As Streaming Atomizes, Sinclair, L.A. Clippers Show Where We’re Headed

There’s been plenty of talk about the tens of billions of dollars the major streaming services are showering on pricey originals like Amazon’s prodigious $715 million price tag for the rights and first season of The Rings of Power.

But at budgets far below what Amazon, Apple, Disney and their competitors are spending, we’re seeing a further atomization of good-quality production into outlets not known for making their own stuff. It has implications for not only for those companies and their audiences, but everyone else trying to capture eyeballs or serve up ads, sponsorships, or subscriptions.

At its most granular level, the millions of creators on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and these days especially TikTok represent a seemingly bottomless source of video entertainment for billions of viewers around the planet. There’s a reason Netflix Co-CEO Reed Hastings has invoked TikTok, with its vast audience and sticky engagement, as his company’s real competition.

But there’s a growing middle tier of outlets we’ve not previously thought of as sources of original programming. It’s partly a matter of necessity.

Broadcast and cable networks are getting strip-mined of good shows, syndication markets are shrinking, and the big media companies are keeping their best stuff for their own services and outlets.

So more outlets are getting in the business of making their own programming. In the future, these efforts likely will become more significant, attracting niche audiences and advertisers, while selling expensive subscriptions for ardent fans.

The Los Angeles Clippers, for instance, announced just before the NBA’s season kickoff this week that they’ll launch their own subscription streaming service, the first such team to do so.

“We need to define the future of watching basketball,” Clippers owner Steve Ballmer, the former Microsoft CEO, told GeekWire on Monday. “We’ll always do a better job of that than any distribution partner. Whether we distribute directly or through an ESPN or a TNT or an Amazon, or whoever gets into the business of distributing these things, the experience that makes this the best basketball possible will come, I believe, from our league.”

ClipperVision isn’t cheap, at $199.99 for the season, and available only for viewers in the Los Angeles market. Compared to the cost of tickets to an actual game, an average of $288 across the league for a family of four, perhaps $200 for an entire season’s worth of games isn’t so dear.

The offering is also effectively the inverse of the NBA’s League Pass, which costs half as much, but doesn’t let fans watch games in their home market, to protect local contracts. More importantly, ClipperVision could represent the future for many NBA and other sports teams trying to serve and build a local fanbase as regional sports networks decline amid cord-cutting and MVPD contractions.

It’s a different, equally complex situation for local broadcasters. As networks shift their best shows to streaming, and NBC talks about giving up the 10 pm time slot, local stations and station groups need to come up with Plan B.

That’s led Sinclair Broadcasting Group, the second-biggest station chain and a prolific experimenter with various ways to deliver a signal, to announce a deal this week for new shows from Anthony Zuiker, the creator of the multi-headed CSI franchise.

To develop reality shows, Zuiker will rely in part on the news archives of Sinclair’s dozens of local stations. That’s a smart way to amortize an underutilized asset. More importantly, Sinclair will use the resulting programming not only for its own station group, but also syndicate them to other broadcasters.

“This is another post-COVID example of a paradigm shift in how content creators are going to get things on the air,” Zuiker told Variety. “We’ve got a pipeline problem. Talk shows and game shows have been on our air as long as we’ve existed. But we’re not getting them anymore from our old suppliers.”

Zuiker, unusually, will not just create programming for Sinclair, but take an in-house role, developing talk shows, game shows and documentaries. While he’s still pumping out episodes for the various CSI shows on network TV, he said the Sinclair relationship is making his life easier.

“Now I find myself rather than running around town trying to convince a network or studio to back my idea, I finally have a family of financiers to get behind me and add value and get my ideas on the air immediately,” Zuiker said. “It’s something I can’t pass up at this age.”

He likely won’t be the last Hollywood producer pondering a different way to get their shows made and seen.

AVOD services such as Tubi and Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment have been producing originals for a while now, though typically on a tightly structured economic model.

CCSE bought Redbox last summer, and now has access to deep data on the viewing preferences of 40 million customers of Redbox’s DVD kiosks around the United States.

Redbox, whose CEO Galen Smith now heads CSSE’s streaming channels, used that data to figure out which genres, stars, and story lines would make for the best originals for the Redbox audience. Redbox also typically licensed its originals to other outlets to generate additional revenue.

CSSE also announced today that it’s extending a deal with Publicis-owned APX Content Ventures to create more shows for underserved populations. The first project under the extended deal is Dirty Pool, a reality show featuring J.B. Smoove (Curb Your Enthusiasm).

That deal structure represents another way to get a show made, with programming subsidized in part by brand placements for Publicis clients within the shows.

“Our partnership on Inside the Black Box embedded our client in a seamless and authentic way that also reflected who they are as a brand,” said APEX Exchange Global CEO Kerry Bianchi. “Finding quality programming that engages consumers and naturally ties to the ethos of our clients’ brands is a win-win for everyone.”

And the companies whose technology enables new kinds of production are adapting to the industry’s more spread-out nature.

Adobe today announced in-camera integrations with Red and Fujifilm that will let production teams automatically upload video and stills to Frame.io’s cloud collaboration system for remote post-production teams. It’s the sort of step-forward innovation that will eliminate a time-consuming and labor-intensive step in video production, and make a noticeable difference in time and cost particularly for smaller teams.

Making homegrown originals isn’t working for everyone though.

Cable/broadband provider Charter Communications started airing original series beginning in 2019 with a lengthy string of mostly drama/thrillers – Bad Boys offshoot LA’s Finest, Curfew, Temple, Manhunt, The Holiday, a revival of Mad About You.

Charter said in August it would shut down the Originals program, however, leaving in limbo the future of shows such as Joe Pickett, which had been touted as the highest-rated show of the bunch when it received a Season 2 renewal in February. Most of the shows remain available on Charter for now, including the Roku Channel co-production Panhandle.

It’s worth asking, however, if creating original programming for cable subscribers makes sense anymore, given the limits on discovery, marketing reach and resulting viewership. And cord-cutting means such originals also will see continued erosion of their potential addressable audience.

That said, for lots of other outlets, the atomization of the streaming world means that originals are increasingly a way to stand out with your core audience, and potentially find new ones in unanticipated places.