Acorn TV is not your granny’s streaming service.
Sure, the service specializes in quality television programming from the U.K., Australia and Canada. And yes, you can definitely staunch the pain of Downton Abbey ending by diving into a spate of new period dramas.
But if heavily-starched miniseries aren’t your thing, the service – up and running since 2009 – also offers quirky comedies, documentaries and gritty crime dramas that often don’t air anywhere else.
Matt Graham, vice-president of Acorn TV, says that a diverse content mix is part of Acorn’s programming strategy: “the best algorithms in the world can’t touch the really focused human curation” that Acorn offers, he says.
Acorn TV picked up an Emmy nomination this year for the 13th and final season of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, a hugely successful and perennial favourite starring David Suchet as a brilliant Belgian detective. But Graham is pleased when fans of such traditional shows discover something new, like The Detectorists, “a quirky big-hearted dramedy” starring Mackenzie Crook (The Office and the Pirates of the Caribbean movies) and Toby Jones (The Hunger Games films) as two men with metal detectors looking for a lifetime’s fortune under farmers’ fields.
“It’s a credit to our acquisitions team,” says Graham, who points out that everyone who works for Acorn watches the channel. There’s no secret programming formula, he says: “in the broadest terms it comes down to ‘do we enjoy it?’ ‘do we think it’s a high-quality show?’ ‘does it fit with the vision of Acorn?’ and ‘does our audience think it’s worth what they’re paying for?’”
A Pricewaterhouse-Coopers study released this past summer noted that revenue from streaming and downloading was expected to hit $9.5 billion in 2015, while physical sales of DVDs was expected to plummet to $7.8 billion. It’s a watershed moment, the first time that streaming has overtaken physical movie sales. Furthermore, the study reports that by 2017 downloading will reach $12 billion, overtaking the amount we spend going out to movie theatres.
“We’re happy to be a part of that,” Graham says, “happy that as the industry shifts and consumer behavior shifts that we’ve got a stake in both DVDs and on the streaming side of things.” (The Acorn catalogue of DVDs and sets is available at acornonline.com.)
But Acorn TV’s high-def streaming service has seen “tremendous” growth since its launch, with audience numbers close to doubling in the past year, according to Graham. In addition to more than 160 titles – with new additions each week – Acorn is rolling out apps on additional platforms and expanding their programming pipeline.
Many of Acorn’s subscribers, he notes, have more than one streaming service and already subscribe to Netflix and Hulu, for example. “People see us as a valuable addition to their à la carte viewing habits,” thanks to first and/or exclusive airings of programs (Doc Martin, starring David Clunes, for example) combined with the convenience factor: “we make it really easy, compared to going through hours and hours of content.”
“Binge-watch” was the Collins English Dictionary’s 2015 word of the year. Streaming has changed the way we watch TV, for better and for worse: Graham says that Acorn believes in a healthy mix when presenting new programs, sometimes releasing entire series at once, and sometimes rolling out a series episode-by-episode. There’s still a lot of fun to be had with water-cooler talk about the latest episode of a show, he says. But he’s quick to add that Acorn makes it easy to keep watching that show you just can’t wait a week for, by knowing exactly where you left off.
Graham says that he “absolutely” makes time to watch TV, counting Foyle’s War (“a pinnacle of TV-making”) as a recent favourite, as well as The Brokenwood Mysteries series from New Zealand.
New titles coming up: Midwinter of the Spirit, a “fun mix of crime drama and the supernatural”; Prisoners Wives; Janet King; and new seasons of Jack Irish (starring Guy Pierce) and Game of Thrones’ Iain Glen as Jack Taylor.
Acorn TV is available at www.acorn.tv for $4.99 per month or $49.99 per year, with a free monthly trial offered.
