How Streamer BritBox Shapes U.K. TV Strategy Through Success With American Audiences

Studios Direct to Consumers. CEO Robert Schildehouse has spent the past few years building up the platform's original programming, including recent releases Riot Women and Linley and the upcoming Priding Prejudice inspired drama The Other Bennett's Sister, as well as overseeing a targeted marketing strategy that's up subscriber numbers for the one niche genre streamer that has now cornered the Anglo file market in the US. Robert, thank you, thank

you so much for joining me today. I appreciate it, my pleasure.

I happened to be in graduate school when YouTube launched, and say that was the one good idea I ever had in my career, was that something was going to change in the way content was being distributed to consumers, and broadband was becoming ubiquitous to the home, high quality video was being distributed over the Internet, and I just knew that the world that we lived in, where other people were making programming decisions on where and how you

watched content, was on the precipice of changing. And so I moved to Los Angeles just on a whim. I probably spent days of my life there at that point, but realized that was probably the place where things were going to happen. As the Hulu story started to emerge in two thousand and seven about Hollywood coming together to coalesce around a common streaming platform to really to combat piracy, which I think now, obviously the streaming is how most

of us are consuming content all the time. But back then, looking at what had happened in music industry, powers that be in Hollywood were legitimately concerned about this looming existential threat of what happens, whether it's existing platforms where they don't have control or piracy and just generally speaking, become the principal means for content distribution, they lose that control. So that's really how Hulu was born. And honestly, I

just bluffed my way in. I reached out to somebody with the title recruiter at Hulu on LinkedIn, which at that time was still a very small website. I wasn't allowed of noise, and they got back to me. I came in and they asked me where I fit best, and I asked where they needed the most help, and they said content, and I said I can do that.

And I think just the good news at the time was nobody really knew what they were doing, and so I was the beneficiary of just being part of an industry that was really getting off its feet at the time. And I had an amazing experience there, who was the most definitive time in my career up until the most

recent chapter here at BBC and brick Box. But it really gave me an opportunity to be a part of something in its ncency and watch it grow, and leading our content acquisition efforts and really thinking about programming and strategy for how we were going to present ourselves to audiences,

and watching the industry develop. And remember this is a time when we're talking in two thousand and eight when Netflix was still principally known for delivering DVDs and red envelopes, and Amazon was kind of dipping its toe in time at the time in streaming. But Hulu was really the first pure play streaming platform in the marketplace, and we had an incredible I had an incredible experience there that

really set off the rest of my career. And from there I spent a long time at CBS and just around I left the company in the wake of the merger with Viacom that ultimately created Paramount, And I've lived in Los Angeles that whole time, and then moved to New York and I got a phone call out of a vloo really about an opportunity at this British streaming

service called brick Box. And I would tell the story because I think it's accurate, but it also sort of gives purpose to a lot of what I do and a lot of what I did at who and what I'm most proud of really is recognizing that brilliant content gets produced all over the globe. Now that's as a professional,

but also as a consumer and as an American. I talked about this a lot that we never really were exposed to British television or television from anywhere on American airwaves growing up, because that was really just dominated by what was coming out of the Hollywood system. And what I recognized as we had a mission to grow to bring the world's premium content online was that great content was being produced all over the world, whether it's in Japan or Korea, or the Nordics, or Israel or Latin

American certainly the UK. And so when I got this call, I was intrigued by the idea of connecting audiences with the content that they love where there's friction between I've been really building that bridge and I'd done that before. And interestingly, my mother was visiting me at the time, and she asked me what I was doing professionally or

with my life. I just moved to New York and was exploring a few options, and I mentioned to her that I just started kicking off a conversation with this content with this streaming service, that's the joint venture between two major media companies in the UK. And she looked at me and said, doing brick Box. And I looked at hid, what do you know about brit Fox And

she said, that's all I watch. And that really kicked off my understanding of the value that BritBox brings to its audience and how much they love the service, and how much it's beyond utility. It's really a relationship that BritBox has built with its audience. And I think that was really the moment where the light bulb went off of my head that said, this is that there's a real opportunity here to grow this thing. You know, I was fortunate enough to start the company started the company

shortly afterwards. It was a joint venture at the time between the BBC and ITV, and just that set off the last three and a half years or so really just an experience I could not have predicted or scripted into British television. And really, I say this and I mean it, that I have the best job in the business. And I'm not just talking about the British television industry.

I think the entertainment industry and think anyone listening to your podcast or reads who reads the news and deeply understands what's going on in this industry right now, it's

under you know, an enormous amount of stress. I don't have to get into what everyone else is dealing with, but I think from the vantage point of where I sit, which is getting to experience how to connect with consumers in a very deep way and build something that really means something to audiences and do that within the environment of a global, major media company is just it's thrilling

for me. And I've had the opportunity to just build a world class organization and hire some really incredible people that have worked in major media companies like I have, and we're all just super invested in building a service that has a sustainable, long term business model and really continues to delight to audiences. And we all come into work every day motivated to do that.

market for it. And now how BritBox makes it accessible as well, So like how people were going about finding British content previously and what Britbeck says to make that more seamless, right, I think.

scope of a British television means. It was it's principally costume drama like Dowt Nabbey for example, and Doubt Nabby had also the benefit of really taking advantage of the streaming ecosystem emerging at the right time for it to reach brought audiences that wouldn't necessarily be tuning into PBS or looking at you know, going through your parents' DVDs.

Like you mentioned, there really wasn't another way into American living rooms and what streaming has done, not just with BritBox, but I think every platform, and I mentioned it's a lot of what I was working on when I was at Hulu very early on had to do with connecting audiences with content that they loved and building that bridge. We have multiple challenges like every like every streaming service does you and we have to earn our way into

the living room like every streaming service does. And then we're the British one. And that has a benefit if you if you're an angle file or you're an expat, or you self identify someone who loves British television, that's great. But if you don't, then we're the British one and maybe that isn't the thing that you're into. And so a lot of our job is to create the on ramps in the marketplace to give people a reason to

give us a try. And once they discover that we have amazing television shows from and distinctive television shows from what they might be able to see in the general entertainment marketplace, and they have eight thousand hours from the Canada British television. Once you walk into our service, they tend to stay with us and stay with us for a long time.

sci fi and thriller and true crime and all. There's a gamut of what makes British television very similar in many ways to what you get out of the Hollywood system. But there are a few distinctive categories that where British television stands out and is globally known to stand out. And mystery and adjacent to mystery, just the broader crime genre is something where British television is known and truly is distinctive. Another area is period and you mentioned Dow

Nabby before. I think the beneficiary of the long relationship that British television has had with PBA and PBS Masterpiece in this market has meant there has been some for the costume drama, the period piece into American audience to

American audiences. And so those are the areas that we spend most of our time on BritBox specifically, and we want to make sure that you don't have that issue that you show up, you watch the one show that somebody told you to watch and there's nothing there for you. I call it the clear, well lit paths. The proposition like, can we make sure that if we bring somebody in for one thing, there are there is a very clear path for them to enjoy the rest of what we

have in the service. And that's really been our strategy.

did dazk Evans Murder? Is Easy Towards Zero, which is our most recent series with Matthew Resent Angelica Houston, and then we have so this year we have Tommy and Tuppen's coming out and Tommy and Tuppen is the first modern adaptation of an Agatha Christie IP in English language.

There may have been some things elsewhere in the world, but in English language it's the first and we're just super excited about that, and we know that our audience loves mystery and interestingly, that show we've commissioned out of the US, so we can get into that if you like, on how we think about programming and commissioning programming. But

just super excited about that show. We have the other Bennett's Sister is a show that we're incredibly excited about that takes place in the world of Pride and Prejudice.

a show that we're very excited about. And then look, we've got great a huge slate of returning series, headlined by the second season of Ludwig starring David Mitchell, that we're very excited about. And so just a very rich slate of new to BritBox and returning series that we know will delight our audiences.

that's accessible to all. We've moved upstream in the way that we think about programmings. We are an extremely active co commissioner and in some cases commissioner British Television and we and I frankly are green lighting television shows that millions of people are watching in the UK, and I

mentioned Tommy and Tuppens that's coming later this year. But we had a series that came to us called Blimley from Colin Calendar and Playground, which is a Colin is an extremely well renowned producer, and we commissioned that and I green Latch green lit that show in the US and it made its way back to the UK via the acquisition route at BBC, so there wasn't a UK broadcaster involved in that commission and it turned out to be one of the if not the biggest drama premiere

on the BBC in the last year. And so we're taking a very proactive approach at knowing what our audience looks for, what their tastes are and what they like aggressively going after those shows, participating upstream. And this even

goes beyond commissioning. We develop projects, We listen to ideas at the earliest stage and we're talking to every premium producer in the UK and a lot of the projects that are on our slate come from from rab or agnostic about where they come from, and they come from the best producers in the UK, whether it's Left Bank

Pictures who made The Crown. They're the producers of The Lady, which is a new series that we have on the service right now, and we talk about Tommy and Tuppens that came from Lookout Point that's a BBC Studios owned label, and that they made Happy Value, which is one of the most well regarded series from Sally Wainwright UK that

many American audiences are familiar with. So we're working with the best producers in the UK and if there's an opportunity and if it makes sense for us to participate upstream in the commissioning or co production phase of things, when we do so.

And we've got again an amazing commissioning team that actually sits in the UK, that's made up actually both Americans and Brits, but it specifically sits in London that screens all of our inbound and they have such an incredible pulse on what our audience in the US is excited about and would be excited about. And yeah, I lean on them, and I think broadly our programming team leans on them immensely. But we have a really good understanding of what our audience likes and we've talked to them.

We spend a lot of time and you listen to them, and I think the output of that are some million incredible shows that we're very proud of.

to lean into that lane. And so somewhat in parallel to having this joint venture of ITV, they had launched a streaming service just focus on factual opportunities and that's BBC Select. And so once we were brought into the fold through the acquisition of ITV share in brick Box, we took a look at where can we leverage the platform the infrastructure of brick Box to supercharge the growth of other things within the broader portfolio and Select was

a very obvious first place to start. So we've integrated that business in really without any hiccups, into BritBox and rebranded. Really at a corporate level, we're calling it direct to consumer, but we're not. We're still from a consumer facing perspective brick Box and BBC Select, and but what we've been able to do is really use the k abilities that we've built at brick Box to accelerate the growth. It's

already very impressive and profitable service in Select. And then you know, in terms of future plans, we're just you know, we're open minded and assessing the market like everything else. So there's a lot of chaos out there, and I think that just leaves us us in a position where there may be opportunities in the future to pursuit and nothing to report today. But what we are doing is building the infrastructure to be able to support multiple faces

to the consumer and also use them together. So we can talk at some point about our premium service Brickbox Premiere, but we're the content from BBC Select lives within the premium tier for brick Box Premium service also, so we're just constantly looking for ways to optimize our proposition to consumers and leverage the infrastructure that we've built to supercharge our businesses on.

So it's not a great feeling. But in order to bring some of this incredible programming and continue to create a service that people love, we need to continue to invest and invest there. So the challenge that I really gave the team was how can we increase our revenue per user through good news? And are there ways that we can bring our audience And we know how loyal our audience is and they tell us how much they love us. Can we bring them closer to the program

and can we give them more? And so we launched the service called Britbock's Premiere over the summer in August, and really it's principal value proposition is earlier access to programming. I'm old fashioned. I love the week over week well

a lot of a show. I think the binge valuable for some people and they really love it, but there's something about having that week to week conversation and a little bit of a pause to reflect and think about what you're watching, talk to your community and think about where things are going, and especially in the world that we play in, which is a lot of mystery and suspense and what's going to happen and who done it, etc. But we recognize that some users would prefer to just

have everything right now. We part of the value, part of the proposition of Premiere is the early access to programming, and mentioned BBC select the inclusion of those documentaries and factual programming into the service. And then there's some compelling product features that we've been hearing for a long time.

Their users wanted, they wanted four K, they wanted more concurrent streams, they wanted temporary downloads and mobile devices, and so we built this product and we said we're going to release it in a very quiet way as an annual only option and see what happens and continue to tinker and continue to make it better and really hope to evolve them into something that feels more like a membership tire than something that's just a transactional relationship with

a service provider, which is I think of how we think about a lot of our relationships with streaming services, and the results have been phenomenal. We're going to exceed our first year plan on that by probably around over fifty percent. And we've just been we talked to what I keep saying, we talk to our users a lot. The response to what has been extremely positive. People always want a little bit more, they want to feel close, and we've got some really great ideas about how we

can continue to improve the service. But this is really a super fan service and we are in the fandom business, so we want to make sure we're always a step ahead and thinking about how to give our users more and if it has the benefit of creating more value for the business as well, that's really impactful and important as well.

at brick Box. And it was an idea came that was organically came up in a training workshop actually that we had and we found the resources and said, just sounds like a great idea. We're a very small organization and so we don't have a lot of bureaucracy. We don't operate in a despite being in a big media environment and being part of the BBC, we don't try to act like that and we try to just move quickly.

And there was an opportunity to get some great talent and talk about TV and leverage the fact that we do have relationships with talent that wants to help promote their shows and get in front of audiences and give them a flavor a little bit of behind the scenes of the world that they operate in, and you, we're just super excited about. It's just another way we can reach users where.

I don't really know. But when you think about general entertainment services, British content is a part of what they do. For us, it's everything that we do. And so when we have a big, impactful tent pole show that maybe somewhere else would be one of many, many things that

are happening for us, it's the most important thing. Whether it's they're getting to see their faces in a billboard in Times Square, which all of our talent take that moment and they take a picture and put it on their socials and they get very excited about it, or even just coming to New York and we do events and we do screenings and some of them, believe it or not, have never even been to New York City before.

And I think the relationship that we're developing back into the British content ecosystem is a really competitive advantage for us. We talk to every producer in that marketplace. Talent is now coming to us and saying how can we work with brick Box because they know that we get behind our shows. We do everything we possibly can do to

get to get the word out there. And the value of just being on a brick box show in the UK marketplace, maybe once upon a time, and I'm speculating here, we may have been thought of as a niche service. You can understand why. But our aspiration is really to be a main that specializes in distinctive programming from the UK and as talent and producers recognize that we will celebrate their content, we will get them talked about in

all the places where Prestige Television has talked about. They've come to get very comfortable with us, and then we make sure that when they are with us, both through the production process as well as when we were out there and yelling from the rooftops about the shows, they're getting a first class experience with us. And so far, I think that's penne that ends in the marketplace.

so that we can lower that barrier to entry. I call it an accessible on ramp, pick whatever turn of phrase you want, but we want to for the person who hasn't discovered yet that British television is for them. We want to give them a reason to give us a try. And we've done that through a marketing campaigns. We launched a brand campaigns year that we called see

It Differently and it want to Clio. It was a fourteen hour time lapse of someone who was playing the role of a BritBox subscriber being converted into characters from our different shows. And there's really I've actually never seen anything like it before and when the team came to me with that idea, I was like, yeah, let's do

something different. But what it challenged the team, what it challenged audiences to do or potential audiences to do is really to think of us differently, and you know, the goal is to try to bring people in and give and give us a try to our existing audience. The job is to just keep feeding them the great programming and bringing back our super brands and returning shows. And we're heavily invested in that, whereas you know, on other services you might expect to see a season or two

or three of very successful shows. We love the franchise. We have Silent Witnesses in its twenty eighth season. We have Death and Paradise and Shetland. These these series have double digit seasons of television and audience has become accustomed to coming back and key beats throughout the year. And this is part of the value of Britboxes. It's not just one show. It's you're here for the experience and we're going to keep feeding you over the course of

a year incredible television shows. And the output of that is that the majority of our subscribers on our direct consumer platform are on annual plans. So what that tells us and we keep leaning into that, and it's statistic that I'm probably most proud of. It's our audience is making a bet on BritBox for the entire year. They know that we're going to keep delighting them, that we're going to curate for them the best of British television.

They're not just show them up for one show. And we're actually seeing that that number continue to increase and Britbox's Premiere, which is only sold as an annual option, that premium tier is helping that number as well. And the job here is of course to keep the existing audience base happy, we get the feedback that that's happening, and then introducing BritBox to lots of new people who are wise wouldn't necessarily know how great the content can be on our British Content service.

And I think that's done very well in specialty services, and whether it's services like ours or there are other services that tackle other content verticals, to me, that's particularly exciting. I have a stinking suspicion that you're going to see some more of that happen name at the general entertainment level, as some of the bigger services who've gone broad are going to have to find identities. And that's something that we think about a lot, is our identity in the

marketplace and what we stand for. And it's difficult as a consumer to pin an identity broad identity on a lot of the general services. They may mean something very important to me, whether maybe it's a sport, certain sports rights that they have, or it may be a show that I really love. From a streaming or service wide identity, I don't know if that really exists out there, but we're in that business. And the reason I'm here and

I continue to be excited and motivated every day. And why my team I've been able to build this organization and we've been able to come together and bring in people who've worked for all the major streaming services, who are super dedicated on building something that can connect with audiences. Why they're motivated to come in every day. It's all about that direct relationship that we can have with the consumer. So that's the thing that motivates me. That's the thing

I'm excited about. I suspect you're going to see more of that happening and more experimentation about how to go deeper with specific audience segments.

We say what we are on the ten as the Brits would say we are brick Box. There's really no other streaming service that says exactly who they are, So we do owe hot, we do owe a responsibility to that content, be that ambassador, to be that bridge between British television and the audiences that love it today but also we'll love it in the future, and it's a role that we take very seriously.