Documentary Channel Sets Streaming Reinvention

After first launching Documentary Channel as a cable network, Tom Neff is now resurrecting the brand as a streaming destination for indie docs, he told viewers of the TV Real Festival today.

Neff is president and co-founder of Documentary Channel, which first launched as a pay-TV channel and has now been resurrected as a streaming home for independent documentaries. You can watch Neff’s keynote session here.

“We want to be a home to the independent documentary filmmaker. There is a crisis going on in the industry right now in terms of venues to show documentary films. The majors have more or less abandoned the documentary, unless they’re producing it themselves. That has left the independent documentary filmmaker in a difficult position. Our mission is really clear: we promote documentaries, we promote the documentary filmmaker and we want to promote the industry.”

The plan is to deliver 1,000 documentaries a year to subscribers. Neff and his team are looking at the festival circuit and building relationships with documentary filmmakers and educational institutions while actively taking submissions.

The need for a service like this for indie filmmakers is clear to Neff and his team, who have seen the major streamers and platforms narrow in on a small subsector of doc categories. “The majors want celebrity, bios, crime and sports.”

Documentary Channel features docs across 32 categories, Neff said, and is enlisting stringers to help it find titles to bring to the platform.

The plan is to keep the service subscription-based at a low monthly fee, while still offering good license fees to producers. “We think we can get to a couple of million subscribers in five years. If we do that, the business model does very well.”

Neff expects originals to be in the mix as the platform matures. “In the early years, meaning years one and two, we’ll do some original production, mostly finishing costs. As the network grows, meaning years three, four and five, we do substantial independent production. We want to encourage independent production, and we’ll do co-productions.”

For Neff, the key to building the brand will be in finding communities of doc aficionados. “We can’t go after traditional advertising, so we’re into the social media world, which is not expensive, but is labor-intensive. AI is very good at finding communities. We’re going to use AI to help bind these communities.”