As the number of streaming competitors continues to grow, there’s also room for niche content providers to make their mark in the space.
Launched in 2016, MyOutdoorTV (MOTV) is a subscription streaming service that targets people interested in hunting and fishing. Unlike general entertainment streamers, the service doesn’t need to “try to appeal to everybody,” MOTV General Manager Sean Luxton told Fierce Video.
Luxton, who next month in Denver will moderate a StreamTV Show panel on how niche streamers can get the most out of their content investment, said MOTV touts around 20,000 episodes of content and skews towards 18+ male viewers. However, the fishing audiences and hunting audiences, respectively, are “quite different.”
“You’ve got the fly fisherman who will spend $3,000 on a rod and $2,000 to go fishing in Iceland, with the hunter who’s going out for a weekend,” he said.
The streamer falls under the umbrella of the Outdoor Sportsman Group, a media group which owns linear channels such as the Sportsman and Outdoor Channels along with the World Fishing Network. Outdoor Sportsman Group also publishes nearly two-dozen magazines related to hunting, fishing and shooting.
But even with the company’s existing portfolio, figuring out how to penetrate the streaming space was still a challenge, said Luxton.
“I think the assumption we had was that dominance in our space would carry through to the streaming space, and it didn’t, which we learned pretty early,” he said.
Control and options for users
MOTV had to learn which platforms were important for distribution, Luxton explained, as well as which technical features the service needed to have, how to handle payments.
But from the outset, he thinks MOTV had a good content strategy that helps the legacy media business as well. For example, the service can market itself through Outdoor Sportsman magazines. And in June, it’s planning to launch a pop-up channel for “In-Fisherman TV,” a show that’s also based off a magazine of the same name.
“I’d say another learning we had during Covid, I think we started thinking that control was really what our audience wanted,” he said. “The mantra for maybe 10 years ago was give people what they want, when they want, where they want [it]. But I think that’s changed. What we’ve found with our audience is that it’s not just control people want – it’s options.”
So, MOTV subscribers can use the search bar to look for content or they can sit back and watch the service’s recently launched live TV channels. Like the rest of the platform, the live TV channels are completely ad-free.
Luxton said while MOTV has considered creating an ad-supported tier, it’s not taking that route just yet.
“My take on that is there are people who will never pay and there should be an offering for them. But I think that for lots of people, it’s similar to HBO back in the day, they’re never going to get 100 million subscribers or never did,” he said. “But there are people who want that quality of content, the quality of experience and they’re going to pay for it. That’s the road we’ve chosen.”
MOTV offers a $10 monthly plan as well as a $100 annual subscription. Luxton, who declined to disclose how many subscribers MOTV has, noted the service has been “stable and consistent” with its pricing, as it hasn’t increased since MOTV’s launch in 2016.
Niche advantages
One of the main advantages of being a niche streamer, Luxton went on to say, is you’re not competing for the same content as Netflix and Amazon.
“Our content prices are still a big portion of our budget, but we’re probably not going to get driven out of business because we can’t afford content,” he said.
Marketing is also a bit easier for niche services, especially those like MOTV that are associated with a larger company, Luxton added.
“When we’re working with our big distribution partners, we have the luxury of saying, ‘we don’t want to talk to everybody, because everybody’s not interested,’” he said, noting it’s sometimes difficult to scale on smaller digital platforms.
“We know exactly the people we want to talk to: They probably drive this kind of truck, they bought this kind of equipment, and they watch this kind of TV show,” Luxton said. “And that gives us a pretty good ability to target them.”
Distribution-wise, MOTV is available on major platforms like iOS, Android, Amazon, Roku, Vizio as well as YouTube Primetime Channels, which is YouTube’s recently launched subscription aggregator.
As for the trajectory of niche SVODs, Luxton said he remains bullish on MOTV but admits “it’s going to be tough” for niche streamers.
“I think that as the audience becomes more and more used to subscription streaming services and accessing their content online, there are lots of opportunities for niche services,” he said. “But we need to be as good as the big guys in user interface, content delivery and technical delivery.”
“Because the consumer just has one set of expectations, basically it’s got to be as good as Netflix, which is a very high bar for the smaller platforms that don’t have hundreds of people in their development department,” Luxton concluded.