Does The Failure of Seeso Spell Doom for Niche Streaming Services?

I consider myself a fan of Seeso‘s programming. Shows like HarmonQuest and Take My Wife were funny and had fresh perspectives, and big-name talent was not only willing to take a chance on a show or comedy special on the network, but also very willing to promote those shows – Wyatt Cenac was more enthused about talking about his stand-up showcase Night Train, for instance, than about his TBS show People of Earth. The network had NBC Universal behind it, as well as the fanbase and huge names associated with the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre.

Yet I never subscribed. And, as the network’s obituary last week indicated, not many others did, either.

Why? Well, the reason coincides with the article I wrote earlier this year about why people pay for streaming services. Even at Seeso’s relatively low price point of $3.99/mo, viewers decided that the programming wasn’t compelling enough to fork over the money. The “big” services — Netflix, Amazon, Hulu — cast such a wide net when it comes to their programming that they catch fans of various genres in a way that a genre-specific niche service like Seeso can’t.

Think about some of the shows Hulu, which has the least number of subscribers of the big three streaming services, has grabbed to entice retain current subscribers and attract new ones: fans of Mindy Kaling and rom-coms were able to keep getting their Mindy Project fix; fans of dystopian prestige shows had The Handmaid’s Tale; fans of snarky acting-centric comedy got Difficult People. And that’s only three of 30 plus original shows they’ve aired, not to mention the hundreds upon hundreds of other movies and shows they have on their service.

Now take the big gorilla in the room: Netflix. Over the last four years, they’ve invested heavily in prestige political shows (House of Cards), female-centric dramedies (Orange is the New Black, GLOW), period dramas (The Crown), multi-camera sitcoms (One Day at a Time, Fuller House, The Ranch), single-camera sitcoms (Atypical, Friends from College), true-crime reality shows (Making of a Murderer), gritty superhero shows (all the Marvel series), and probably a few other categories I haven’t thought of. Add to that the money they’ve thrown into original movies and handed to every major comedian to do specials, and you can see where the problem is for Seeso and its nichey brethren.

If you’re an executive in charge of a streamer that’s backed by a major media company, like AMC’s Shudder, BBC and ITV’s BritBox, you have to figure out how to make money with a small audience while spending the money on both existing and original content. It’s not easy to do when you’re likely only attracting a subscriber base that’s in the low-to-mid six figures, as Seeso had done. If it were a true startup venture, operating on a shoestring budget with modest expectations, those numbers would have been incredible. But, as the service’s former president, Evan Shapiro, pointed out via a tweet soon after he left the company, large companies like NBCU don’t work that way.

“The conundrum is that every policy and procedure that makes a company and efficient execution machine stifles innovation,” wrote startup expert Steve Blank in the article Shapiro linked to in that tweet. “Innovation is chaotic, messy and uncertain. It needs radically different tools for measurement and control.”

Seeso was innovative, to say the least. HarmonQuest consisted of Dan Harmon, his ex-wife, and his comedy friends playing a role-playing game to a live audience, with animation laid over the game action. My Brother, My Brother and Me was a show based on an advice podcast. Bajillion Dollar Propertie$ was a takeoff on cable house-hunting shows. Take My Wife starred real-life couple Cameron Esposito and Rhea Butcher in a not-so-fictional version of their actual lives as engaged comedians. While all of those shows, comedy specials from people like Sasheer Zamata and filmed versions of UCB stage shows scratched the itch of hard-core comedy nerds like me, there really wasn’t a show that grabbed the audience at large and made them pony up the money.

The show that could have done that was There’s….Johnny!, a period piece that revolved around the world of The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson after the show moved to Burbank in the early ’70s. With names like Paul Reiser behind the camera and Tony Danza in front, it could have been the prestige, big-tent project that brought more than just the comedy nerds in. But something must have given NBCU pause, because they closed down Seeso before the show, which got a showing at the Tribeca Film Festival last spring, could premiere. Now it’s on the shelf without a premiere date or outlet.

But even when it came to hardcore comedy, Seeso ended up getting bigfooted by Netflix, which can afford to give Dave Chappelle 60 million dollars (!) for three comedy specials, two of which were already in his vaults. They can afford to toss bucketfuls of money at Jerry Seinfeld to do specials and bring Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee over from Sony-owned Crackle. They can also bring in lesser-known comedians like Ali Wong to do specials that eventually become hits, because those comedians know that Netflix was committed to comedy. NBCU was likely too skittish to get into that game, and felt they were just throwing good money after a bad idea, though, given time, Seeso might have found a reasonably robust audience.

Other media companies are likely looking at what happened to Seeso and are trying to figure out their options. If they haven’t already, they’re probably calling up Amazon or Hulu and seeing if they can be an optional “channel” on their services, which seems to be a burgeoning trend. But the days where a media giant offers a standalone, single-genre channel with any kind of original programming are likely coming to an end. If you don’t cast a wide net, you’re not going to get a big catch back, and that’s just something big companies just can’t tolerate.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.