Elizabeth Hendricks North Talks CuriosityStream

Elizabeth Hendricks North, president and CEO of CuriosityStream, tells TV Real about the platform’s progress thus far and its plans for the future.

In the 1980s, John Hendricks set out to create a space in the nascent cable landscape exclusively for lovers of factual programming. Last year, he embarked on a similar quest, this time in the digital arena. After retiring as chairman of Discovery Communications, Hendricks founded CuriosityStream, an internet-delivered on-demand platform serving up documentaries for a monthly subscription fee. With Hendricks’s daughter, Elizabeth Hendricks North, as president and CEO, CuriosityStream has been expanding internationally, embarking on original productions—most recently commissioning the three-part Deep Time History—and steadily building its membership base.

Elizabeth Hendricks NorthTV REAL: When you launched the platform in March of last year, what gaps did you want to fill in the marketplace?
NORTH: There wasn’t a service that was dedicated to documentary streaming, particularly the kind of high science and technology documentaries that we wanted to showcase on CuriosityStream. We also wanted to make sure that there was an ad-free subscription source for quality nonfiction programming.

TV REAL: What are some of the things you’ve learned about your subscriber base since you’ve been up and running?
NORTH: They enjoy watching on Roku, that’s been a great platform for us. We’re surprised at how many watch on mobile as well. You wouldn’t think that a documentary would be something that people would want to watch on their phone or their iPad, but apparently that’s very popular as well. We’ve also learned that the [average] age of our subscriber has gone down significantly since launch, so we’re pulling in a younger and younger group watching CuriosityStream. When we started off we were around the 55 age range; now our average is 33. It means that younger generations are just as interested in factual content as the older generations, which were the mainstay audiences of documentary TV. When our head of programming, Steve Burns, was at Science Channel and Nat Geo, his demographic was 55 and up.

TV REAL: The OTT space seems to get more crowded by the day. What were the biggest challenges for you, first in getting the service operational, and then making people aware of it?
NORTH: The largest challenges were just to make sure that we were on as many platforms as possible, the back-end design and constantly improving the platform. We have a redesign across all of the platforms coming up soon. It is hard to be a new business, to let people know that you exist. But Facebook has been a really good platform for us to reach our target audience. [From those ads] people know, if you are interested in documentaries, if you like these types of programs, you probably would like watching CuriosityStream.

TV REAL: What are you doing on the original programming front? What kinds of shows are you looking to invest in, and will international co-pros factor into your strategy?
NORTH: We’re still young, and we are continuing to grow. We are still heavy on acquisitions and licensing, just because that’s more affordable for us at this time. But we’re certainly very interested in good-quality co-productions that we can do, particularly with filmmakers that have experience in creating great CGI and science and technology programs. We had success this summer with Destination: Jupiter, a show following the Juno mission. We were able to work with a British production company for that one. We’re looking for good partners on the kinds of programs that we’re seeing our subscribers are interested in. A lot of our subscribers want to see more of the science and technology shows that aren’t on television anymore. I always tell people this, and they’re surprised: the most popular program on our service last year was The Secrets of Quantum Physics. It was recently replaced by a show about gravitational waves. Our audience is quite sophisticated! They like high-minded science programs, especially if you can find ways of telling the narrative so that it’s easy for anybody to grasp. I’m not a physicist, but I enjoyed watching The Secrets of Quantum Physics and the one about gravitational waves because it’s all about storytelling. If you can tell a good story, you can make science, technology, anything, really fascinating and easy to grasp.

TV REAL: What about your acquisitions strategy? Where are you sourcing content from?
NORTH: We have a good partnership with the BBC, so that provides a lot of great content for the U.S. We’re trying to work with them to get more programming that can be available in other countries worldwide. We work with a lot of European producers, a lot of French producers, NHK in Japan, ZDF Enterprises has been a great partner. We’re particularly open to anyone that has a great library of shows that they’ve already created and are looking to distribute to a wider audience. That’s really important to us, particularly since we have a worldwide service. If they have the SVOD rights, that’s a win-win for everybody.

TV REAL: Why did you opt for a tiered pricing strategy?
NORTH: If you’re streaming SD you’re not sending as much data, so it’s less expensive for us to stream, and we can offer a lower price. If you’re streaming high definition and 4K, it costs a little bit more. 4K is twice as much data as HD, so the pricing reflects the burden on us to get that data to the customer.

TV REAL: How has the 4K take-up been?
NORTH: It’s been OK. It’s still a small market. What was most important to us was making sure we got there as quickly as possible. And we pushed ourselves to get the technology down. So that was quite a challenge for our team, and I’m proud of our group of engineers, who were able to figure out how to stream 4K. It’s hard to do, and we’re glad that we have a service that can offer that tier.

TV REAL: What are your plans for CuriosityStream globally?
NORTH: We’re already available internationally—we launched in September 2015. You can be in any country and log in. We decided consciously from the start to look toward worldwide distribution. So we’ve been [acquiring] as many [worldwide] rights as we can get. It took a little bit longer than we expected. We had to get the geo-blocking and the caching ready from a back-end perspective. But we are available worldwide. Since we’re an English-language-only service, we’re finding the strongest markets for us are English-speaking countries. Surprisingly, Scandinavia has been a strong market for us as well.

TV REAL: What do you want to tell international doc producers who are keen to work with CuriosityStream?
NORTH: We’re looking forward to bringing to the table another option for people who are trying to get programs made and maybe they just need that one more partner to help them round out the budget. We’re open to being that great producing partner that can help them do the quality science and technology shows they’re looking to create.