Streaming services catering to British TV lovers look to take share from US giants

'No matter what happens, everyone makes a cup of tea and moves on', says viewer

Philippa Braithwaite, Martin Clunes and chief content officer for Acorn brands, Mark Stevens on a panel promoting the TV show Manhunt. Shutterstock

After watching the impeachment hearings recently, Salomé Samii turned to two streaming services to satisfy her Anglophile entertainment needs: Acorn TV and BritBox.

They’ve become her preferred form of escapism: Agatha Christie’s spinster sleuths, murder mysteries set in quaint villages, and constant servings of tea and crumpets.“It’s comfort television in this time of rising anxiety and stress,” said Samii, 50, a retired lawyer.

“No matter what happens, everyone makes a cup of tea and moves on.”

Far away from the main streaming battlefield, where media and technology giants are spending billions of dollars to compete with Netflix, Acorn TV and BritBox are competing for the wallets of those who love British TV.

For now, Acorn TV is winning. Last autumn, the streaming service surpassed 1 million subscribers in the US and Canada. Acorn TV also has something that some larger streaming services don’t: profits.

While Disney+, Hulu, and the coming HBO Max and Peacock expect to lose money for years, Acorn TV is profitable because its costs are “a small fraction” of those of bigger services, said Josh Sapan, chief executive officer of its parent, AMC Networks.

Acorn TV isn't spending massive sums of money for reruns of Friends or deals with famous showrunners. It hopes to complement — not compete with — the streaming giants, Sapan said. "They are in a different world of economics," he said.

Acorn TV costs $6 (Dh22) per month. BritBox is $7 a month and owned by BBC Studios and ITV. While BritBox has fewer subscribers, the two-year-old service is newer and growing quickly, reaching 650,000 North American subscribers in July.

They offer some of the same shows. For example, the nine seasons of the detective show “Vera” are divided between Acorn TV and BritBox, frustrating its fans.

But they also differ in some ways. Unlike Acorn TV, BritBox streams live programming, including the most recent royal wedding, and makes episodes available within a day of their UK broadcast. Acorn TV has expanded into new markets and is offering international shows from Australia, New Zealand, Canada and other countries, while BritBox only offers shows from the UK — a fact that it uses to make a subtle dig at its rival.

“BritBox is the only authentic British content service in the market,” said Soumya Sriraman, BritBox’s founding president.

In 2018, AMC Networks, which is controlled by the Dolan family, took over Acorn TV when it bought RLJ Entertainment in a $274 million deal. AMC Networks, home of cable channels like AMC and IFC and dramas such as Better Call Saul and The Walking Dead, is responding to the cord-cutting era with four niche streaming services. Besides Acorn TV, there's Shudder for horror film fans; Sundance Now for indie film addicts; and Urban Movie Channel for black audiences. The four services have more than two million subscribers combined. By 2024, AMC Networks expects them to have as many as 7 million subscribers.

Acorn TV and BritBox are two of dozens of niche streaming channels. Some of them, like Crunchyroll for anime fans and CuriosityStream for science and nature lovers, are more popular than the British-focused apps. But others — including FilmStruck, for arthouse-movie fans, and Seeso, for comedy lovers — have shut down, raising doubts about whether niche services can continue to survive in a crowded landscape.

For Acorn TV, the big question is whether its owner can afford to keep investing as its cable-TV business struggles and the competition grows. AMC Networks shares slumped 28 per cent last year, and ratings for its biggest show, “The Walking Dead,” have been declining.

Meanwhile, BritBox’s owners are starting to pull back shows from Netflix and Acorn TV for their own service. Netflix has said it was spending about $500 million last year on more than 50 TV shows and films in Britain. An Acorn TV spokeswoman said the service is making more of its own original programming and licensing shows from other producers.

But when deep-pocketed streaming giants like Netflix become interested in a genre, it makes it more expensive for niche services to license shows, according to Matthew Ball, the former head of strategy at Amazon Studios.

Without the resources of a larger media company, Acorn TV looks for unique marketing opportunities. It targets fans of British TV on Facebook and offers trial subscriptions at public libraries because many shows on the service are based on famous books. AMC Networks recently struck a deal with the movie chain AMC Theatres (an unrelated company) in which customers who buy a ticket get an offer to sign up for Acorn TV and its owner’s other streaming services.

“We’re going to find our way to them,” Sapan said. “We’re not going to wait for them to find their way to us.”

One of the first things that Acorn TV subscribers see when they open the app is Martin Clunes. With his protruding ears and scowling face, Clunes is largely unknown to American audiences. But he is famous in Britain, where he has a devoted fan base known as the "Clunatics". Clunes stars in at least five shows on Acorn TV, including two travel documentaries and Doc Martin, where he plays a former surgeon who changes careers after developing a fear of blood.

Some Acorn TV shows are unmistakably British. There's Agatha Christie's Marple about an older female detective who is "proper, demure and sharp as a tack", according to the website. There's also Victoria Wood's Nice Cup of Tea, in which the comedian travels the world exploring "how this little leaf became such an important part of British life." The New York Times included Manhunt, a Clunes-starring Acorn TV drama about a serial killer, on its list of "Best TV Shows of 2019."

Many fans of British TV subscribe to both Acorn TV and BritBox. Some merely enjoy the scenery of the English countryside or the characters’ accents, which one subscriber described on Twitter as “cotton candy on my ears”.

Marilyn Arnold, a 74-year-old retiree in Des Moines, Iowa, pays for six streaming services because they all have some British TV shows: Acorn TV, BritBox, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and HBO.

“The British and Australian programs are far more interesting and the acting is superior to American television,” she said. Many like British TV shows because they feature older female protagonists, which is rare on American-made shows, said Stefanie Hutson, creator of IHeartBritishTV.com.

"They tell stories American TV doesn't tell anymore," said Hutson, 39, who started the website to help her grandmother find British shows. "People say, 'I haven't seen a show like this since Golden Girls or Murder She Wrote.' It moves them to tears because they're so glad to see people like them in a show who are not forced to the sidelines."