Acorn TV Is Doing Originals Now Because There’s No Such Thing as Too Many British Shows

The British are coming.

Or, more accurately: The British are all over American TV, and there’s are a lot more on the way.

AMC’s The Night Manager, Amazon’s Fleabag, and Seeso’s Flowers were some of the best TV shows of the year. Ron Howard’s Beatles documentary on Hulu is an Oscar contender, Tracey Ullman is back on HBO, and Netflix is coronating its $130 million royals drama The Crown this weekend. Crime drama Undercover starts in a few weeks on BBC America, and Victoria comes to PBS in January.

(Decider has a new three-part series (I, II, III) about British costume dramas to help you keep track.)

U.S. streaming service Acorn TV has developed a strong niche over the last few years importing shows from British TV and is both continuing on that path and investing in its own originals. Acorn is also looking to Canada, Australia and elsewhere for prestige dramas with British — call it Commonwealth — sensibilities.

Acorn TV chief Mark Stevens sat down with Decider to talk about the company’s recent history, some of its more popular shows and what to expect in the future.

DECIDER: You announced in June that Acorn TV had reached 320,000 subscribers, which is double where you were a year ago. Is that growth driven by anything in particular — Amazon’s add-on option or direct marketing or something else?

MARK STEVENS: We don’t have a huge marketing budget, so most of it is word of mouth and press. We clearly see subscriber bumps when we release a new show that gets review or written about — in the New York Times or Decider or other places — and we think that’s how people have been discovering us. Our whole premise is that there’s a lot of high-quality content in the U.K. and beyond that has a hard time finding a home here on traditional channels. That’s what we have always focused on, and streaming has given us a chance to reach more people, and I think they’re enjoying it.

Would you say more than half or less than half of your new subscribers over the last year have come from people adding it on Amazon Channels?

It’s less than half. That has been a nice extension that have helped us to a bigger audience, but we have been growing since we started. Our non-Amazon activity is still growing at a nice clip.

Are you on every platform you want to be on, or are you still working on some launches?

There are more platforms out there. We’re on iPad, Roku, Amazon, Android and we’re continuing to work on other television apps that are coming into the market.

Netflix is going to be on Comcast Xfinity’s X1 set-top box soon. Do see that developing as an exclusive space or a platform that a lot of SVOD services will have access to?

I don’t know how that will unfold. We’re obviously interested in being available to as many consumers as possible. There’s an audience interested in this content, and SVOD is a good way for a niche service like ourselves that may not have made as much sense as a linear cable channel.

Do you expect to see Acorn on at least one satellite or cable provider’s set-top box in the next six months or a year?

We are certainly out there having those conversations. If things go in the direction that they seem to be going — with more providers going to add-on services — I think we’ll be on those platforms.

Are new subscribers coming mostly for particular shows?

A lot of our shows are new to this territory that are successful shows U.K. broadcasters like BBC and iTV but that wouldn’t find a big enough audience here on a traditional broadcast network. We’re identifying what we think are great shows that people have enjoyed in other markets. Some of these shows have won a lot of awards in their home markets like our Canadian show 19-2. A show like that can find more customers on an SVOD platform like Acorn than it can on a linear platform like cable.

With BBC having BBC America in the U.S., are you competing with BBC America for access to the same content?

Shows on BBC isn’t in the U.K. aren’t necessarily available in BBC in other territories. A show that’s on BBC in the U.K. may be produced by a production company that licenses to other companies in other territories. We have good relationships with BBC, iTV, DRG, Freemantle, other networks and many of the producers and production companies that are often who make the decisions about streaming in other territories.

We’re also starting to move upstream a bit and participate in the development of shows that we think fit our audience. We own the Agatha Christie library along with the Christie family. We purchased the Foyle’s War franchise, which was an extremely successful show in the U.K. and did well here on PBS for a number of years. Agatha Christie’s Poirot aired on iTV for many years and now airs on Acorn exclusively. We got an Emmy nomination for Poirot.

Did you make the relationship with the Agatha Christie estate with the intent of launching new Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple shows?

At the time, the family was still producing Poirot and Marple for iTV, and we participated in the completion of those two series. We have since developed Partners in Crime, which is based on a book series of hers, and developed And Then There Were None that aired this year and Witness for the Prosecution that will air on Acorn TV next year. It’s a wonderful library, and there’s a lot of interest in doing other projects.

You have to make decide what shows to keep and what to let go with a finite budget. Is it practical to build a permanent catalog, or are you always having to roll things off your list to get new content?

We’re delivering on a lot of platforms. DVDs are still quite popular, and we also sell content that we own to other streaming services like Netflix and Amazon and other broadcasters. We like to invest in a show with multiple episodes and multiple seasons that we can find new ways to package and promote. A show on cable might have its biggest audience in the first season and then taper off; our audience grows from season to season for a lot of shows. The previous seasons pick up as new seasons release.

Agatha Raisin is a recent show that’s gotten a lot of attention. Has that made a big impact?

That’s a great example of what we can do. We were involved early on in getting the show made and is the perfect show for our audience, which is a slightly older demographic. It’s a fun murder mystery about a PR executive who gets involved in solving murders in a small town. We got a lot of nice press on it from the New York Times and other places.

It’s an eight-episode show, and we got a good bump from that throughout the month of August. We like to spread a new season out and not put the whole thing up as other SVOD services typically do, which helps to get people engaged with the service on a regular basis. They come back and discover other show, so that’s a show that has done really well for us.

For two shows that are very different — like The Secret Agent, which is a Victorian thriller, and Capital, which is a contemporary London story — do the same people watch both shows, or is that more demographic-driven?

It’s not exactly all the same people. Agatha Raisin is a fairly comfortable murder mystery that our older demographic likes, and you see edgier dramas like 19-2 skew a little younger. Brief Encounters, which is more of a comedy and stars Penelope Wilton from Downton Abbey, is a lighter, heart-warming show that has done well in the U.K., and we’re hoping there will be more seasons of that. The model is to bring interesting, new content from the U.K. and beyond and build out with later seasons.

You’ve got The Disappearance from France and 19-2 from Canada and several Australian shows. Is the “British TV” tagline a center of gravity for Acorn, or do you think you’ll move away from that over time?

It’s been our focus for our entire history, and it’s still the dominant part of what we do. We have realized that the people who like those shows also have an appetite for similar shows from other areas. The Disappearance is a bit of a test because it is in subtitles, so the question is how much of our audience has an appetite for that. But a lot of that is happening in the U.K. too; international shows with subtitles are starting to do well in the U.K., and we’ve taken our lead from that. The audience for a show like that may not be as big, but it’s committed, which is a good sign. British TV shows will continue to be the core of what we do in the future.

Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider and is also a contributing writer for Playboy and Signature. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.