A new season of Deadliest Catch, its 15th, starts on Discovery April 9. The show depicts the brutal battle for crabs in the Bering Sea. “A new boat blows into town, rumored to know where over a quarter-billion dollars worth of king crabs are located,” Discovery teases. Everyone else will do just about anything to get in on the bounty.

Compounding the anxiety, the weather off the Alaska coast is downright unforgiving. Capturing it all is improved technology, including new RED Helium, Gemini and Dragon cameras shooting the action. “It gives us the look of a feature film, even though it’s a documentary,” said Decker Watson, executive producer with Deadliest Catch producer Original Productions.

The Southern Wind, The Wizard and Saga are among the boats featured this season. Bill Howard, Discovery executive producer, spoke with Multichannel News about the new season.

MCN: What has enabled Deadliest Catch to last for 15 seasons?
Bill Howard: People have a primal fear of and an attraction to the ocean. Deadliest Catch has been able to capture that in the most visceral and compelling way possible and it continues to step up its game season after season. The amount of work that goes into figuring out the best technology, the best camera techniques, the best talent that you can put into a show like this allows Discovery to continue to keep the bar very, very high.

MCN: What’s different about this season?
BH: We have a new captain who is part of a fishery survey who was able to determine that the bulk of the king crab hoard was in one area called the Mud Pit. He kept that information secret, but it soon got out. By the time we’re into the first and second episodes, they’re all fishing on top of each other. It becomes very competitive.

MCN: How many more seasons for Deadliest Catch?
BH: I wouldn’t begin to speculate. I think it’s got a long run. We end up with an incredible amount of material. We’re premiering back-to-back, two-hour episodes at the top of the season. There’s just so much incredibly compelling content.

MCN: What have you learned from the fishermen over the years?
BH: You learn a lot about risk versus reward, the give and take when you’re pursuing something to make a living. These guys epitomize that balance, where they’re constantly taking extreme risks in one of the most extreme environments on the planet in order to return a decent living for their families.

MCN: What compels them to do the show?
BH: These captains would be doing exactly the same things with or without the cameras present. We’ve been able to work with captains who are willing to take on the additional burden of a camera crew on the boat and that’s what makes the show as compelling as it is. The captains become less aware of the crew over time and they just continue to do what they do.

MCN: What’s your favorite moment this season?
BH: There’s a great sequence in the premiere on the Cornelia Marie, where Josh and Casey are pulling up their first pot of the season. Everything comes down to the contents of that pot — whether they made the right decisions, if they’re in the right place. When they pull it up, the reaction you get from the crew, from the captains — as a viewer you’re on pins and needles. Have they invested all this time and effort into putting the pots in the wrong spot? When they pull that one up and it’s full, you can see the unrestrained joy.

MCN: Tell me about the weather.
BH: As winter moves in, it’s predicted to be one of the coldest in memory. The captains are all bracing for sea ice, which they haven’t seen for many seasons, as well as extreme snow. The weather is as extreme as I’ve ever seen it.

But we’ve got better camera equipment. The technology evolves and you can see more at night than you could in past seasons. When the storms hit the boats at night, you’re able to see with your own eyes the size and scale of the Bering Sea versus how small these boats become when they’re getting washed around by 20-, 30-plus-feet waves. It takes this season to a new level.

MCN: Is this the toughest Discovery series to film?
BH: I think that that would be beyond dispute. There may be some people who disagree, but I’ve worked on a lot of shows at Discovery and this is by far the hardest.

Burbank, Calif-based Original Productions has developed several of the most successful unscripted docuseries — History’s Ice Road Truckers and Ax Men, Discovery Channel’s Monster Garage and A&E’s Storage Wars among them — over nearly a 20-year span. Founded by Thom Beers, the FremantleMedia-owned production company also has cast the net with several shows in the fishing genre, the biggest being Discovery’s Deadliest Catch. This fall the studio and Discovery will spawn a spinoff, Deadliest Catch: Dungeon Cove, set among fishing families on the Oregon coast. Original Productions CEO Phil Segal spoke with Multichannel News programming editor R. Thomas Umstead about adding again to the Discovery Channel series, now in its 12th season, and about the future of reality TV.

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MCN:After 12 successful seasons ofDeadliest Catch, why did you feel this was the right time to create this spinoff series?

Phil Segal: We’ve done spinoff s before — Storage Wars was one of our shows that successfully spun itself off into Storage Wars New York, Texas and Miami, and of course L.A., as well as internationally in Canada, France and South America, so I think that’s an example of a really powerful format that equally had some good characters.

Deadliest Catch is uniquely different. While over the years we’ve done many shows that feature different forms of fishing, Catch is one of those shows that we were looking to expand the universe in terms of giving the audience a much richer, immersive experience, but we never thought about spinoff s because we were always concerned about damaging the brand. What we found with Dungeon Cove is an incredibly organic opportunity to celebrate crab fishing, but from a uniquely different perspective. This is the Oregon coast, featuring small towns and very prideful people, and their fishing grounds are rich and complicated. It’s an incredibly unique opportunity for us to celebrate our world through a very different lens. I don’t like to think of it as a spinoff but rather an organic extension of a world that hopefully the audience will embrace.

MCN:From a production perspective, what criteria do you need to meet before extending a popular reality franchise?

PS: It’s a very delicate process and one that’s not taken lightly, not only on our side but on the network side as well. The negative side of an unsuccessful splinter obviously could be damaging to a brand. The object of the exercise is never through the lens of “more is better.” It’s always through the lens of whether the audience’s experience is literally going to be expanded. The question always is, “Is this a legitimate story and is this going to have a benefit to the audience?” We always take that very seriously. For us, it’s when you have a unique opportunity to tell the story of a character, but because of the prism you choose to tell that story in, you have to make a decision whether or not going off and seeing what these other characters do or what’s happening in the world evolving around them is added value and not just a special or a B-story, but a world that can add value to the brand.

MCN:How do you see the reality genre evolving given the changing content distribution marketplace?

PS: It’s a complicated question: On the one hand, never in the history of television has there been so much content available for consumers on so many different platforms. When Original Productions launched, there were 20-plus competitors; today there are over 750. So for us we continue to look at what the storytelling worlds are for us going forward. I also think on the other hand it’s a challenge because as these distribution changes evolve there will be shifts in how we do business.

I think over the next 18 months, we’re going to see a continual evolution of the distribution system and we’re going to have to get a better handle on the economics of our business. What is the price of entry? What is it going to cost to produce? What can these networks afford to pay for their content and can we remain competitive? That story has yet to be written as we continue to look at the competitive landscape and learn on a daily basis how to compete in it.