BEVERLY HILLS—Chris Long had never seen the popular television drama Downton Abbey until his wife implored him to watch one evening.

“Honestly, I didn’t even know what channel my PBS station was on,” Long, the senior vice-president responsible for content on American satellite provider DirecTV, said in an interview with the Star.

“But it certainly made me realize people will take the extra step and go where the content is.”

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Under the leadership of Long, DirecTV, which most people see as a provider of other people’s offerings, has got into the content game in a big way.

It is an accelerating trend in the industry where businesses that were once happy to be the pipeline for broadcasters are now competing with the providers themselves. Viewers certainly stand to benefit. But with so many channels proliferating, who’s going to watch?

The motto seems to be build the best show and the audience will come.

For the providers, it’s purely about survival in a brutally competitive media environment.

Distribution once determined whether shows lived or died. But with so many outlets and platforms available, content is now king.

So DirecTV, the largest satellite TV provider in the U.S., announced this week that it was launching Kingdom this fall, a gritty drama set in the mixed martial arts world of Venice, Calif. It stars Jonas Brothers band member Nick Jonas. And the darker vision and cinematography has it looking more like it came from the world of independent film than a typical mainstream broadcaster.

“This is not something that would air on the Disney Channel,” says Long, who worked in sports for Fox before moving to DirecTV.

Long is hoping that enough people will like Kingdom that they subscribe to DirecTV. It’s also future-proofing the network against viewers who increasingly get their entertainment not just from cable and satellite, but online.

“It’s about retention, making sure we give our customers value that they keep coming back.”

While the privileged period world of Downton Abbey and the brutal, explicitly violent domain of Kingdom have nothing in common, they highlight the common strategy of emerging content providers: It only takes one big breakout hit to get viewers to tune in. As PBS has discovered, viewers of Downton Abbey will linger for a while and look at their other offerings.

But with so many non-traditional providers such as HBO, Amazon, Hulu, Crackle, Netflix and DirecTV getting in the game, and dozens of new shows this year, the question remains whether the market is oversaturated with product.

AOL, for example, used to be America Online and is perhaps best known as the guys who provided Internet service for a fee. Netflix were the guys who used to mail rental DVDs. And Amazon were the people known for selling books online.

Many of these programs aren’t available in Canada because of licences and viewing restrictions. But it is only a matter of time before all or some of the shows become more readily available as the industry matures.

Perhaps this kind of vertical integration should not be surprising. After all, other industries do the same. Canadian grocery store chain Loblaw, for example, has long made its own in-house branded goods, including ketchup to compete against Heinz. And The Bay has its own clothing lines to compete against fashion brands that they stock.

Television has been something of a final frontier.

But it is a tough battle. Studies show that most consumers will stick to three or four tried and true channels and it is difficult to get them to try something new. Unless there is a compelling reason.

That reason is quality television, says Long.

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“You have to cut through the clutter. And the only way you can do that is with excellence. We are giving viewers choice, to see something that they may not otherwise have seen.”

No one outside the industry really paid attention to this seismic shift until Netflix led the push last year by getting an Emmy nomination for Best Drama for the political thriller House of Cards, starring Kevin Spacey.

The show was nominated for an Emmy this year as well.

And other non-traditional shows such as Jerry Senifeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee for online provider Crackle and AOL’s Park Bench with Steve Buscemi were also nominated for short format Emmy Awards this year.

Not to be outdone, Amazon this year announced an impressive roster of new shows including dramas made by Doonsberry creator Garry Trudeau, Moonrise Kingdom’s Roman Coppola and X-Files creator Chris Carter.

“I think it’s going to be the way that people will watch television exclusively before long,” said Carter when asked why he is working with an online purveyor to create a new TV show.

Carter is producing The After, about eight survivors who are trying to make sense of a postapocalyptic world.

“I am sometimes asked whether there are cultural differences between Hollywood and techland,” says Roy Price, director of Amazon Studios. “But at the core I think there aren’t. Both communities want to take chances and create new things that people will love. It’s a new era in TV.”

The shift did not happen overnight, of course. Cable was the first incursion into the cosy world of the network broadcaster.

HBO had 99 Emmy nominations this year, the most of any network, with Game of Thrones leading all contenders. And once again, for the third year in a row, broadcasters were shut out of the Emmy nominations in the coveted Best Drama category.

Apart from Netflix, the new wave of online networks has not quite earned that level of respect in the industry. In fact, many actors seemed defensive when asked by television critics in Los Angeles why they were appearing in online product.

“No actor is looking at this as a lesser outlet,” said Jeffrey Tambor, who plays a transgender husband in Amazon’s Transparent. “There are major people coming to this platform and they are simply following where the opportunity is.”

Tambor echoed other actors who said that working with alternative networks allowed them to work with creative people free from the tight leash of a traditional broadcaster.

For the new networks, providing content is not just about adversity, it is ultimately about control over the product they provide.

“You never know what you will get exactly when you are buying something,” says Long. “This way you know pretty much what you’re going to get and maybe even improve on what they are doing. I think it is anyone’s game and it’s a great time for creators.”

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