AMC Networks president and CEO Josh Sapan said Tuesday that his horror-centric streaming service Shudder is “doing extraordinarily well” and explained why having that “super-niche” platform — and a few others in Acorn TV, Sundance Now and Urban Movie Channel (UMC) — is “extraordinarily beneficial economically.”
“It really does begin with defining an audience appetite, an audience segment, and serving it — because they’re making independent decisions about whether they like it or not,” Sapan said during a call with investors following the release of AMC Networks’ second-quarter earnings. “What is uniquely attractive about targeted subscription services, which is somewhat less true of something-for-everyone, big SVOD services, is they are slightly less individual-show dependent.”