Fun
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Choked Up
Curious
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Weird
Upstart streaming service Acorn TV said today that it has reached 375,000 U.S. subscribers and expects to pass 400,000 before the end of the year.
The SVOD service, which specializes in importing British TV shows and has already started airing some of its own original shows, has increased its base of U.S. subscribers 125 percent over the last year and 17 percent since June.
“We have been getting about 20,000 subscribers a month on Acorn TV on a net basis,” Miguel Penella, CEO of Acorn TV parent RLJ Entertainment, said in a conference call this morning with with analysts and reporters after reporting the company’s quarterly earnings. “That was in part driven by Amazon but not exclusively. We’re seeing subscriber growth across all platforms.”
Acorn TV has its own apps on Roku, Amazon Fire TV and other devices and has been featured prominently on Amazon’s Amazon Channels platform, which allows Amazon Prime subscribers to add premium channels like Starz and Showtime and smaller, niche channels like Acorn TV, Seeso and History Vault to their Amazon Prime monthly bill and access them as channels on the Amazon Video app.
Penella also talked for the first time about AMC Networks’ recent $65 million investment for a 50.1 percent stake in RLJ Entertainment, which operates Acorn TV and the more recently launched Urban Movie Channel (UMC) service, which specializes in African-American movies. AMC’s BBC America, Sundance and AMC channels have significant overlap in viewer demographics with Acorn TV, Penella said, and AMC’s WE TV has a significant overlap with UMC. AMC also operates the Shudder and Sundance Now streaming apps.
“AMC Networks and RLJ Entertainment service similar audiences on different platforms,” Penella said. “AMC’s network business is primarily the broadcast channels, where we are focused on developing digital channels. BBC America, AMC and Sundance serve in many ways the same audience that Acorn serves — affluent consumers who are looking for high-quality mysteries in dramas. The same thing is true with WE TV and UMC in that both are looking for African-American urban audiences on different platforms.”
Penella said AMC Networks and RLJ Entertainment’s development teams are meeting now to look for areas where they can partner on current projects in development, projects in production and possible future co-productions. One of the latter category that Penella specifically mentioned is the Agatha Christie Library, which Acorn TV controls the rights to.
“We’re looking to see if there are stories we can develop jointly to exploit on BBC America or AMC or Sundance and at the same time for Acorn TV,” Penella said. “We feel very strongly that that’s going to give us the ability to bring bigger-production programming to Acorn TV and do it on a cost-efficient basis. The more you can exploit content across multiple platforms, the more widely you can spread the expenses.”
UMC launched in February 2015 and 17,000 U.S. subscribers. Penella said he sees it as potentially having a bigger subscriber upside than Acorn TV and a perfect partner for WE TV. Like Acorn TV, UMC is $5 a month and is available for all the major streaming devices and on Amazon Channels. UMC includes a lot of feature films and documentary exclusives like Knucklehead, a 2016 indie drama starring Alfre Woodard and Amari Cheatom.
Penella did not discuss the prospect of UMC developing its own original content, but an RLJ Entertainment spokesman told Decider after the earnings call that UMC is presently focused on finding exclusive content for UMC and anticipates developing original content as it continues to grow its subscriber base.
[Find out more about what you can stream on Acorn TV]
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.
