Over-the-top services may be placing more emphasis on documentaries, but what is demand like among their users? Andrew Dickens reports.

Mention the term video-on-demand (VoD) and it’s likely House of Cards, Netflix or even that old cliché ‘the golden age of television’ will crop up somewhere in the conversation.

Indeed, scripted content has become synonymous with the growth of over-the-top (OTT) services. Serialised drama has leant itself well to the binge-watching phenomenon and heavyweight scripted producers such as Breaking Bad’s Vince Gilligan have been quick to praise streamers for taking drama in new and exciting directions.

But it’s fair to say VoD’s impact on the documentary sector has been somewhat overshadowed. This is mostly down to volume – the documentary categories on VoD players tend to be much smaller than those for drama and movies.

Now those streamers are giving unscripted programmes a new lease of life after introducing a host of dedicated genre categories and original commissions. It was a point enthusiastically raised at Natpe in January by Super Size Me filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, who hailed Netflix as “one of the greatest places in the whole world for documentaries” and thanked other VoD services for bringing the genre to public attention.

“More people are watching documentaries on Netflix than anywhere else right now, period,” said the renowned producer. “It’s awesome. I can’t tell you how many people have watched Inside Man and every other movie I ever made on there.”

The company made its most significant move into factual programming so far when it commissioned ^[1] eight-part blue-chip wildlife series Our Planet from the producers behind Planet Earth in April. The series will see Netflix link up with Silverback Films and conservationists WWF. Its debut to Netflix subscribers is set for 2019, and the show is being billed as one of the largest and most ambitious ever attempted in natural history filmmaking.

The venture is being led by Alastair Fothergill and Keith Scholey, who created David Attenborough-fronted series Planet Earth, Frozen Planet and Blue Planet for the BBC before setting up Silverback Films in 2012.

It’s hard not to mention Netflix’s ambitions in the VoD documentary space, especially as a growing number of Hollywood celebrities nail their colours to the streamer’s factual mast.

Among the A-listers is Wolf of Wall Street star and environmentalist Leonardo DiCaprio, who recently teamed up with Netflix for Virunga, an Oscar-nominated feature-length doc about African gorilla preservation. The Californian firm has also secured worldwide streaming rights to Hot Girls Wanted, a doc produced by Hollywood actress Rashida Jones (The Social Network) about young girls exploited by the amateur porn industry.

Fellow US VoD service Hulu has long been playing the VoD documentary game. In 2009, the firm launched a dedicated doc movie channel featuring titles such as Spurlock’s Super Size Me and Cuban music film Buena Vista Social Club and has commissioned original projects such as 2013 Emmy-nominated doc series Behind the Mask. More recently, Hulu debuted Hollywood actor James Franco’s behind-the-scenes film Saturday Night, about US sketch show Saturday Night Live, as well as bolstering its factual slate with an output deal with Franco-German broadcaster Arte.

Amazon Studios, the production arm of the digital company, is also eyeing up more docs, after recently giving a series order to Alex Gibney’s The New Yorker Presents, which presents stories based on articles in the iconic magazine. The series will debut exclusively on VoD service Amazon Prime in the US, UK and Germany in 2015 or 2016.

Such activity has convinced Jon Sechrist, VP of production and development for Discovery Networks International, that the factual genre will continue to be well represented for generations to come.

“In my Netflix queue I have a lot of documentaries that I enjoy watching,” says Sechrist, who focuses on lifestyle and entertainment content for TLC International. “Are they the kind of documentaries I’m seeing on traditional cable or broadcast? Probably not. But there are so many platforms out there coming up every day that will be a trend for the traditional, old school factual titles to exist.”

But amid the hype, it’s easy to forget that unscripted content still represents a small percentage of most VoD line-ups, with the majority focusing on the less-expensive option of acquiring finished product rather than commissioning.

“Documentaries are a very important piece of the puzzle for us but we are selective and don’t want to just take anything that’s out there,” says Robert Franke, director of content and productions at Switzerland-based VoD service Viewster. “But I don’t think we will be commissioning product for the time being as it’s really expensive. Right now there is so much good finished product to buy.”

Viewster will continue to pick up unscripted content that complements its “young, tech-savvy, 18-34 target audience,” says Franke. As such, wildlife and natural history docs are not on the shopping list, but titles such as Under Your Skin, about Lyme disease, have made the cut. That said, Franke estimates that only 10% of Viewster’s entire catalogue is made up of documentaries – a proportion not too dissimilar to those of other international services.

In the Middle East, VoD service Icflix is leading the way with Arabic, Hollywood and Bollywood programming, but interest in documentaries is comparatively low, says CEO Carlos Tibi. “The demand for documentaries has been generally slow among audiences in the Middle East and North Africa, as the younger generations in the region prefer to binge-watch movies and TV serials,” says Tibi. “The older generations, however, tend to watch documentaries, as they can relate to them and find them aspiring. We stay away from documentaries with religious and political themes.”

Tibi – who hints that Icflix may move into original doc commissions eventually – believes Middle Eastern audiences are most interested in content that raise awareness in social change. “Our audience’s viewing habits show that history, science and factual documentaries tend to be watched more, as they aim to bring awareness or social change in one way or another,” he adds. “With each country we localise the content to that user’s preferences.

“There has been huge interest in the United Nations documentaries, for instance. They are short features on human-issue topics that aim to reduce poverty and human suffering, provide humanitarian assistance and stimulate economic growth.”

Social justice docs are also the big-hitters on US-based independent film platform IndieFlix. CEO and co-founder Scilla Andreen says: “Documentaries that address issues people have first-hand experiences of are also the most appealing to audiences.

“Because we are global, we have documentaries that address situations in Rwanda, Guatemala and the Middle East. Documentaries that have universal themes, such as female empowerment and girl bullying – like in our film Finding Kind – also work. It’s interesting to have a subject that all sorts of people can relate to in order to break through international borders.”

But is binge-watching, made famous by Netflix subscribers consuming back-to-back episodes of dramas such as political thriller House of Cards, applicable to online documentary viewing?

Viewster’s Franke doesn’t think so. “It’s not something that happens, from my experience. It’s mainly something that happens only with fiction, as there is a strong hook at the end of each episode. Documentaries tend to be very interest-driven and usually one doc is not like another. So it’s a different sort of viewing.”

From the factual distributors’ angle, Esther Van Messel, CEO of Switzerland-based First Hand Films, believes binge-watching of documentaries is done in a “different way.” She explains: “It’s probably not done over a weekend as it is with fiction, but documentaries have a very faithful audience.

“If people choose a non-fiction programme to watch, they are likely to choose non-fiction again, whereas if somebody chooses fiction, you never know what they will choose next. In that sense, for documentary viewers, it’s not binge-watching over the weekend. The phase goes on longer.”

While Van Messel also sees some demand for “social cause” docs online, she maintains there is a lot of talk but no action from VoD companies when it comes to making deals. “I’m hearing a lot of words about big changes and new trends but I don’t actually have a lot of yummy offers on my desk,” she says.

“There’s a lot of interest in our catalogue, but still, as always, there is little money to invest in them, and I don’t find it easy securing good deals for my producers. In essence, we are still making a lot of our money from linear television.”

Van Messel believes there is a “gross misunderstanding” about viewers’ demands for more choice. “It’s hugely overestimated,” she says. “People don’t want to choose that much and they are becoming overwhelmed with content.

“The buyers come to companies like ours because they can see there’s a boutique of 10 to 15 titles to choose from. Very few VoD services have a business model in mind when it comes to acquiring this type of content. They all offer revenue-share models that, first and foremost, finance them and their infrastructure.”

Van Messell’s answer to this issue is for VoD players to be more disciplined in their curation.

It’s a tactic Viewster has adopted for some time. “Our content is heavily curated,” Franke says. “We get a lot of good stuff on our desk but we have to think about our target audience and whether it will be relevant to them. If we get it wrong it’s expensive and would be too far off our positioning.

“For us, it can’t be too academic or sophisticated in terms of what it’s about. For example, 10 episodes about the Second World War is not something we would buy, but if it is something about alien conspiracy then we might look at it. It has to be geeky and nerdy stuff to match our target audience.”

Other digital platforms are taking a different route. UK factual producer and online content specialist Barcroft Media recently launched a self-funded longform strand of digital-first docs on its Barcroft TV platforms.

The 6×60’ strand, titled Original Docs, includes extreme fishing show Landing Sharks and 1-800 Autopsy, about a family firm in LA that offers autopsies to bereaved people concerned about the circumstances surrounding the deaths of loved ones.

Barcroft CEO Sam Barcroft’s idea is to premiere the docs online and then move them to linear TV once they’re proven. It’s a model that has worked well for Barcroft in shortform content. For example, Channel 5 in the UK recently commissioned Grandmother Lover as a one-off 60-minute doc after the show’s subject, Kyle Jones, first appeared on Barcroft TV online.

“We want to prove there is demand for original longform content across the platforms we are on and see if we can create a new way of paying for our journalism and production and keep our audience happy,” says Barcroft.

But he believes it is a tall order to expect viewers to pay for factual content on any platform. “Our feeling is that, in the documentary sector, you can’t expect viewers to pay subscriptions, whether that’s factual entertainment or factual,” he says.

“The trend at the moment is going towards ad-funded free-to-air VoD, on YouTube, or catch-up services like BBC iPlayer. It will be difficult to make a play to ask for money for documentaries, unless they are feature docs or big specials.”

Whether a pay or ad-supported model is the right way forward to showcase unscripted content will obviously vary depending on the company and territory. What is certain, however, is that the afterlives of the documentaries have been substantially extended by VoD services.

So says Icflix’s Tibi, who believes filmmakers shouldn’t rely on traditional distribution or a middleman anymore to get their product out there. “VoD has transformed the landscape for distribution of documentaries, where filmmakers have the means to monetise their content, especially with the AVoD model, gradually over a period of time,” he says.

The sheer volume of VoD outlets also provides a plethora of new opportunities for producers, for both one-off series and feature docs, says IndieFlix’s Andreen. But despite having an opportunity for more exposure, doc producers should still concentrate on marketing their products, she says.

“If it’s an interesting and timely topic, a documentary will have a life on any platform, but it requires marketing,” Andreen says. “Even if it is timely you can’t just put it up on a platform and expect people to watch. You have to market it and let people know it is there and get people engaged. You have to keep stoking the fire.”

For now, popular award-winning one-off documentaries continue to be the ones most sought after by viewers, while longform series tend to come in second place. This it to be expected, as many of these one-offs were released in theatres first and enjoyed plenty of marketing.

For the time being, acquiring documentaries remains a precarious business for both streaming service and producer. “If we bought something that did not fit in well with our existing catalogue, our users wouldn’t watch it and, at the end of the day, nobody will be interested,” says Franke.

“The producer won’t win because they don’t get exposure after spending money on something, and the worst-case scenario is that we put users off and water down our own positioning.”

As Icflix’s Tibi says, the windowing for these docs will vary depending on the type of content produced. “Windowing has moved closer to meet the demands of what the consumer wants, and as consumers change their viewing habits, distributors also have to change their release strategies,” he says.

Despite the hyperbole about docs on VoD and the number of celeb-driven one-offs, expect the genre’s growth on streaming services to lag behind that of drama.