Channelling the comfort of a cuppa
Far from streaming crowd, smaller services compete for those who love British TV
Streaming services vie for wallets of those who love British TV,
After watching the impeachment hearings recently, Salome Samii turned to two streaming services to satisfy her Anglophile entertainment needs: Acorn TV and BritBox.
They’ve become her preferred form of escapism: Agatha Christie’s sleuths, murder mysteries set in quaint villages and constant servings of tea and crumpets.
“It’s comfort television in this time of rising anxiety and stress,” said Samii, 50, a retired lawyer. “No matter what happens, everyone makes a cup of tea and moves on.”
Far away from the main streaming battlefield, where media and technology giants are spending billions of dollars to compete with Netflix Inc., Acorn TV and BritBox are competing for the wallets of those who love British TV. For now, Acorn TV is winning. This fall, the streaming service surpassed a million subscribers in the U.S. and Canada. Acorn TV also has something that some larger streaming services don’t: profits.
While Disney Plus Hulu, and the coming HBO Max and Peacock expect to lose money for years, Acorn TV is profitable because its costs are “a small fraction” of those of bigger services, said Josh Sapan, chief executive officer of its parent, AMC Networks Inc.
Acorn TV isn’t spending massive sums of money for reruns of “Friends” or deals with famous showrunners. It hopes to complement — not compete with — the streaming giants, Sapan said. “They are in a different world of economics,” he said.
Acorn TV costs $7.49 a month. BritBox is $8.99 a month and is owned by BBC Studios and ITV Plc. While BritBox has fewer subscribers, the two-year-old service is newer and growing quickly, reaching 650,000 North American subscribers this past July.
They offer some of the same shows. For example, the nine seasons of the detective show “Vera” are divided between Acorn TV and BritBox, frustrating fans.
But they also differ in some ways. Unlike Acorn TV, BritBox streams live programming, including the most recent royal wedding, and makes episodes available within a day of their U.K. broadcast.
In 2018, AMC Networks, which is controlled by the Dolan family, took over Acorn TV when it bought RLJ Entertainment in a $274-million (U.S.) deal. AMC Networks, home of cable channels like AMC and IFC and dramas such as “Better Call Saul” and “The Walking Dead,” is responding to the cord-cutting era with four niche streaming services. Besides Acorn TV, there’s Shudder for horror film fans, Sundance Now for indie film addicts and Urban Movie Channel for Black audiences. The four services have more than two million subscribers combined. By 2024, AMC Networks expects them to have as many as seven million subscribers.
Acorn TV and BritBox are two of dozens of niche streaming channels. Some of them, like Crunchyroll for anime fans and CuriosityStream for science and nature lovers, are more popular than the British-focused apps. But others — including FilmStruck, for arthouse-movie fans, and Seeso, for comedy lovers — have shut down, raising doubts about whether niche services can continue to survive in a crowded landscape.
For Acorn TV, the question is whether its owner can afford to keep investing as its cable-TV business struggles and the competition grows. AMC Networks shares slumped 28 per cent last year, and ratings for its biggest show, “The Walking Dead,” have been declining.
Meanwhile, BritBox’s owners are starting to pull back shows from Netflix and Acorn TV for their own service. Netflix has said it was spending about $500 million last year on more than 50 TV shows and films in Britain.
An Acorn TV spokesperson said the service is making more of its own original programming and licensing shows from other producers.
But when deep-pocketed streaming giants like Netflix become interested in a genre, it makes it more expensive for niche services to license shows, according to Matthew Ball, the former head of strategy at Amazon Studios.
Without the resources of a larger media company, Acorn TV looks for unique marketing opportunities. It targets fans of British TV on Facebook and offers trial subscriptions at public libraries because many shows on the service are based on books. AMC Networks recently struck a deal with the movie chain AMC Theatres (an unrelated company) in which customers who buy a ticket get an offer to sign up for Acorn TV and its owner’s other streaming services.
One of the first things that Acorn TV subscribers see when they open the app is Martin Clunes. With his protruding ears and scowling face, Clunes is largely unknown to U.S. audiences. But he is famous in Britain, where he has a devoted fan base known as the “Clunatics.” Clunes stars in at least five shows on Acorn TV, including two travel documentaries and “Doc Martin,” where he plays a former surgeon who changes careers after developing a fear of blood.
Some Acorn TV shows are unmistakably British. There’s Agatha Christie’s “Marple” about an older female detective who is “proper, demure and sharp as a tack,” according to the website. There’s also “Victoria Wood’s Nice Cup of Tea,” in which the comedian travels the world exploring “how this little leaf became such an important part of British life.”
The New York Times included “Manhunt,” a Clunes-starring Acorn TV drama, on its list of “Best TV Shows of 2019.”
Many fans of British TV subscribe to both Acorn TV and BritBox. Some merely enjoy the scenery of the English countryside or the characters’ accents, which one subscriber described on Twitter as “cotton candy on my ears.”