BritBox President Soumya Sriraman Talks About What It Takes To Bring The Best British TV Across The Pond In Real-Time

It used to royally suck being an American fan of British TV. You’d have to wait at least a year, if not longer, for new episodes of your favorite show to land on cable. Weekends would be spent combing the local library stacks for the latest in-demand Masterpiece Theatre DVD set — teenaged me was on a waitlist for new Forsyte Saga installments at one point, guys — and sometimes the only way to watch a show would be on low-res bootleg. Now, thanks to streaming, those dark days are over.

Launched last March, BritBox is just the latest service trying to elbow its way into the crowded streaming landscape. However, the BBC and ITV’s joint American streaming service has already managed to build a reputation for itself. The secret to the service’s long-term success may very well rest with its unique Now feature which closes the gap on how long American audiences have to wait for their favorite British shows. Popular soaps like EastEnders and Coronation Street, along with timely fare like Strictly Come Dancing and Q.I., are already available on the Now menu. Besides that, BritBox has started to aggressively poach the streaming rights to old mystery classics and lesser-known favorites from its competitors, and the service announced its very first original program, The Bletchley Circle: San Fransisco, at TCA this month.

Decider recently chatted with BritBox President Soumya Sriraman to learn more about what’s coming up for BritBox in 2018. Sriraman is one of the rare television executives who you can catch geeking out about her own platform’s line-up mid-interview. (Seriously, I cut an entire exchange where she asked me what I thought of Sandi Toksvig replacing Stephen Fry as host of Q.I.) So with that in mind, we were curious about how she felt BritBox fit in among the “PBS Passports” and “AcornTVs” of the world and what motivated many of the platform’s strategic choices in 2017.

DECIDER: During TCA, you announced that you’re launching your first original series, The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco. So I had a few questions jumping off of that. So why a spin-off of The Bletchley Circle? How did you determine who would return from the original cast? And will we see other actors besides Rachael Stirling and Julie Graham?

Soumya Sriraman: The Bletchley Circle was a personal favorite of mine and I was devastated when ITV decided not to renew the show. Way back then, World Productions, the original producer of the show, had some scripts that I had read way back in the day. And then when World Productions was bought by ITV, we all just sat together in a room — and ITV’s our parent company — we said, “It kind of makes sense for us to revisit this and see what we can make happen.” We had the script developed in San Fransisco because we wanted to bring the codebreakers into the post-World War II Japanese code-breaking era, which I thought was a really interesting set-up.

Of course, from a casting standpoint, we had the producers working long and hard, and yes, we will continue to weigh in as well, but availability becomes a big issue. We thought this was a good way for us to go.

As a life-long Anglophile, the Now feature you have is really special. Growing up, the lag-time to get a British show stateside could be infuriating. What’s been the response from your subscriber base that you’ve seen? And what direction do you see the Now feature going in the future?

This is a very important part of what we are doing. We thought long and hard about how we’re an SVOD service and we wanted it to be on demand. So why not offer things on a more real-time basis anytime that we can? Interestingly, that opens up a lot of technical and operational challenges, as you might imagine. You know from being a consumer of that content stateside that content doesn’t make its way over here easily. Mostly because the British music contracts and kind of the clearances process is very different. And it takes time. So it was a bit of making sure that the two companies understood that this was strictly legal and could they start clearing content so we can start accessing it.

You’ve seen the few that we have and we’ve been fortunate enough to even get some dramas up in a near-real-time basis. Our goal is to do more and more and more. And I think we’re going to grow this as time goes on and as the producers, and the content creators see that this is a feature that our audience is responding to — which by the way, they are. We have a good number of people who tune in —and my editorial team hates me for this — but not a Friday evening goes by where someone’s like, “Why is my Friday EastEnders not up?” And it’s like, “Gosh, it’s a half an hour late because someone just happened to be in a meeting that went a half hour late.”

Well, speaking of subscribers, do you have any numbers or metrics for the Now app you can share?

The Now feature is a vertical that is in the BritBox app and it is — look, it’s a significantly consumed portion of our numbers. I’m not sharing numbers specifically yet and just because I don’t have it at the top of my head. The numbers I view on a regular basis are very, very promising.

And is there any insight you can give on what the average BritBox user tends to be drawn to? Is it the Now feature? The Mysteries? You have a Lifestyle section that’s really robust. What do you find is sort of the “sweet spot” for the BritBox subscriber?

Again, we’ve been fortunate in that our audience seems to be a consumer of a lot of things fairly equally. We absolutely have seen an over-index on the mysteries. I always believe it’s because Lynley was taken off air by PBS not too long ago and then we remastered it and put it back. The Joan Hickson Marple, same thing. You know, back in the day, it was in that terrible 240i tape and we went back to film and we remastered it. So there’s many such shows that I think getting it “up” res-ed re-energized that whole genre. Jonathan Creek wasn’t seen in so long, Waking the Dead, Silent Witness, the fact that we’re getting it on a near-real-time basis. So I think some of those unique things have probably pitted us towards favoring the Mysteries, but Lifestyles also going well. We were literally looking at the screens this morning going, “Wow, so many people clicked on Escape to the Country, which we just posted last week.” So we’re constantly surprised. Q.I. made our top list last year.

What do you consider the biggest challenges that BritBox faces in 2018? And what do you think the service’s biggest successes have been for the service?

It’s a crowded marketplace and I mean that’s a challenge. But I think, interestingly, it’s equally an opportunity because we’ve been very clear in that we’re going to be one thing and we’re going to stay true to the fact that we believe we want to be the home of the finest British television. We can’t be the home of everything British because the way that TV rights have shook out over time, but we will be the home of the finest — and the most — British television.

I noticed that your February offerings came out in a press release this week. One thing that caught my eye is you’re getting Tipping the Velvet and I thought that was a really interesting choice because it hasn’t been on streaming services for a while. How do you guys seek out older series? Do you go out of your way to research when specific titles are up for grabs, who do you go to for the rights? I’m curious about that process.

Oh gosh, again, one of my passion-passion things. We have access to this amazing catalogue — everything that the BBC and ITV have. Look, it’s not an easy process because oftentimes I can tell you we find that the show happens to have been produced by the BBC, but the rights have reverted back to the writer. So somebody has to go find the writer and get that cleared.

Well, switching gears, I know that last August BritBox became an Amazon Channel. I know that Amazon loves their Amazon Channel model from their point of view, but I was curious how is it working for you?

Amazon Channels has two benefits. One, of course, is the wide reach they have. And the second, even back in the days of DVDs, most people will tell you that British DVDs are over-indexed on Amazon. The luxury of having that algorithm seeding right into SVOD viewing has been a big help to us.

And has it helped in terms of numbers? Did you see a big subscriber shift once you became an Amazon Channel?

Again, we’ve been happy. Amazon’s done incredibly well for us. We’re very happy.

Speaking of Amazon, I know that if I go to their “British” landing page, BritBox’s offerings are top of the list, but they’re followed by Acorn TV, Masterpiece, and Amazon’s British own offerings. So what do you think makes BritBox different? How do you get it to stand out? What makes BritBox “BritBox”?

I think the fact that we have the pedigree of BBC and ITV is something the others cannot claim. And, I do think you hit the nail on the head, it’s our Now feature. We’ve found a way to make it work with even Amazon Channels, a completely different platform. Again, the teams have worked incredibly hard on both sides of the pond, even on both sides of the US. The Seattle teams for Amazon had never done this before. And it always makes me smile when I see the social comments come through — our customers always write to us saying, “Thank you. Thank you for making all of this wide on Amazon Channels.”

Interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.