amazon have proliferated at the expense of conventional broadcasters. So companies such as NBC in the U.S. and Bell in Canada with its CraveTV service have tried to get a piece of the action.
Sounding the alarm, market research firm Convergence Research Group says streaming services in Canada are set to overtake conventional TV in only two years.
By the end of 2020, about 10.6 million Canadians are expected to sign up for streaming services, compared with the 10.2 million who have TV subscriptions.
“The gloves are off. The TVmovie industry is being reconstructed from the inside and by the outside,” warns the report. “Amazon, Apple, DAZN, Facebook, Google and Netflix all have the money muscle to finance their own productions or outbid on programming.”
As a smaller market, Canada has less than half the options available to U.S. consumers in terms of subscription services, but the writing is on the wall for conventional broadcasters, says Convergence.
One thing that hayu doesn’t have so far is original program- ming. It has in-house programming and programming acquired from other broadcasters, but not its own material as CBS All Access does with Star
Trek: Discovery and The Good Fight. McDermott, whose personal favourite is the Million
Dollar Listing real estate franchise, says that next step is potentially in the cards.
“We don’t have plans to do original programming at this point,” he says. “Right now there is a lot of content to watch, but going forward it does make sense over the long term to look at original content.”
One thing that McDermott learned working in the trenches in Toronto is that “compelling content” is what drives subscribers. “It’s what you can’t get from someone else.”
Hulu, which is owned by Disney, 20th Century Fox, Warner Media and Comcast, used to be a Netflix wannabe, but that was before it produced the Torontoshot The Handmaid’s Tale. That show made history last year as the first from an online streamer to win a best drama Emmy.
Meanwhile, it’s getting more crowded in the marketplace as Canadians struggle to keep up with the plethora of streaming services and other ways to watch TV.
Besides free streaming avail- able from apps such as CBC, Global News, HGTV, BNN and others, there are paid subscription services such as Amazon Prime Video, YouTube Premium, CraveTV and, of course, Netflix.
And that’s only some of the more popular services.
New streaming services such as hayu are fighting the monster of Netflix by becoming more niche. So say hello to Britbox, which for $8.99 a month gives you all your favourite British shows as the TV universe becomes increasingly fractured to appeal to subsets of viewers. This is the future of anytime, anywhere television.
“I think the level of engagement that our subscribers have is huge,” says McDermott.
“And research shows that people don’t typically want to see advertising and they’re willing to pay for the best possible environment to watch TV.”