“Ninety Day Fiancé” is, on some Sunday nights, the most watched program on television. And in the latest innovation in streaming, Discovery + includes a channel that allows you to watch for four days in a row without seeing the same episode twice.
If you are unfamiliar with the six-year program, as a surprisingly large portion of New Yorkers (my editors here, shamefully included), the title’s 90 days refer to the period in which the non-citizen holding a visa K-1 can stay in the country before the wedding or face deportation. The program narrates couples during this period, with skeptical relatives, fights and the enchantment or disenchantment with Nebraska or New Hampshire, all with countdown music and chyrons like “73 days to get married”.
Now, on the Discovery + program “90 Days Bares All” (one of about a dozen spinoffs, including “90 Day Fiancé: Self-Quarantined”), the program can “push the limits even further compared to standards and practices of a regular cable channel, ”said Howard Lee, president of TLC, one of the cable networks that make up Discovery’s business in the United States. So you can watch couples scream expletives at each other without touching or discussing their toys favorite sexual acts.
The biggest story in mainstream media today is the “streaming war”, the confusion of people who traditionally make TV and movies to follow Netflix. Disney is dominating the race for second place; it is not clear who else will survive. CBS hobbles to the party next month with Paramount +, with the hopeful (for the company) and terrifying (for consumers) suggestion that normal, content-addicted Americans will end up handing over their credit cards on five credit card services. different streaming.
Discovery, the dominant programmer of what used to be called a “reality show” and now prefers to call it “real life”, has emerged as perhaps the most successful new entrant in this complicated and high-risk competition. It is bringing a mostly female audience. The company claims to have 12 million paid subscriptions worldwide, a more than respectable start that helped put the company’s shares among the top performers on the S&P 500 this year (although it is also riding a broader wave in the market ).
The app, which launched on January 4, has a mass of content that rivals Netflix, with 55,000 episodes – and is launching an exclusive content pack dominated by American cultural figures like Oprah Winfrey, a procession of cover games from People led by Chip and Joanna Gaines and pop icons, including chef Guy Fieri. (Discovery also made a nine-digit bid for a deal with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, but the couple chose Netflix, which insists less on exclusivity, said two people familiar with the talks.)
The initial success of the application is partly the result of an agreement with Verizon, and Discovery will not disclose the portion of its subscriptions from that route; nor will it say how many subscriptions are for an unrelated European sports service. (A media analyst, Michael Nathanson, estimates that Verizon has provided about 20 percent of the five million subscriptions in the United States.) But the increase in new subscriptions this year has exceeded analysts’ expectations, initial validation of the company’s big bet. that delivering shows through new apps on a variety of devices is now an entirely popular phenomenon. And as the hype about technical bells and whistles and the use of new types of data to predict people’s interests fall, audiences still love to see people fixing houses, touring restaurants, crawling into sewers and discussing their relationships. .
“Our bet is when the world gives a complete rotation, that the content that people chose when they could choose anything on TV or cable, the content that they love and run home to – ’90 Day ‘,’ Fixer Upper ‘,’ Property Brothers – they’ll still love it, ”said David M. Zaslav, Discovery’s president and chief executive. “Ultimately, people don’t really change that much.”
This is Zaslav’s unromantic version of the old statement that content is king. And it’s a punctuation mark for a media era that started with a dizzying sense of transformation. Instead, I went on to explain my 11-year-old Disney’s devious strategy of releasing a single episode of “WandaVision” at the same time each week, producing an experience mysteriously identical to the way we used to watch television.
Zaslav is also the last of his kind – the “last tycoon,” his old friend, former HBO chief executive Richard Plepler, told me. He is a relentless tycoon in woolen clothes who likes to call reporters to talk about his own book (and he caught me on Tuesday morning in a moment of panic about what I was going to write this week). He likes to visit his stars at home and keep them close. He hangs around with ex-Disney boss Bob Iger and Mr. Plepler and others who grew up creating television and movies. But these companies are now run by people who come from other areas of the business – telecommunications, applications or theme parks. He is a Hamptons mainstay who also offers an annual “boys dinner” to 50 of his closest male friends, including Apple’s head of content, Eddy Cue, and Netflix’s executive co-chairman, Ted Sarandos, In Los Angeles. Dinner is held during a golf tournament for which Discovery owns the television rights.
Discovery +’s smooth start comes at a time when streamers closest to the center of the media class are struggling. Apple’s service got off to a slow start. WarnerMedia’s HBO Max was defined by stumbles. But Discovery remains in a strange position in the media business: the company, valued at more than $ 23 billion, is much smaller than a handful of dominant media and telecommunications conglomerates. But it is too big to be acquired by only a few companies. There is an ongoing debate among those who know Zaslav about whether he is buying or selling – that is, whether Discovery + is another move to make the company more attractive for a giant to swallow before bottoming out of the cable business. USA or whether the current high price of the company’s shares will lead Zaslav to acquire other businesses.
“He should use this opportunity to strengthen his business,” said Nathanson, the media analyst, who suggested that Discovery “buy CNN.”
Zaslav, who was involved in the creation of CNBC and MSNBC as an executive at NBC from 1989 to 2006, began working in the global news industry. Discovery is an investor in GB News, a center-right competitor for television on the BBC. In Poland this year, Discovery’s owned channel, TVN, went into the dark along with other media outlets to protest the government’s latest attempt to curb independent media. Zaslav said the investments in these channels are part of a strategy to sell streaming services in a package with news and sports.
But he said he did not speak with CNN President Jeff Zucker, an East Hampton golf partner, about buying the network from his parent company, AT&T, and signaled that he was wary of the political charge that comes with first-rate American cables. news line.
“The news is very exaggerated and criticized here in the United States,” he said.
Discovery has its own nuanced cultural policies, which are the subject of an entire school of cultural criticism. The success of “90 Day” accompanied Donald Trump’s xenophobic rise, and the show was “so rooted in the real-world and real-life consequences of these people that it often seems too sensitive to touch,” wrote Scaachi Koul in 2019. “ The immigration policy and class and race and gender are so present in each episode that sometimes you have to watch through the cracks in your eyelids ”.
Much of the company’s audience emphatically includes Donald Trump’s America (although shows like “90 Day” also have cult followers among, say, readers of New York’s Vulture magazine). Part of its programming is decidedly anti-coastal. But its cast is inclusive, its couples diverse. And its programming also offers a clue as to why Republican attempts to revive, in particular, anti-LGBT cultural war attacks have lost some of their political effectiveness. The real-life version of the TLC regularly includes a number of couples. A “90-day” spin-off tells the story of an American partner who moved to Mexico, her husband’s home country, and fought open homophobia. At one point, looking at a giant statue of Jesus Christ in Cantamar, the American-born partner reassured her husband: “I think he would approve of us.”
The most strained relationships for Zaslav, as well as for the other streamers, are with distributors. Dish Network’s president warned Discovery last week that selling content through the app could mean lower fees for cable companies and other pay-TV operators. But that threat has not yet materialized.
The big question may be whether and when the service will develop an identity, or high-level programming, that looks more than a supplement to the television network. It is an experience, as my colleague John Koblin wrote, to know whether people are going to pay $ 5 a month (or $ 7 without ads) for a service that runs in the background while you fold laundry or pay bills.
So far, the exclusive content is mainly for superfans of specific programs, with occasional experiments with formats that do not fit perfectly in the cable. One of the first attempts is “Ben’s Workshop”, which the host, Ben Napier, said was satisfied with the fact that Discovery + had chosen. “People kept saying, ‘Ben should have a joinery program’ and I kept retweeting and tagging the network and saying that we should do this,” he said. “I didn’t care if it was just a social media show. I really wanted to do the show. ”And Mr. Fieri told me that he is recording four episodes of an adventure program in Hawaii for the service that” would not have been able to fit in well with the main path of doing what the Food Network does “.
But the company says it will get more and more of its desirable content there first, including a drink show with chef Ina Garten and actress Melissa McCarthy, as well as programs with promising titles, “Amy Schumer learns to cook: uncensored ”And“ Judi Dench’s Wild Borneo Adventure. ”
And while the emergence of Discovery + is primarily an indication that changes in distribution technologies have not changed American tastes, that does not mean that the change is without consequences. Sunny Anderson, co-host of “The Kitchen” on the Food Network, said she has enjoyed – mostly – a wave of feedback on old content.
Last week, a viewer sent her a message to congratulate her on losing weight.
“I thought, what did they watch? I didn’t lose weight, ”she said, and then realized that they were in her library, watching old episodes of her“ Cooking for Real ”program. She said she needed to answer: “You have been watching me for 10 years, I actually gained weight”.