March 2016. Netflix just launched in 130 additional countries, including in India, Nigeria, Poland, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Turkey. But Hollywood conglomerates are still several years away from launching their own broad-based streaming streaming services.
Comcast’s NBCUniversal, however, is trying to be ahead of the curve with a niche streaming idea designed to leverage its strong reality programming portfolio outside the U.S. On March 1, 2016, it launches reality TV streamer Hayu in the U.K., Ireland, and Australia.
Its promise is to become “the premiere destination for must-watch, world-renowned reality TV content” for super-fans. Or put more simply: all reality all the time!
Powering Hayu are the Kardashian family, a group of popular housewives, and other reality household names. After all, Keeping Up With the Kardashians and its spin-offs, I Am Cait, The Real Housewives and Million Dollar Listing are among the core content offerings, along with the Top Chef franchise and more.
A Hayu rollout in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark followed in November 2017, before its launch in Canada in September 2018, and the Benelux countries in December 2018. Southeast Asia, namely The Philippines, Hong Kong and Singapore, came next in October 2019, with Germany and Austria joining in November 2020 and 11 additional European countries, including France, Italy, Spain, and the Czech Republic, in February 2021. The most recent launch in 2023 was the addition of New Zealand.
Now, Hayu is nearly nine years old, and it is available in 45 markets. And the first-ever Hayu FanFest is set to take place in London this Saturday, Oct. 26, in the next step of the brand’s evolution.
London-based Hendrik McDermott, managing director — EMEA networks, Hayu & international direct-to-consumer at NBCUniversal, is proud of how far the streamer has come, even though he can’t share subscriber details.
“In every market we’re in we’re still in growth mode, but it does vary market by market,” he says. “And in some of our more mature markets, such as the U.K., we’ve moved to focusing on subscriber retention and trying to find higher-value customers.”
Hayu was an early entry into a streaming market that has since become much more crowded. “The platform was conceived before most direct-to-consumer SVOD platforms had even launched because NBC produces a lot of unscripted content, and probably is one of the market leaders in unscripted content production,” McDermott explains. “We do somewhere close to 2,000 hours of unscripted content per year, and most of that comes through via such flagship brands in the United States as E!, Bravo, and the Oxygen channel. So we were ahead of that curve looking at how can we get this content in front of as many people as we can.”
Reality programming may have had a reputation for not being as repeatable as other genres. However, NBCU’s consumer insight showed there was potential given the appetite of avid fans of reality. “We also knew from our U.S. domestic experience that people really love reality TV, and they like to watch a lot of that content,” shares McDermott. “The reason it worked is because we had access to our own content library back then, and not only that, that library was full of thousands of hours of content. To stand up a platform, you can’t just put 100 hours, 200 hours on it. We managed to launch with just over 3,000 hours of content, which is enough to get going, and because we produce so much content, we’re able to add to that every year.”
The executive says that Hayu adds anywhere from 750 to 1,000 hours of programming a year. So today, in the U.K., the streamer is “just north of 10,000 hours of content from 300 shows,” McDermott says. “That is primarily NBCUniversal content but we also now acquire content on the open market from third parties.” The goal is to use that particularly to fill holes during the summer when the NBCU network partners don’t debut as much new content. “We buy from studios like Warner and Paramount, such shows as Paris in Love, Basketball Wives, and Love & Hip Hop.”
In some of Hayu’s non-U.K. markets, the streamer uses content licensed from the U.K. “So in Canada, we are the exclusive license holder for the U.K. version of Love Island,” mentions McDermott. “Because our platform is in so many different countries, we are able to move content around like that.”
Hayu’s approach to language differs from other streamers. “We have chosen not to dub or subtitle content, and there are a few reasons for that,” McDermott tells THR. “One of it is just technical that this would mean a lot of dubbing at a high cost. Also, what we found through our research is that people want to watch the content in the original language, in the original voice. So they want to hear Kim Kardashian’s voice or whoever they love watching. And so we chose to follow, initially an English language footprint, followed by an English friendly footprint.”
After all, the next region, the Nordics, is one where most people speak English and a lot of content is distributed in English.
When the Hayu team looked at Southeast Asia, “interestingly, what came to the surface was that in markets like the Philippines and India, in terms of what we could see through our YouTube channels, people were watching a lot of clips of the content in English in those markets,” says McDermott. “And so we used some of that data to figure out that actually there might be a market. So we launched into the Philippines, Singapore and Hong Kong.”
Without disclosing subscriber figures, he shares that Hayu’s biggest territory remains the U.K., followed by Canada and Australia.
The biggest market where English is not the native tongue is the Nordics. “It’s a great television market just in general. People watch a lot of content. It’s a very good unscripted market, and it’s a great market for us,” McDermott explains. “And we have a dual strategy in that market. We do have our own direct-to-consumer platform, but in most of those markets, we’ve also partnered with a local player and are offering what we call hard bundles. So we put our Hayu platform inside the partner’s platform. So in Norway, for example, our partner TV 2 has the TV 2 Play streaming service. So if you subscribe to TV to that, you also get a Hayu subscription as part of that.”
The reason is that Hayu does not care much whether it gets a direct subscription or one via such partners as TV2, Amazon, YouTube and the like. “We’ve chosen as a strategy to be platform agnostic for our subscriptions, which means we don’t mind where a subscription is as long as there is a subscription because we want to make sure that the maximum number of people can gain access to our content and subscribe to our platform,” the executive highlights.
McDermott has heard the question of whether there is a competitor offering a service similar to Hayu before. “We think we’re the world’s only all-reality subscription video-on-demand platform, and that is an important thing for us,” he replies. “We’re not trying to compete with some of these other SVOD services that are general entertainment services. We very much view our platform as a complementary service.”
He continues: “So we wouldn’t say that we’re competing with Netflix or competing with Amazon Prime. You would have a Netflix subscription and a Hayu subscription. In order to do that, we have to price our platform quite competitively — in the U.K., it’s 4.99 pounds ($6.48). As a result, we think that we can be a complementary service. We are a single-genre service as well focused only on reality. So, while other services may have some reality content, none of them have only reality content.”
While general entertainment streamers have been hiking their subscription prices to improve their bottom line, Hayu’s price in the U.K. has been raised only once so far from the original 3.99 pounds ($5.18). “We have also done one price increase in Australia, and we’ve done one in Canada,” adds McDermott. “It is part of the business model over time. I think it’s inevitable. But it’s important to remain competitively priced because people have hard choices to make.”
Niche, genre-focused streamers are having a moment in general, McDermott argues. “Single-genre platforms are emerging in the direct-to-consumer marketplace, just generally, as a very strong option for subscription. It’s very competitive out there in the general entertainment space, and it can be a very daunting business model for all the reasons, such as marketing and subscriber growth, content costs, and everything else. But being a single-genre service allows us to be very focused on who we think our subscribers can and should be, and we can super-serve them with thousands of hours of content that speak directly to them.”
Now, the service is making its first foray into a new space, live events. This Saturday, the Hayu FanFest is taking over Magazine London in the Eastern part of the British capital from 4 p.m. local time. The cost is the same as a monthly Hayu subscription, 4.99 pounds. The sold-out big event will include panels, meet-and-greets, and an after-party.
“That’s the next evolution of our growth as we’re looking to do more to engage with our fans,” McDermott tells THR. “The Hayu FanFast is a chance for our fans here in the U.K. and for anyone who comes from abroad to get time to interact with our key talents. We’re bringing over some of the most well-known stars from the U.S. This is really meant to be an engaging moment for them to be able to interact with our fans.”
Among the stars coming to London are The Real Housewives host and executive producer Andy Cohen, The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star Lisa Barlow, Southern Charm stars Craig Conover and Austen Kroll, Sutton Stracke (The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills), Jessel Taank (The Real Housewives of New York City), and Below Deck‘s Captain Sandy Yawn, among others.
Will the FanFest become an annual event? “This is our first year, so we’re going to wait and see,” says McDermott. “I would love to say that it will become an annual event in success. So far, the indications are very positive. We sold out all of our tickets in minutes. We’re massively oversubscribed. There’s quite a waiting list. So in success, we would love to be able to do it again, but we need to wait and see how we deliver.”
With a decision on if, when and how the Hayu FanFest will return set to come at a later stage, could original content be next for Hayu? “Original content is something we’ve thought about,” McDermott tells THR. “It hasn’t been a feature of our strategy to date because we have access to a catalog of content, which is a treasure trove of very popular brands. But it is certainly something we are looking at.”
As for where the brand name Hayu originates from, McDermott says simplicity was top of mind: “We wanted to find a new brand to bring to the market so that we didn’t have to rely on one single, pre-existing brand, because the platform features so many different types of reality content. So, we couldn’t just call it like E! or Bravo. We looked at words that we could trademark and build a brand around. There were a few options we had. But we also wanted to make a website at the time because back then more platforms were web-based rather than app-based. And so you wanted to have a URL that was memorable and simple.” Hayu was born!
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