Horse & Country sees itself as an ‘Identity feed’, or a destination for niche audiences willing to pay for its services.
Speaking in a presentation entitled Hyper-enthusiast networks: small can be beautiful, Heather Killen, the company’s chairman and CEO, said that this was in contrast to ‘scale feeds’ and ‘social feeds’. The former, which include services such as Netflix, aggregate a lot of content, while the latter, encompassing services such as YouTube, Facebook and Snapchat, are destinations for mass but fragmented audiences. Killen added that it was more difficult to create an identify feed than a scale or social one.
She also gave a number of examples of identity feeds. They included Tastermade, Panna, Gaia and Acacia TV (lifestyle); Motorland, Blackbelt TV, Fishing TV and Sail TV (sports); and crunchyrole, Funimation, ConTV and Anime Network (anime).
Furthermore, she spoke about an ‘audience funnel’, at the top of which were Web/social media, casual audiences accessing content for free and bottom the most lucrative ‘prosumers’ paying for subscription services.
Speaking more generally about Horse & Country, she said that it had moved to a managed cloud play-out model five years ago. This is more cost-effective than satellite delivery and can be extended to OTT.
Commenting on specific markets, she said that its first non-UK service was its Dutch feed. Now it is available on all platforms in the country with the exception of KPN, offering 30% Dutch productions and the remainder localised.
Horse & Country is also “on the same journey” in Sweden.
