AMC Networks Boss Kristin Dolan On Why Streaming Is Better When It’s Wholesale, And What She Learned From ‘Dark Winds’ Netflix Run

As someone who in many respects grew up in the cable business, AMC Networks CEO Kristin Dolan is loyal to the traditional cable TV programming model, especially in the streaming era.

Speaking Tuesday at a Media Council luncheon at the Paley Center for Media in New York, Dolan affirmed that “everything old is new again” in terms of industry economics despite the glitter and temptation of crossing the digital divide. Most media companies have tried their hands at the direct-to-consumer streaming business, with decidedly mixed results. AMC Networks has stayed out of the general entertainment fray, preferring to operate a portfolio of niche services like AcornTV and AllBlk.

“It’s better for us,” Dolan argued, to let distribution partners like pay-TV operators or tech giants maintain the relationship with customers.

“We do have a small DTC business and we’ll continue to support that, for some of the smaller ones” like horror outlet Shudder, she said. “But my goal, and I know we could never get to 100% wholesale, but if we could, I would do it. Because I know we could come up with a financial model that shows that allowing other people to do what they do best [selling to consumers] is better for us than someone having a bad experience.”

She called churn (the industry term for the percentage of customers who cancel their service) the “dirty secret” of the media business. Speaking hypothetically, she said a streaming outlet with a 12% monthly rate of churn, is “churning 145% of your customer base every year, and you have to bring all of them back.”

AMC Networks has been overhauling its business to reflect the streaming-oriented environment. One strategy that continues to pay dividends is licensing, especially to Netflix, a key partner since the DVD-by-mail days. Dolan said a recent deal to put past seasons of 15 original series on Netflix offered not just revenue but an opportunity to gain a better understanding of how to stand out in the ultra-crowded streaming field.

“One of our big learnings from Dark Winds,” she said, was the way Netflix promoted the drama series. With its third season recently concluded and a fourth in production, the mystery has wowed critics and boasts a rich literary heritage and eye-catching locations on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico. Yet Netflix staffers offered very pragmatic advice to AMC Networks, which Dolan recalled as, “It’s a cop show. People don’t care that it’s the ’70s, they don’t care that there’s a beautiful woman who’s a police officer. It’s a cop show. Show the uniform.” When the tile art was adjusted to reflect that guidance, Dolan said, “you could see in the algorithm that it drove more viewership because people were looking for cop shows.”

Dolan was named CEO of AMC Networks in 2023, having previously held a range of posts at Cablevision and Rainbow Media (as AMC Networks was formerly called). Her husband is media and sports executive James Dolan, though the two are separated. The Dolan family operates a number of businesses rooted in the pioneering exploits of Chuck Dolan. A media innovator whose feats included helping form the modern cable TV era and creating the network that became HBO, Dolan died last December at age 98.

Asked by moderator Cynthia Littleton, co-editor-in-chief of Deadline sister publication Variety about business lessons Kristin Dolan learned from her father-in-law, the CEO smiled.

Remembering preparations for a major new product launch in 2001, she said the elder Dolan told his colleagues, “I want to send out a business reply card and tell everybody about this,” referring to the physical, postage-paid mailers used by companies seeking customer feedback in the pre-internet era. “We were all like, ‘Oh my God, it’s 2001, nobody’s sending a BRC!’” When the cards went out, she said, 22% of them wound up being returned – such a large number that it required numerous mail bags to haul them in to be sorted and analyzed. The data from a large swath of the company’s footprint of 7 million homes at the time proved invaluable, and the launch exceeded “our wildest dreams,” Dolan said.