CuriosityStream’s Clint Stinchcomb

On the heels of a buzzy appearance at TCA, cable TV pioneer John Hendricks announced that his four-year-old factual SVOD platform CuriosityStream had raised $140 million in private-placement funding to fuel its growth. As Clint Stinchcomb, the president and CEO of CuriosityStream, tells TV Real, that capital injection will be used to build on two priorities: ramping up the content lineup and international expansion. Stinchcomb articulates his strategy for how CuriosityStream is breaking through in an increasingly competitive SVOD landscape.

TV REAL: When you joined the platform, what were the major strategic initiatives you identified in order to drive expansion?
STINCHCOMB: I came in to help with distribution and development in May 2017. I noticed a terrific customer proposition, with an incredible collection of the best factual programming in the world. There were about 1,300 titles. I had been talking to John [Hendricks, founder and chairman] about how to let the world know that CuriosityStream existed. When you’re a start-up, you can’t spend a billion dollars [on marketing]—that’s not the best use of your money! I had read about Liberty Global doing a deal with Netflix. They decided that since people were going to subscribe to Netflix, it’s better they do it in their ecosystem. So as I was talking to John, I said it might make sense to work with third-party distributors. That will make it easier for more people to subscribe, and you benefit from the promotion of working with these partners. Working with our current COO, Tia Cudahy, we did about 30 third-party agreements in a year. That increased the awareness of CuriosityStream, and it increased our subscriber count dramatically. If you only have one line of revenue, SVOD, it’s a hard business. I thought we could branch out into multiple lines. We’re a direct-to-consumer subscription service, have been from day one and will always be, but we also work with MVPDs like Comcast, Cox and Dish; virtual MVPDs like Sling TV and YouTube TV, and they package us like they would HBO or Showtime; and internationally [operators are] looking to package us more like an ESPN or Discovery in a basic bundle. We look at all the different opportunities. We intend to take CuriosityStream and get it, over time, into hundreds of millions of households. And in addition to the MVPDs, we sell to colleges, universities, libraries and corporations. And we take a light sponsorship touch on the network. It’s a fantastic time to be CuriosityStream because, as you know, over the last ten years, so many networks that started with a factual charter moved hard into reality programming. That created a significant gap for a pure factual provider. It also enabled us to acquire a lot of programming from some of the best factual producers in the world because it was a buyers’ market.

The second area I identified was ramping up the programming, both the quality and the quantity. We now have over 2,100 titles on the service. We’re growing that to 3,000 by the end of this year, staying true to our charter—science, history, nature, lifestyle, technology, society, etc. At the same time, we’re going to augment our kids’ and lifestyle programming, you’ll see us do a few feature docs, and some great classic factual programming will also become part of the service.

TV REAL: Integrations with partners can take time and can be complicated. What are the biggest challenges of those partnerships and what has become easier the more you’ve done?
STINCHCOMB: Our CTO Andre Silva, Peter North [chief digital advisor] and the whole engineering team built a platform that is strong, solid and built to scale. We’ve never let integration or technology be a gating factor for anything we’ve done. We’ve worked with the biggest partners in the world. Some are more challenging to work with than others, but we have a great group of people and they’ve always been able to clear every technological hurdle. We have a linear feed for distributors who want that. It’s a great complement to on-demand. When John launched Discovery internationally in the ’90s, you had to open up offices and had to lease transponder space and do all these things. Today, provided you have the proper content rights, you can push a button and shoot [the service] out all over the world. It’s exciting to play on a global scale.

TV REAL: You have carriage on StarHub in Singapore. What is the international expansion strategy?
STINCHCOMB: Today we have customers in 175 countries. We do a bit better in the English-speaking countries, but we see that [leveling] out. The same dynamic that exists in the U.S., where so many networks abandoned their factual charter, has happened in Latin America, Europe and Asia. So distributors are looking for factual providers. Those agreements tend to take longer than others, often 6 to 12 months, but we’re long-term focused. And the direct-to-consumer service serves as additional promotion; it gets the name out there. We’re incredibly excited about the international opportunity. We work with Niche Media Global in EMEA and China, Simma Media in Latin America and Monty Ghai in Asia. And we have a board member who has been working in China for 35, 40 years, so we have some good relationships there.

TV REAL: I understand the content slate is still about 70 percent acquired. Now that you’ve had this $140 million financing injection, are you looking to ramp up your original lineup?
STINCHCOMB: We’ll be opportunistic on the acquisition side, and we’ll do more hours as it relates to original programming, but I don’t know if the [original-to-acquired ratio] will necessarily change. There is a lot of great stuff out there. That’s the beauty of it. We’re doing some original short-form content, developing a newsmagazine-style show for the mobile age. Working with NHK, we just released a series called The Body. The graphics are incredible. We have a great original called Sacred Spaces. At TCA we premiered a clip of SPEED. We’ll do that kind of brand-definitional factual programming. And then we’ll have some fun with the culture as well. We have a special leading up to the Woodstock anniversary that premieres in August. We’re optimistic that will generate a fair bit of attention. We have a lot cooking!

TV REAL: What goes into developing a user interface that promotes stickiness and discovery?
STINCHCOMB: One thing that is at the core of what we do is trying to incentivize people to sign up for annual subscriptions. Getting someone to sign up for 12 months gives us the opportunity to learn what they like, learn how they like to interact with the service, and ideally serve up exactly what they want to see. Since August, about 70 percent of new subscribers signed up for annual subscriptions. We love that. Also in that area, our marketing people and our agencies tell me that within the next four to six months, more than half of our new sign-ups will occur on mobile. That means you need to simplify your mobile site. We have a lot of messages we want to communicate, but you have to force yourself to bring it right down to the most minimal level. We’re trying to make the mobile site ultra simple, ultra clean, because we know a lot of people will sign up there. These YouTube influencers that we’ve been working with are fascinating to me. They’ve been incredible for us. They’re so credible, authentic and genuine, just like the characters we want on our air. When they suggest something to their followers, people often take that suggestion—and sign up! We love that.

TV REAL: You also have those gorgeous TV spots.
STINCHCOMB: That’s the other end of the spectrum. Obviously, we have to be aggressive on the digital side with YouTube influencers and Facebook and Google display search. We’re trying to get smarter and more efficient about this every month. At the same time, there’s real value in traditional TV advertising. Part of the calculus is, what’s the right level? At a certain point, we’ll get to a tipping point where more people have heard about CuriosityStream than haven’t, and traditional TV is crucial to getting us there.

TV REAL: For your programming teams, how much are decisions based on data analytics versus just having a gut instinct about a show?
STINCHCOMB: I don’t think [the gut instinct] ever comes out of the equation. Our data scientists and engineers look at information like completions versus abandonments—did somebody watch 80 percent or more—and total views and viewers. We try to account for programming that gets promoted and programming that doesn’t get promoted. The bottom line is Steve [Burns, chief content officer] has been doing this for 40 years. We’d be foolish not to rely on his gut. Steve and I will sprinkle in our opinions. It’s vital to use data, and it’s awesome to have that kind of data. That’s the wonderful thing about having a direct-to-consumer business. We can then share our learnings with our MVPD partners.