During their Q2 Earnings Call on Friday morning, AMC Networks officials said they hit their anticipated target number of streaming subscribers for the second quarter and are well on their way to landing their future subscriber goals.
On Friday, the company reported its collection of streaming services — AMC+, Acorn TV, Shudder, Sundance Now, and ALLBLK — remain on track for a combined 9 million paid streaming subscribers for the year. That would be up from a total of 6 million subscribers during the first quarter and would put them well on their way toward their stated long-term goal.
“We’re well on our way to our earlier stated goal of having between 20 and 25 million paid subs by the year 2025. a subscriber range that is very meaningful to AMC Networks,” officials said.
Earlier in the summer, AMC announced that they will stream the first half of the two-part Season 11 Premiere of The Walking Dead a week ahead of cable viewers via their streaming platform, AMC+. Starting August 15, AMC+ subscribers will be able to watch the episode “Acheron, Part One” one week earlier than the episode will be carried on its linear channel.
AMC+ has been a source of contention between AMC Networks and a number of its cable provider partners, as evidenced by a recent tiff between AMC and TDS Telecom. The cable operator, which has thousands of customers in Colorado, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas, and Utah, was upset with AMC Networks’ shift of at least some of its first-run original programming from its linear networks to AMC+.
This led to TDS removing AMC and its sister networks from their service, including BBC America, We TV, BBC World News, IFC, and SundanceTV, and they haven’t been added back since. This new move certainly won’t win them any friends among management at the cable operators. But will this further damage talks between the two sides?
AMC’s streaming service, AMC+, has been in the process of expanding its distribution in recent months. Josh Reader, president of distribution and development for AMC Networks says this is something that is always happening behind the scenes. The company is often in discussions with distribution partners.
“Every partner has their own profile and has their own interests and priorities. We’ve really been able to tailor these conversations to the specific profiles and interests of our different distribution partners,” Reader explained in late June at The StreamTV Show.
The company recently made agreements with new distribution partners and launches are in the works. Reader did not give a specific timeline for the launches, and he also didn’t give too many details about who those partners are. AMC has discovered that maintaining a linear channel within electronic programming guides (EPG) has been a smart move.
“A lot of customers still interact with that EPG. It would be tempting in some ways to say, ‘It’s a streaming product. We don’t need that linear channel,’” Reader said. “But we’ve found that linear channel has been a huge addition of customer value.”