Exclusive Interview: BBC Worldwide’s Herb Scannell

January 9, 2013 World Screen Top Stories

PREMIUM: Herb Scannell, the president of BBC Worldwide America, talks to World Screen Newsflash about the success of innovative content and the demand for it in the American market.

 

WS: BBC America set out to present the best of British television to an American audience. It has grown into much more than that.
SCANNELL: The BBC will always be the British Broadcasting Corporation and represent the good work of the U.K. What our audience really likes is that British drama continually innovates; just the fact that there are so many series that come and go means that they are always coming up with something new and different. BBC America continues to be a place that showcases the best of British programming. We are very proud that over the last two years Doctor Who has become a bigger and bigger force, not just a British show, but a big popular show. Recently it was on the cover of TV Guide as the winner of the magazine’s Fan Favorites cover poll, selected over The Walking Dead and over The Vampire Diaries. It’s just an example of how we are taking the best of the programming from the U.K. and providing a great celebratory platform for it.
 
Part of our mission statement is to celebrate the cultural divide between the U.K. and the U.S. There is something wonderful about that cultural divide. The language that came out of our promo department is, “British by nature, American by nurture,” which is nice because it really does say that we take television from the U.K. and try to make it more appealing to American audiences. Doctor Who is more of a family show in the U.K., while in America it really plays to the Comic-Con crowd. Doctor Who actors are rock stars at Comic-Con.
 
We’ve created a block on BBC America called Dramaville, which is where all the top, high-quality British dramas are showcased: Luther, The Hour, Whitechapel; that is a destination we have put on the schedule. So we continue to bring the best of British programming to America, we nurture it in a way that is appropriate for the American audience and then we supplement it with original productions. We take the values of the BBC, some of the personalities, and see what we can make here that both fits the channel charge and adds value to the channel. Along those lines we did a show called Copper that had the high-quality pedigree that comes from Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson. I mentioned innovation; Copper told a story nobody had told before on television. All the stories about the 1860s have been about the West. This is about the East and more in common with the European experience. It’s about the birth of cities and how they come of age. It’s about a cop and complex characters and it takes place at a time in American history that is rich with themes and ideas that are relevant today—divided nation, immigration and race. Copper embraces our values of complex drama and innovation.
 
We’ve also done a show called Richard Hammond’s Crash Course. We think Hammond [who also stars in Top Gear] is an incredibly good ambassador in America. Top Gear has a great audience, he is well liked, and in Crash Course he takes on jobs that he would never envision doing.
 
Those are examples of a scripted and an unscripted show that reflect the way we look at the values of the BBC and how we can interpret them for a local market.
 
WS: And your original programming has broken audience records for the channel.
SCANNELL: We’re very proud. Our highest-rated month was September, with Copper and Doctor Who. That was a one-two punch that was very much BBC America—television that is challenging, smart and innovative. When I first got here I described what I thought was the heart of the great BBC shows as I3Q: intelligent, innovative, irreverent and always quality.
 
WS: Tell us about BBC America’s audience demographic.
SCANNELL: The channel’s demographic is slightly more male, in part because Top Gear, which airs Monday through Friday, skews male. Doctor Who also has a male following. BBC America’s audience is also upscale and, if not the most educated, it’s one of the most educated and affluent audiences. It’s also a very tech-savvy audience. It over-indexes in people who use Twitter. When I got here, I very much wanted this to be a culture that doesn’t think about digital as an afterthought but thinks of it as a primary thought, especially with the fan bases of Doctor Who and of Top Gear. We have 22 million followers on Facebook for those properties. It’s very important that we are continually in touch with these fan bases and super-serve them.
 
WS: How are you super-serving fans through online and mobile?
SCANNELL: People access us many ways. Doctor Who was the most downloaded show on iTunes in 2011—more than Glee, more than Modern Family, because of the rabid fan base. We had a show from the U.K. called Misfits, and it played on Hulu first. We are continually trying to provide fans with whatever they want about the shows. We brought the cast of Doctor Who to Comic-Con, and one of my favorite bits is that we partnered with BuzzFeed, and had the cast read tweets from American celebrities—like the kids on Jersey Shore—in American accents. It’s what fans want; they want to see real people. Wherever we can we super-serve the fans.
 
WS: How do you see on-demand viewing affecting linear channels?
SCANNELL: People want their programming when they want it and from many different places. The DVR is clearly more mainstream than it was before. When we aired Copper, our Live+7 viewership (live broadcast plus seven days of DVR viewing) doubled the audience. We are one of the top five most DVRed channels; 23 percent of our prime-time audience watch on DVR. There is also VOD on cable. Comcast does a good job, but there is still more work to be done in terms of getting programming in front of viewers. 
 
So the emerging idea is we need to put together a different matrix. I had a friend who was in the music business and said that around the year 2000, all the boy bands were automatically making hits and selling 2 million records in the opening weekend. He said that back then it was really easy to be in the record business—you got on MTV, you had radio promotion and you had retail. Now, in order to have any song that sells 50,000 to 100,000 [records] you need multiple outlets.
 
You have to be working YouTube and several digital platforms that didn’t exist before. Thinking about the success of a show or a network is the same: you need the live show, you need DVR viewing, you need iTunes and Netflix and several other outlets.
 
Linear networks will always be there because people like things to be really easy. That friend of mine was saying that 85 percent of music is still listened to on traditional radio because people don’t want to work hard to find songs. Television will always have that value: viewers like it because they can sit back and use their remote control to find lots of different options.
 
WS: How are you increasing the distribution of BBC programming?
SCANNELL: The BBC has four channels in the U.K., so there is more programming available than we are able to put on one strand in the U.S. As a result, we have embraced an ecosystem that allows our library and much of our content to go to where the audience is. BBC America is the showcase for many of the top shows from the U.K. Then there is Dancing with the Stars, which airs on ABC; it’s not a BBC America show. So we run some of our programming on our own channel and also sell our shows to other networks. In the digital space we are on iTunes. We have done big deals with Amazon and Netflix. We have a big library, and that is part of the value that we see in that space.
 
WS: You mentioned Dancing with the Stars. What is the strategy at the BBC Worldwide Productions?
SCANNELL: The production unit is run by Jane Tranter, who has great credentials; she was head of drama and comedy at the BBC in the U.K. Jane has been here about four years and had three remits: one was to take BBC IP and bring it to the U.S. marketplace; second, to diversify and look at producing original content, both scripted and unscripted; and third, look at a broader base of clients. She has done that. The unit has sold an unscripted show to The CW called Breaking Pointe. And they are doing a scripted show with Starz called Da Vinci’s Demons.
 
There are some 70 cable and broadcast networks commissioning original programming in America, so there is a world of opportunity. This summer there were six or seven of our shows launched on broadcast and cable networks. They’ve made good progress and it’s part of the opportunity we see: produce programming that can then feed the pipeline of BBC Worldwide, sell it around the world, and potentially nest it on some of BBC Worldwide’s emerging channels.
 
WS: Building BBC’s global brands is also part of your remit?
SCANNELL: We have a group of people that is dedicated to making the global brands even bigger, mainly Doctor Who and Top Gear. Before I arrived there was an American version of Top Gear that complements the British version. The goal is to see the American version prosper and maintain the presence of the brand on BBC America. Another big global brand is Dancing with the Stars, which continues to have an incredible presence in the U.S.
 
Matt Forde [executive VP of sales and co-productions at BBC Worldwide Americas], who runs our group here, has been very active. With so many networks commissioning original series, and so many others looking to acquire programming, there is a great opportunity for us to sell to the American marketplace—including to Hulu, which is not a channel but is looking for programming—and to co-produce. Top of the Lake is being done with Sundance Channel and Jane Campion, who is a very prestigious director, so Matt is also finding there are more co-production opportunities as there are more people getting into the originals game.
 
WS: What growth areas do you see?
SCANNELL: We are still in a growth curve in distributing content digitally. There are new ventures coming up that are going to be interesting, such as Verizon and Redbox’s joint venture. Because we have a library and we have a lot more programming than we have channels, there is an opportunity for us to think about everything from our comedy offerings, which have a legacy in this country dating back to Monty Python, and to think how that plays in an emerging digital world. The production business in L.A. has just started to create some scale, and if we come out with new scripted shows they will open up some new opportunities because, as I said at the beginning, there is a demand for complex characters, period pieces and, mostly, innovation.