ABC Just Launched Seven Digital Exclusive Series and Has 40 More in the Pipeline

After playing games Tuesday night — Celebrity Family Feud, The $100,000 Pyramid and To Tell the Truth — ABC went to work. By the time we woke up Wednesday morning, the broadcast network had:

• Unveiled out a completely redesigned iPad, iPhone and Apple TV apps;
• Rebranded all of its streaming apps from WatchABC to simply ABC;
• Launched a slate of seven short-form originals branded ABCd that includes new scripted shows from Ty Burrell (Boondoggle) and Iliza Shlesinger (Forever 31), and announced plans for 40 more originals that will begin rolling out monthly; and
• Added full seasons of 38 so-called “throwback” shows — mostly from ABC’s catalog — that includes Sports Night, My So-Called Life, Dirty Sexy Money and Ugly Betty

Karin Gilford, ABC’s executive vice president for digital media, sat down with Decider to talk about all the new digital toys and ABC’s digital plans going into the fall TV season.

DECIDER: I think a lot more people would read this if you would just tell me who JoJo picks on The Bachelorette.

KARIN GILFORD: [Laughs] That is locked up in a vault! They won’t even let me know.

You’re announcing seven new short-form series starting today. What else is coming?

Right now, we’ve got about 40 shows in various stages in the development pipeline. The plan is to launch a fresh batch of five to seven shows each month starting September 1 and the beginning of every month going forward, and all of the episodes of those shows will be available when we launch them.

Why monthly instead of weekly or rolling out each title on its own?

From our perspective, that’s a case we can get behind. The great thing about digital is that you get immediate feedback, so we’ll be able to look at the data, see how people are watching the shows, and adjust that if we need to.

Will the marketing differ from what you do for your broadcast shows mostly in terms of intensity, or are you doing some different things.

We’re definitely doing some different things. These are younger skewing shows for a more mobile-oriented audience, so we’re doing more with social.

The shows you launched seem to skew 18-35 female. Is that the idea?

When we developed the concept we look at the 25- to 35-year old demographic, and the content shoulders out nicely to 18-to-24 and to 35 and older. If you look at a show like Newborn Moms, that’s very relevant to someone who’s just had her first child or maybe pregnant, and relevant to someone like me who’s got teens and tweens in the house and can remember that. We’re looking for shows that appeal to men and women, but we came out of the gate with shows for that 25-to-34 demographic.

Will these shows live on all of the same digital platforms where you network shows already are, or are you trying to hit particular pockets?

These will live across the entire ABC digital footprint — iOS, tvOS, Roku, Xbox, etc. The content has rolled out to the entire footprint, and we’ll continue to do that.

Boondoggle plays like a traditional single-cam sitcom but shorter. Can you tell me about how you developed that with creator Ty Burrell?

Our comedy team was a huge partner in the project and has relationships with the talent we have on the air. This was definitely a passion project for Ty Burrell, and it came together really well. It was inspired by his real life, and the guys you see in the show are his real friends. We loved Ty’s term “non-tourage.” He hit fame a little bit later in life than what you think about from Entourage, so all the great perks are coming to him in mid-life.

All My Gay Friends Are Getting Married is kind of a talk-reality hybrid. How did that happen?

You summed it up the same way we think about it. We were really looking for things are familiar but also innovative, and this concept was very forward-thinking. We wanted to celebrate gay marriages with great stories about gay couples, and we feel like Michelle Collins is the exact right voice to host that. It’s a reality-talk format that brings people into this world and celebrates a major milestone in our country’s history.

Will you have digital series in the fall that will be tangential to your fall line-up — like post-game shows or webisodes?

Absolutely. We have a history of doing those things, and we plan to expand that strategy. One of the overall intents in adding the originals, adding the library content and redeveloping the app is to provide a more robust experience for ABC viewers. Extending the stories and giving fans more of their favorite shows is a party of that. We’ll continue Secrets and Lies with those webisodes. We’ll continue to do things around Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and The Bachelor. We’re talking to our new showrunners on our fall slate as well.

With the new design of the iPad app, what were you doing — reacting to a change in how people are using apps, giving the UI a fresh coat of paint, fixing some aspect of how the app works?

One, we wanted to take a very consumer-centric approach to the app. A lot of things have changed in the market, and the power is in the hands of the consumer. We wanted to have a beautiful, easy-to-use app that would get people right into the viewing experience. We wanted to bring the essence of the shows into the key art and onto the app so that you’re engaged with that right away.

Two, we wanted to take advantage of the capabilities of Apple’s new tvOS. We think it’s the way TV is going to be consumed in the future. If you look at our tvOS app, there’s a lot of motion in the key art, it has a very intuitive interface, and you can search with Siri. We built that app from the ground up with the capabilities that the platform allows.

Almost everything in the last year has moved stretching the viewing window — from live to same day, to three days, to seven days, to other services like Netflix — and all the sudden you have thinks happening on shows like Game of Thrones and The Bachelorette that have put a lot of emphasis on live viewing. Do you see things going both directions at once, or are these shows a blip.

I think there’s going to be a combination. The good news is that there’s more TV out there than ever before, consumers have a lot choice, and that sparks a lot of innovation. There will always be appointment-viewing shows that you have to be on your couch watching while it’s airing, and the other mode — binging shows — is also huge now. We think the addition of all the new library content accommodates that. The third mode is discovery and exploring, where people are looking for new shows to watch that really resonate with them. Our intent is to hit all three of those modes.

Nielsen has a new report showing that household penetration for streaming has reached parity with DVRs. I assume that is more attributable to Netflix than to network streaming apps, but are you beginning to see signs that ABC’s streaming viewers are approaching parity with DVR viewing?

We don’t report that particular metric, but the fact that we rebranded our streaming apps [from WatchABC] to ABC is a testament to the fact that we view digital as seriously as we do on-air.

Was the new iPad app developed separately from other Disney networks like ESPN and FreeForm, or was it developed with the intent to update more apps in the next few months.

The ABC project is managed by a team that’s dedicated to ABC, and each network has its own roadmap. We share technology, which is one of the benefits of being in a big company, but each brand treats its own digital specifically to its own brand. We’re not trying to create a cookie-cutter approach across all the brands.

There’s a tab on the iPad app for news that goes to ABC’s various news shows. Will that grow into an outlet for election coverage, or are you routing most of that to the ABC News app?

News is a hugely important component of ABC’s brand. One of the things we did with the redesign, which I’m glad you noticed, was to give our news content its own dedicated section that we could program. The ABC News app is terrific and is going very deep on election coverage, and we’ll reflect some of that coverage on our news tab.

Is there a particular new show for fall that you think looks and feels different than what ABC has done before.

In Downward Dog, the main character is a talking dog on network television, and it was based on a digital original. I would argue that ABC has something every season that breaks out and goes against the grain. If you made me pick one, I would cite Downward Dog.

[Download the new ABC app for free for your iOS, Android, Kindle Fire and more]