Documentary YouTube aggregators & streaming platforms

There are numerous players jostling to find audiences, and many will be in the market to acquire documentary rights from producers.

The tale of documentary and factual TV over the past 10+ years is one of huge growth in investment that masks an underlying trend away from risk and journalistically important programmes.

This

Daniel Parris

post is worth reading on the statistical analysis of investment in documentary feature and series. It includes this great visual showing how Netflix’s originals strategy has changed over time as they and other streamers discovered how documentary can be a popular genre, similar to how it has been for broadcasters for many decades in countries like the UK:

By Stats Signifiant

And it hasn’t just been Netflix where this growth in documentary has happened - here is Daniel’s visual representation across all genres based on IMDB data:

By Stats Significant

While this tailing off in terms of projects in the early 2020s is related to Covid as well as the deflating (popping?) of the big streaming wars bubble, it also masks that for documentary as a genre, the bulk of the growth of projects being greenlit were (and continue to be) entertaining in nature, rather than films or series telling risky but socially important stories. This is something I’ve written about previously, and how there is genuine concern amongst documentary producers about the future of the type of programmes that traditionally have been commissioned and funded via public service broadcasters in the UK.

'Netflix can't do everything' - the future of scripted and serious factual

As always, market upheaval such as this creates opportunities, and quite a few players emerged over the past five years or so, all jostling to find an audience for global documentary lovers. Some are focussing on YouTube, others have developed their own platforms. Most are available for all audiences, although a couple are geoblocked to specific regions, or others have a slant to a particular territory despite being available worldwide. They usually have a large volume of titles, although some are focussed on festival films while others are a mix of more general factual TV as well as features. And most have picked one of three models - ad funded and free to watch, pay per view, or a monthly subscription. The bulk are largely focussed on archive acquisitions or exploiting their own back catalogues, however a few are premiering individual films and series on their platforms. What is also noteworthy is how many of these platforms are buying advertising on YouTube and Google Adsense around key words like ‘documentaries’.

Free Documentary
Subscribers: 5.4m
Video views: 1.1bn

The German company Quintus Studios is a digital first producer and distributor of factual programming (and to a lesser degree scripted). They have a network of YouTube and FAST channels, the flagship of which is Free Documentary, as well as other brands including Seed (environmental content), Free Documentary Nature (natural history), and Endevr which is an explainer channel. As well as acquiring catalogues, they also premiere documentaries on their channels such as Drug Wars: Inside Kano’s Underworld by A13 Films. They have a division called Quintus Originals which commissioning broadcast-length, high-quality documentary content for its YouTube/FAST channel network and distributing this content globally to linear TV networks - for example, they just announced a new series Danger Pay by Adventure Alliance Films.