Valentine’s Day is over, but romance-themed shows featuring African-American leads are blossoming on cable and subscription video-on-demand platforms.

Programming executives said shows like OWN’s scripted show Cherish the Day, as well as unscripted program Black Love and Urban Movie Channel’s scripted Stuck With You, offer African-American viewers authentic portrayals of relationships that have been rare on the small screen.

“I think the whole love and marriage/black love concept is going to start showing up a lot more, because there is such an opportunity to show black people in love on television,” Cheryl Grace, Nielsen’s senior VP of U.S. strategic community alliances and consumer engagement, said. “It’s trending now and you’ll see a lot more in the future.”

While the genre found a home in film during the late 1990s and early 2000s with such movies as Love & Basketball, Love Jones and Poetic Justice, there have been few television shows depicting African-American couples in romantic relationships.

Nostalgia for those popular 1990s films served helped to inspire Cherish the Day, executive producer Ava DuVernay told writers during January’s TCA Winter Press Tour. She said she wanted to bring similar stories to the small screen.

“I just longed to see that kind of black love story on television,” she said. “All of our collaborators just embraced that with a sense of joy about exploring black love, which is something we don’t feel we see hardly enough.”

Each episode in the eight-part series represents a day in the life of a couple. Its Feb. 11 premiere drew nearly 1 million viewers, making it cable’s the top-rated show among African-American women and among total viewers in its 10 p.m. time slot, Nielsen reported.

“In all of our dramas, there is some notion of love and romance … and I think that Ava’s new show, Cherish the Day, is going to be an even louder call than anything we’ve had to date,” OWN president Tina Perry said. “[DuVernay] is showing for the first time in a very intimate, one-on-one way black love in all of its beauty, nuances and challenges.”

Streaming service UMC’s original dramedy Stuck With You follows the behind-the-scenes ups and downs of a celebrity couple. “Stuck With You is the perfect blend of comedy and relationships drama,” UMC chief content officer Brett Dismuke said. “Our original shows like Stuck With You and [Craig Ross Jr.’s Monogamy] pluck at the emotional heartstrings of the viewers.”

OWN’s Perry said African-American viewers are hungry for content that reflects their lives and images, and relationship-themed content has always resonated with the audience. The network had earlier renewed four unscripted relationship-themed shows, including Black Love, in which real couples open up about the realities of love, marriage and romance in the African-American community.

“As African-American viewers and consumers, we are really ready to see black love on TV in a really direct and intimate way,” Perry said. “I think [DuVernay’s Cherish the Day] will amplify a message and a mission that we’ve been on for years, and I think the viewers are absolutely going to love it.”

Urban Movie Channel (UMC) in March will launch a new series focused on the lives of celebrity women.

The series, Behind Her Faith, debuts March 26 and focuses on a leading women in the entertainment/media industry as they talk about the most difficult moments in their lives and how they  overcame them to ultimately become successful through faith, said officials for the streaming service.

Women profiled for the docuseries include Essence Atkins (Marlon, Ambitions); Angelica Nwandu, founder of The Shade Room; Niecy Nash (When They See Us, Claws) and Aisha Hinds (Underground, The Hate U Give).

Behind Her faith is executive produced by Jay Ellis (HBO’s Insecure) and created by Paula Bryant-Ellis.

Marina del Rey, Calif -- OTT services are not breaking new ground on stortelling, but have found better ways to package and deliver those stories to consumers compared to their linear TV competitors, RLJ Entertainment Robert L. Johnson said during the Aug. 2 OTT Video Summit.

“What they have done is recognized that the technology platform allows the content to be maximized in any way possible,” Johnson said in an exclusive Multichannel News video interview. “The stories are the stories; they’ve just said we’re going to process them through the technology in ways that enhance people’s enjoyment of the programming.”

Johnson, who founded BET and currently oversees OTT services Urban Movie Channel (UMC) and Acorn TV, also attributed the success of streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu to their ability to deliver quality content to consumers to watch at their leisure on multiple devices.

“Netflix would be a complete failure if it became a Netflix TV station, and they put on a show at 9 o’clock, 8 o’clock, 10 o’clock, and just repeat it,” he said. 

A transgender father struggles to come out to his self-absorbed kids who are dealing with their own sexual issues and identities. A hyper-aggressive, African-American lesbian inmate has the hots for a white inmate from the suburbs who mixes with a virtual ethnic rainbow of female prisoners at a federal correctional facility.

The unique and trans-cendent diversity of Jeffrey Tambor’s character of Morton/Maura Pfefferman in Amazon Prime Instant Video’s dramedy series Transparent, and Uzo Aduba’s portrayal of Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” Warren in Netflix’s prison series Orange Is the New Black have made the two over-the-top services credible players in depicting diverse characters on television.

Their respective portrayals also earned Tambor the first-ever Golden Globe award for the portrayal of a transgender character and Aduba a rare Emmy Award for an African-American actress.

And in a 2014-15 television season that’s arguably been one of the most prolific ever for multicultural broadcast and cable shows (with such breakout hits as Fox’s Empire, The CW’s Jane the Virgin, ABC’s Fresh Off the Boat and Black-ish and Starz’s Power), it might be OTT that provides the ultimate platform for content depicting diversity for both multicultural and mainstream audiences.

ULTIMATE DIVERSE PLATFORM?

Established over-the-top services such as Netflix, Hulu and Amazon have a unique opportunity to target multicultural viewers by offering content directly to an audience that increasingly streams its favorite content to smartphones, tablets and TV sets, executives said. Meanwhile, new multicultural OTT services like Urban Movie Channel, created by BET founder Bob Johnson, are creating targeted online-video services for specific segments of the multicultural audience.

“Over-the-top streaming is a quintessential answer to diversity because it allows consumers to access exactly the kind of content they want to access targeted to their primary viewing interest, whether it’s based on ethnicity, cultural behavior, or social interests or gender issues,” Johnson said. “There is no limitation on access and no limitations posed by gatekeepers if the consumers are willing to access the programming on an advertiser mode or a pay-basis mode.”

There is certainly a viable, growing multicultural audience for online video providers to mine. African-American and Hispanic viewers spent more time watching video content via the Internet or on smartphones on a monthly basis in the fourth quarter of 2014 than they did in the same period in 2013, per Nielsen’s Total Audience Report for the timeframe.

Further, multicultural viewers over-index on subscriptions to cable, SVOD, OTT and other pay TV services when compared with their white counterparts, according to a recent Horowitz Research study on the State of Viewing in the Age of OTT. Nearly 90% of African- Americans subscribe to some form of pay service, compared to 87% of Hispanics and 80% of Asian-Americans. Among whites, 75% have some form of pay TV subscription, according to Horowitz.

“This younger generation that is on these platforms is so diverse, naturally, that they will fi nd shows that are great and appeal to them,” said Rodrigo Mazon, director of content acquisitions for streaming service Hulu. “We do prioritize the audience that has been underserved traditionally, but it’s truly about great stories and shows that have a diverse and authentic composition.”

Indeed, the expanding multicultural online audience has not been lost on the top OTT providers. For one, Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black has one of television’s most diverse casts, which netted Orange casting director Jennifer Euston a 2014 Emmy for outstanding casting in a drama series.

NATURAL FOR YOUNGER DEMOS

Orange’s Aduba in her Emmy acceptance speech for best supporting actress in a comedy series last August singled out Netflix “for putting something like this on television so that everyone can be represented in such a beautiful way.”

At the Television Critics Association Winter Press Tour this past January, Netflix chief creative officer Ted Sarandos touted the diverse casts of Orange and of drama series Marco Polo as examples of the streaming service’s concerted effort to create more original programming with multicultural appeal. Netflix also signed Men In Black 2 star Rosario Dawson to appear in its upcoming Marvel Comics-based series Daredevil.

“Netflix was born on the Internet, so our demographic was younger and more male when we were beginning, [but] it’s far more mainstream today,” Sarandos told more than 200 reporters at the TCA tour. “So you really are covering all demographics and trying to find programming that people love and attach to in a way that leads to retention and creates a brand halo for Netflix as well. We really are trying to program something for everyone.”

Hulu, which already offers same-day replays of such shows as Empire, Jane the Virgin and Black-ish, also wants to ramp up its multicultural viewer appeal through its original content, Mazon said. Hulu original drama East Los High, with an all-Hispanic cast, is the linchpin of the network’s Latino-themed content, which also includes acquired movies and series from Latin America.

“We’ve been committed to diverse, multicultural millennial audiences and content before that and this just reaffirms that,” Mazon said. East Los High, which chronicles the lives of Latino students in a fictional Los Angeles High School, will launch its third season later this year. The service last fall also launched unscripted series Los Cowboys, which focuses on a multigenerational family steeped in the sport of Mexican rodeo.

For Amazon, diversity isn’t limited to ethnicity. The studio’s dramedy series Transparent has been lauded for Tambor’s breakthrough portrayal of a middle- aged transgendered father; he won a Golden Globe for best actor in a television music or comedy series this past January. The series also won a Globe for best musical or comedy.

But established OTT services are not the only choices for diverse viewers. Other startup services, such as Urban Movie Channel, are looking to get into OTT on the ground floor.

UMC’s Johnson said today’s OTT business looks a lot like cable in the early 1980s, when networks looked to differentiate themselves from the broadly focused broadcasters by targeting niche audiences.

Johnson, who launched BET in the early 1980s as the first TV network specifically for African-Americans, added that producers of quality content aimed at multicultural audiences have a great opportunity for success at this early stage of the industry’s development.

Urban Movie Channel, which launched last November as an SVOD service, offers urban-themed documentaries, comedies, horror films and stage plays targeted to a predominately African- American audience.

UMC recently secured the VOD rights to the much anticipated independent film Blackbird starring Isaiah Washington and Mo’Nique. The movie will have a limited run in theaters before it streams on the UMC SVOD service later this summer.

“The OTT content providers of today are a lot like the content providers of yesterday,” Johnson said. “Their mindset to some extent is to go for scale and large audiences, and tend not to think about targeting micro audiences or unique diverse audiences. We’re going to take advantage of that window and build us a unique brand, much like I built BET into that unique brand.”

OUT OF AFRICA

Cable network Africa Channel will launch an OTT service in 2016 that will feature African-themed content from the channel as well as exclusive content created on the continent, according to vice president of marketing and digital Brian Newton.

“We look at [OTT] as evening the playing field,” said Newton, whose service has struggled to gain linear MVPD distribution. “Right now, you have all these people at home paying for channels that they don’t watch, and they do not see themselves reflected, so there will come a time when the viewer will have a choice to spend $5 a month to access programming that reflects their sensibilities all the time as opposed to a more expensive package that may do that part of the time.”

Hulu’s Mazon expects to see more multicultural programming in general pop up on both traditional TV networks as well as in the OTT space, all competing for the eyeballs and dollars of multicultural viewers.

“I think because of the young, multicultural demographic that exists today, a lot of content is being developed and created to target that audience,” Mazon said. “Voices are being heard more loudly now, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we started seeing a lot more multicultural [content] done in an authentic way.”

Black Entertainment Television founder Robert L. Johnson will once again seek out African-American and urban audiences with a new subscription video-on-demand service called UMC — Urban Movie Channel. He spoke with Multichannel News programming editor R. Thomas Umstead about the service, which will offer more than 150 titles of programming with plans to add original series, movies and other programming in the near future ($2.99-$4.99 per month), and the evolving television landscape.

MCN: Why did you decide to launch UMC as a subscription digital channel?

Robert Johnson: The media landscape is changing dramatically because of digital technology, the elimination of gatekeepers in terms of delivering content to an audience and the desire of the consumer to have content that appeals to their direct interests on whatever mobile and digital device they have at their command. People are breaking free from having programmers that determine what they see and how much they pay for.

Just as I looked at cable as a way to break free from broadcasting and target niche audiences, I see the new platform of digital [video] as offering the same opportunity in providing targeted programming to an audience who wants to see what they want to see and is ultimately willing to pay for only what they want to see.

MCN: Does you feel that new online platforms give you more opportunities to offer a diversity of programming options than you had when you launched BET?

RJ: There has never been a targeted African- American-oriented channel that has been free from the limitations of what advertisers think they want to advertise in. We can be creative and aggressive in content.

When I was at BET and I wanted to put on a show, the advertisers would often say no, because it’s either too aggressive culturally or sensual for an African-American-targeted show. Then we would sit back and watch everybody else do those same type of shows, but the advertisers took a different tact with black-oriented programming. That’s why I think this is the perfect time to launch this channel.

MCN: How can you adequately market and promote UMC to digital African-American audiences?

RJ: This question is the question I was asked 30 years ago with BET, and with a company worth $4 billion dollars later, I figured it out. The answer to that question is that we have to put on programming that people want to see. All of these stories that African-American producers want to tell but have been denied because they didn’t fit the studio model or the advertiser model, are now possible with this subscription- based channel.

MCN: Do you think that cable’s African-Americantargeted channels are adequately serving the audience?

RJ: I’m not going to judge those guys and what they do. I just think the digital model is the way to go, to target audiences so that they can watch what they want to watch and pay for just what they want to watch. The other channels that are tied in as part of the cable cluster forces someone to pay upwards of almost $75 to $100 for programming they never look at. That’s not an economically viable system longterm as the convergence of digital, streaming and big, [smart] television sets comes about. For us this is the right place to be from a technological, economic and programming standpoint. That’s the way we see this opportunity — it’s in the right place at the right time.

MCN: Given your decision to launch over the top, rather than as a cable channel, do you believe cable is on its last legs?

RJ: No, not at all. I think cable will be around for a long time. I do think that it’s the beginning of a growing pressure on the cable industry to figure out a way to reduce the rising costs of programming.