Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Heading into a new year that will see streaming originals like The Good Fight (a spinoff of The Good Wife) and Star Trek: Discovery (a new franchise series), the CBS All Access streaming service now has more than a million subscribers and is aiming for 4 million subscribers by 2020.
CBS Interactive CEO Lanzone, who oversees digital operations for CBS, confirmed the numbers in a new interview on Recode Media with Peter Kafka, a popular tech podcast. Kafka is a senior editor for Recode, the tech news site, and was interviewing Lanzone just after the second anniversary of CBS All Access’s October 2014 launch.
Lanzone said the growth of CBS All Access — an SVOD service like Netflix or Hulu — has been attributable to a combination of making full seasons of current and catalog CBS shows available, stacking all in-season episodes for current shows, providing lower ad-loads than on CBS, and providing live local CBS feeds and now original programming.
“Different people want it for different reasons, but it’s more than a million total subscribers so far,” Lanzone said. “We didn’t think this was anything more than accessing those [CBS] fans, but we thought that was a number in the millions that we would be able to get to and that would want to subscribe to it. That was before the thought of adding original content and other things for that audience.”
Lanzone said the idea for CBS All Access came out of the success CBS had several years when the network launched a web service for Big Brother superfans. More than 100,000 of the reality show’s viewers paid $4 a month to get access to live-streamed camera feeds to watch between episodes. CBS All Access’s first original series, which launched in September, was a streaming-exclusive edition called Big Brother: Over the Top.
“There were people out there who wanted more content, wanted to be able to access it in more places and are willing to pay for it, so we built All Access originally more toward that,” Lanzone said, “not in reaction to the overall landscape or people doing skinny bundles or going direct to the consumer.”
CBS has since grown into a full-blown streaming service with Big Brother: Over the Top airing now, The Good Wife spinoff The Good Fight premiering in February, and Star Trek: Discovery premiering in May. CBS is planning a fourth original series that would premiere in late summer, CBS Interactive president and COO Marc DeBevoise told Decider in a September interview.
CBS is developing a Big Bang Theory prequel that would focus on the Dr. Sheldon Cooper character as a child. The Variety report that broke the news last week did not say whether the series was being eyed for CBS All Access, but that would fit the service’s M.O. of developing original shows that would be familiar and particularly appealing to CBS viewers.
In response to a question about whether he considers CBS All Access a threat to bundled TV providers like Comcast, Lanzone said that the service is a tiny drop in a much larger digital bucket. “Our target is 4 million subscribers by 2020,” he said, “and you’re talking about a universe of 100 million households with cable or satellite. And this is in addition to that — for people who want more than just broadcast.”
Lanzone also noted that CBS wants to be in the so-called “skinny bundle” packages of fewer channels and at a lower cost that bundled TV providers are beginning to offer.
“Everybody is trying to access another kind of customer than the superfan, which is cord-cutters and cord-nevers who are a small percentage of the audience that we also want to get access to,” he said. “We’re part of those bundles, which is also part of our strategy. They all need us, and we want to be distributed in those places.”
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.
