‘Ninety Day Fiancé’ is the most watched program on television on Sunday evenings. And in the latest innovation in streaming, Discovery + includes a channel that lets you watch it for four days in a row without watching the same episode twice.
If you are not familiar with the six-year-old show, as a surprisingly large portion of New Yorkers (my editors here, shamefully, included), the 90 days of the title refer to the period in which the non-citizen holder of ‘ A K-1 visa can stay in the country or face the marriage before marriage. The program chronicles couples during that period, complete with skeptical in-laws, bickering and the enchantment or disillusionment with Nebraska or New Hampshire, all with countdown music and chyrons like ’73 Days to Wed. ‘
In the Discovery + program “90 Days Bares All” (one of about a dozen spin-offs, including “90 Day Fiancé: Self-Quarantined”), the show can push the boundaries even further towards the standards and practices of ‘ a regular cable channel, ”said Howard Lee, president of TLC, one of the cable networks that make up Discovery’s US business. So you can watch the couples shout curses at each other, unhindered, or discuss their favorite sex toys.
The biggest story in big media these days is the “streaming wars”, scrambled by people who traditionally make TV and movies to catch up with Netflix. Disney dominates the race for second place; it is unclear who will survive. CBS is going to the party with Paramount + next month, with the hopeful (for the company) and scary (for consumers) suggesting that normal, content-addicted Americans will take out their credit cards for five different streaming services.
Discovery, the dominant programmer of what was formerly called ‘reality TV’ and who now prefers to call it ‘real life’, has emerged as the most successful new entrant to this complex competition. It brings together a mostly female audience. The company says it has 12 million paid subscriptions around the world, a more than respected start that has helped the company’s shares perform best on the S&P 500 this year (although it is also a broader wave in the market) .
Launched on January 4, the app has a huge amount of content that Netflix competes with 55,000 descendants – and it launches a series of exclusive content dominated by American cultural figures such as Oprah Winfrey, a parade of People cover accessories . by Chip and Joanna Gaines and pop icons, including chef Guy Fieri. (Discovery also offered nine figures for an agreement with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, but the couple chose to go with Netflix, which according to the two people was familiar with the exclusivity that insists less on exclusivity.)
The app’s early success is in part the result of an agreement with Verizon, and Discovery will not disclose part of its subscriptions coming via the route; nor will it say how many subscriptions are for an unrelated European sports service. (A media analyst, Michael Nathanson, estimates that Verizon delivered about 20 percent of the five million subscribers in the United States.) But the increase in new sign-ups this year beat analysts’ expectations, the initial confirmation of the company’s large betting that delivering apps through new apps on a range of devices is now a complete mainstream phenomenon. And as the hype fades away over technical bells and whistles and the use of new kinds of data to predict people’s interests, the audience still loves watching people fix houses, visit visitors, sewer around and quarrel over their relationships.
“Our bet is when the world takes a full turn, that the content people chose if they could choose anything on TV or cable, the content they love and that they go home for – ’90 Day,” ‘Fixer Upper, ” Property Brothers’s – they’ll still love it, ” said David M. Zaslav, president and CEO of Discovery. “In the end, people really don’t change that much.”
This is mr. Zaslav’s unromantic version of the old statement that content reigns supreme. And this is a bookmark for a media era that began with a dizzying sense of transformation. It took place in me and laid out my 11-year-old Disney’s cunning strategy of releasing a single episode of ‘WandaVision’ at the same time each week, which mysteriously delivered an experience to the way our television watched.
Zaslav is also the last of his kind – the ‘last tycoon’, his old friend, former HBO CEO Richard Plepler, told me. He’s a ruthless, fleece-lined man who likes to call reporters to talk about his own book (and caught me Tuesday morning in a moment of panic about what I would write this week). He likes to visit his stars at home, and keep them close. He hangs out with Disney’s former boss, Bob Iger, and Mr. Plepler, and others who rose up by creating television and movies. But the companies are now run by people who come from other parts of the business – telecommunications or programs or theme parks. He’s a supporter of the Hamptons who also hold an annual “boys’ dinner” for 50 of his closest male friends, including Apple’s content chief Eddy Cue and Netflix’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos in Los Angeles. The dinner is being held during a golf tournament at which Discovery owns the television rights.
The smooth start of Discovery + comes as streamers struggle closer to the heart of the media class. Apple’s service is starting slowly. WarnerMedia’s HBO Max is defined by obstacles. But Discovery remains in a strange position in the media industry: the company, which values more than $ 23 billion, is much smaller than the handful of dominant media and telecommunications conglomerates. But it is too big to be acquired by a few companies. There is an ongoing debate among those who Mr. Zaslav knows whether he’s buying or selling – that is, whether Discovery + is another step to make the company more attractive to a giant to swallow before the bottom really falls out of the US cable industry. the current high share price of the company will mr. Zaslav leads to acquiring other businesses.
“He needs to use this opportunity to strengthen his business,” he said. Nathanson, the media analyst, said Discovery would buy CNN. ‘
Mr. Zaslav, who was involved in the creation of CNBC and MSNBC as CEO of NBC from 1989 to 2006, began playing in the global news industry. Discovery is an investor in GB News, a live television broadcaster for the BBC. In Poland, the TVN channel TVN, along with other media this year, went dark to protest the latest government attempt to thwart independent media. Mr. Zaslav said the investments in the channels were part of a strategy to sell streaming services as a bundle with news and sports.
But he said he had not spoken to CNN President Jeff Zucker, a golf partner in East Hampton, about buying the network from his parent company AT&T, and indicated that he was very concerned about the political charge paired with American cable. news.
“News is very much overplayed and excited here in the US,” he said.
Discovery has its own nuanced cultural politics, which is the subject of an entire school cultural critique. The success of ’90 Day ‘followed Donald Trump’s xenophobic rise, and the show was’ so rooted in the effects of the real world and the real lives of these people that it often feels too soft to the touch,’ said Scaachi. Koul written in 2019. immigration politics and class and race and gender are so present in every episode, you sometimes have to look through the tears of your eyelids. ”
A large portion of the company’s audience certainly includes Donald Trump’s America (although programs such as ’90 Day’ also follow cults, such as readers of New York Magazine’s Vulture). Some of the programs are resolutely anti-coastal. But the cast is inclusive, the couples are diverse. And its programming also provides an idea of why Republican efforts to revive, in particular, war attacks on LGBT cultures have lost their political effectiveness. TLC’s version of real life regularly features a variety of couples. One 90-day spin-off tells the story of an American-born partner who moves to his husband’s native Mexico and struggles with overt homophobia. At one point he looks up at a giant statue of Jesus Christ in Cantamar, and the American-born friend reassures his husband, “I think he will approve of us.”
The best relationship for mr. Zaslav, as for the other streamers, is with distributors. The chairman of the Dish Network warned Discovery last week that selling content through the app could mean lower costs for cable companies and other pay-TV operators. But the threat has not yet materialized.
The bigger question may be whether and when the service will develop an identity or high-profile programming, which is more than a complement to the television network. This is an experiment, as my colleague John Koblin wrote, whether people would pay $ 5 a month (or $ 7 without ads) for a service that plays in the background while you fold laundry or pay the bills.
So far, the exclusive content is mostly for superfans of specific shows, with occasional experiments with formats that do not fit neatly on the cable. One early attempt is ‘Ben’s Workshop’, which host Ben Napier said he’s glad Discovery + picked up. “People kept saying, ‘Ben has to have a woodworking program,’ and I tweeted it again and tagged the network and said we should do it,” he said. “I did not care if it was a program for social media would not be. I really wanted to make the show. ”And Mr. Fieri told me that he was recording four episodes of an adventure program in Hawaii for the service that“ would not be able to sit in the main track to do what Food Network does. “
However, the company says it will put more and more of the desired content there first, including a drinking show featuring chef Ina Garten and actress Melissa McCarthy, as well as shows with the promising titles, “Amy Schumer Learns to Cook: Uncensored” and “Judi Dench’s Wild Borneo Adventure.”
And while the rise of Discovery + is mostly an indication that changing distribution technologies have not changed American tastes, that does not mean that the shift is without effect. Sunny Anderson, a co-presenter of ‘The Kitchen’ on the Food Network, said she – mostly – enjoyed a wave of feedback on older content.
Last week, a viewer sent her a message congratulating her on her weight loss.
‘I thought, what were they looking at? I did not lose weight, ‘she said, then realized that they were deep in her library, watching old episodes of her program’ Cooking for Real ‘. She said she had to answer, “You’re watching me 10 years ago, I’m actually gaining weight.”