“Everything for Someone”: The Evolution of Sundance Now's Specialty Streaming Service

in 2020, amc networks announced its stand-alone subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service, AMC+. Like similarly named conglomerate-backed platforms (e.g., Disney+, Paramount+, and Max), AMC+ is organized around branded programming hubs from AMC Networks’ affiliated cable channels and content providers. Pitched as offering “everything for someone,” AMC+ is presented as appealing to a more discerning audience than “something for everyone” conglomerate-backed streamers. Indeed, AMC+ bundles programming hubs from AMC Networks’ most distinctive cable brands—including AMC, IFC, Sundance TV, and BBC America. Alongside these recognizable cable outfits are hubs from AMC Networks’ lesser-known, specialty SVODs—including its festival-branded streamer, Sundance Now. However, this hub is just Sundance Now's newest iteration in its decade-long evolution. Launched in 2012 as Sundance Now Doc Club, the service was originally conceived as appealing to a narrow cinephile taste culture, offering content and features for documentary fans. By the mid-2010s, Sundance Now began pivoting away from its film-specific model and started embracing more media-agnostic programming and promotional practices. Since the late 2010s, Sundance Now has continuously adopted strategies associated with traditional cable networks and mass-market streamers such as Netflix; it has prioritized the acquisition and development of exclusive and original series—most notably international thriller, crime, and drama series—for discerning streaming audiences.Throughout the 2010s, the “Big Three” streaming companies (i.e., Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu) received copious journalistic and academic attention for leveraging original productions, syndicated TV series, licensed movies, and aggregated viewership data to gain and maintain mass-market subscriber bases. The emergence of conglomerate-backed platforms in the early 2020s added further complexity to the streaming ecosystem. Within the field of media industry studies, much of the scholarship addressing economic and cultural transformations in the streaming landscape has focused on the “Big Three” and conglomerate-backed entrants (Lobato and Lotz; Lotz; Elkins). However, the attention to these mass-market players has obscured understanding of activities on the margins. Although less visible than major global platforms, specialty SVODs—which seek to appeal to specific audience segments, fan communities, or taste cultures—present valuable yet often-overlooked perspectives about niche-oriented business models and practices. Such perspectives have become even more crucial given the dominance of global platforms guided by a big box, “something for everyone” logic.To contribute more nuanced understandings of niche-oriented streaming services and their industrial and cultural implications, this article traces Sundance Now's evolving content acquisition and development practices, promotional strategies, and branding over the past decade. This study discursively analyzes select journalistic publications and promotional materials published between 2012 and 2023. In addition, interviews conducted with Owen Shiflett (vice president of development at Shudder and Sundance Now from 2015 to 2019) that took place in May 2017 and June 2023 shape the discussion's attention to Sundance Now's content acquisition and development practices and branding. To a lesser extent, this article draws on insights gleaned from interviews with executives and employees of other specialty streaming services (e.g., Fandor, Sundance Now, FilmStruck, and Tribeca Shortlist), which took place between June 2016 and August 2017 as part of a larger project. These conversations offered valuable insights regarding perceptions of market conditions, imagined audiences, and professional practices.Drawing on select studies of the streaming industries and scholarship on niche SVODs, the first section situates Sundance Now's specialty streaming service and highlights its significance as a case study. The rest of the discussion presents three historical phases in Sundance Now's trajectory, which are organized in relation to AMC Networks’ changing interests, transformations in the streaming market, and broader industrial shifts. This periodization offers a means of considering how AMC Networks with Sundance Now has negotiated crucial transformations in the streaming landscape, in large part by pivoting away from ideals of global cinephile culture and toward discourses and practices affiliated with traditional cable services. In part, Sundance Now's transformations reflect tenuous efforts to fuse film-specific discourses and practices (e.g., curation) with cable-based strategies (e.g., cross-promotion) for the streaming format. In turn, this study reveals struggles to make specialty film (e.g., independent, international, documentary film) matter as a distinctive media form for a streaming format marked by media convergence. Moreover, the streamer's evolution underscores its shifting values and functions for AMC Networks. For instance, Sundance Now became a means for AMC Networks to secure low-budget production deals for affiliated cable channels. Thus, despite its original, cinema-specific origins, Sundance Now's specialty streaming service has come to be guided by the same “everything for someone” logic as AMC+.Addressing recent developments in the global streaming ecosystem—brought on by such factors as ongoing consolidation and increased competition—media industry studies scholars have presented various frameworks for conceptualizing and categorizing streaming platforms’ complex business models, distribution practices, and programming strategies. Moreover, although scholarship on niche-oriented SVODs has thus far been limited, such studies have presented valuable approaches to specialty streamers both as stand-alone entities and in relation to broader economic and industrial conditions. Taken together, studies in these areas of scholarship offer a productive framework for conceptualizing Sundance Now's specialty model.Currently, Sundance Now operates as a stand-alone subscription streaming service that, like major streaming platforms, is available via OTT streaming devices, smart TVs, laptops, and smartphones in the United States and Canada. Sundance Now also repackages some of its content for its Amazon channel. Available to existing Amazon Prime members, the Sundance Now Amazon channel costs less than the subscription to its stand-alone service. Subscribers to AMC+ also can access a selection of Sundance Now content via its branded hub. Despite its accessibility, the streamer has struggled to grow a subscriber base. Although AMC Networks has not released subscriber numbers for Sundance Now, its combined subscribers for all its SVODs (AMC+, Sundance Now, Shudder) total eleven million (Alexander).Sundance Now's large-scale distribution practices reveal challenges defining niche and mass-market streaming models. In their study of niche content acquisition practices among Jewish/Israeli SVODs, Michael Wayne and Matt Sienkiewicz assert that “the very notion of niche SVODs belies the extreme variation within the category of platforms that could be appropriately labeled as such” (15). Indeed, Sundance Now's affiliation with AMC Networks, its large-scale distribution, and its accessibility on mass platforms such as Amazon Prime conflict with its niche status. As will be discussed in forthcoming sections, Sundance Now's evolving content acquisition and development strategies further reveal the limitations of the niche/mainstream binary.Ramon Lobato and Amanda Lotz also have noted the increasingly complex distinctions among streaming platforms in terms of business models, audiences, and programming. As Lobato and Lotz argue, dominant conceptualizations of streaming markets and competitive dynamics perpetuated in “streaming wars” discourses have obscured these complexities (90). Because Sundance Now is owned by one of the only midsize media companies not owned by a major conglomerate, this case study offers a unique perspective on the rapidly changing 2010s-era streaming landscape. More specifically, it highlights how AMC Networks has navigated difficult industrial and economic conditions made more challenging by ongoing consolidation, the continued decline of cable, and increased competition in streaming over the past decade.Furthermore, Sundance Now's shift away from its original film-specific acquisition practices and appeals to cinephile audiences and toward more cable-oriented programming and promotional efforts makes the service's classification as a “specialty” service challenging. Lobato and Lotz note that most streaming platforms adopt either a “generalist” or a “specialist” content strategy. According to the authors, generalist services offer “several types of programming but less depth in any [single] one,” while specialist services “offer lesser range in types of programming but more depth” (Lobato and Lotz 94). Over time, Sundance Now's programming strategies consistently moved away from “specialty” and toward “generalist.” Nonetheless, the streamer has continuously strived to reframe its content and rebrand its services as distinctive from dominant, mass-market streaming services. Consequently, conceptualizations of what constitutes specialist content strategies have shifted as streaming has evolved.Scholarship on niche streaming SVODs provides an especially useful framework to situate Sundance Now's initial film-specific business model, programming practices, and promotional strategies. Such studies have highlighted the economic and industrial limitations that specialty services must navigate in efforts to stay viable. For instance, specialty SVODs’ content libraries are necessarily shaped by the costs and availability of licenses that have largely been dictated by globally dominant platforms. Indeed, in their study of Mubi, Roderik Smits and E. W. Nikdel assert that niche SVODs work in “the shadows of powerful market leaders” (34). In addition, by focusing on specialty SVODs, this scholarship has addressed diverse strategies and features employed to repackage niche content and speak to associated fan communities or taste cultures on streaming formats. Numerous studies have examined one long-standing UK-based, film-specific streamer, Mubi, and its efforts to appeal to discerning cinephiles by repackaging and recirculating art-house films (Hessler; Smits and Nikdel). Popular anime-centric streamer Crunchyroll also has been analyzed in terms of its global platform, branding, and fan communities (Noh; Wong). Especially significant for this study is Jessica Balanzategui and Andrew Lynch's analysis of AMC Networks’ horror-content SVOD, Shudder. Analyzing Shudder's curation and interface, the authors address Shudder's success in offering an “experience of immersion” in the horror genre (3). However, Sundance Now has been far less successful than specialty streamers that are frequently analyzed or cited in studies of niche SVODs. Indeed, tracing Sundance Now's fraught transformations from a film-centric to a media-agnostic service underscores the challenging space in which niche SVODs must operate.From the late 2000s to the early 2010s, digital distribution represented a new frontier to circulate specialty films and speak to cinephile taste cultures on a larger scale than previously possible on cable or video. While major streamers such as Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu began growing their massive subscription-based online distribution platforms, many legacy media companies, film festivals, specialty film distributors, and other players pursued smaller-scale digital distribution ventures. During this period, US-based film festivals—including Sundance and Tribeca—partnered with cable providers, YouTube, and other tech start-ups to tap into emerging digital markets. In his book On-Demand Cinema: Digital Delivery and the Future of Movies, Chuck Tryon highlights how film festivals incorporated new digital tools to expand access to and create new on-demand markets for films. According to Tryon, initiatives such as Tribeca (Online), Tribeca On-Demand, and Sundance Next activated digital delivery's celebratory rhetoric to facilitate new engagements with film culture (172). Crucially, these myriad digital ventures were bound to film festivals and thus shaped by cinema-specific institutions, agendas, and fan communities. All capitalized on digital delivery's hype to further their respective festival brands, gain corporate sponsorships, and facilitate the discovery of a global, engaged of film-specific digital models and online ventures in the late 2000s and early into the streaming During this period, streaming represented to niche taste cultures and repackage specialty films on a larger scale than previously possible on cable or video. 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