BET will launch a new lower-priced ad-supported tier to its BET+ streaming service, which launched in September 2019. The “BET+ Essential” service will cost $5.99 a month, compared to $9.99 for the ad-free version, and will launch at 9 a.m. PT on June 25 — timed to the live 2023 BET Awards that night.
BET president/CEO Scott Mills and BET+ exec VP/general manager Devin Griffin were set to announce the new tier on Thursday morning, as they and BET Media Group media sales president Louis Carr prepare to pitch it to advertisers.
As part of that pitch, BET is revealing subscriber numbers for BET+ for the first time: More than 3 million. The company expects to grow that number, and although some users will migrate to the lower-cost tier, Mills said he expects to see a net gain.
“We’ve been pretty conservative in terms of estimating, I think, and actually we’re going to see a far bigger number than we forecast,” he said. “Advertisers have just been very excited about this opportunity to to avail themselves of the expansion in reach. What our advertising partners understand is that it’s important to reach a Black audience, but it’s important to reach the Black audience in environments that the Black audience deems to be culturally relevant.”
BET+ Essential — which shares a similar name to the Paramount+ Essential ad tier — will feature all of the same content as BET+, just with ads, which will be approximately 6 minutes per hour. The 15-second and 30-second ads will run as pre-roll and post-roll during programming; and BET+ Essential will be measured by Nielsen’s Digital Ad Ratings.
Mills and Griffin said they weren’t ready to reveal launch advertisers just yet, but they said it’s a mix of ongoing marketers who are already in the BET mix, and are BET Awards partners as well. “We’ve got an array of extraordinary advertising partners who really are excited about the environment that we deliver on BET+ and are excited about reaching our audience in that environment,” Mills said.
The launch is also timed to the premiere of BET+’s new dark comedy “Average Joe,” starring Deon Cole, which premieres June 26. BET+ series also include the Emmy-nominated “Ms. Pat Show,” as well as original shows like “The Porter,” “Bruh” and “Kingdom Business.” The service just launched a new season of “College Hill: Celebrity Edition,” and BET also announced the docuseries special “My Journey to 50,” which follows Gabrielle Union and husband Dwyane Wade as they travel across Africa.
“We’ve seen strong double and triple digit growth of our overall business over the last three years,” Griffin said. “What we see is that different consumers see different value in what BET+ offers. So BET Essential will be offering the same lineup of monthly originals, a star-studded library, the deepest offering in the Black programming industry. So we’re going to be setting the table before it launches.”
Mills and Griffin said the ad-supported tier has been in the works for two years, since the original launch of BET+. The timing of the launch comes just after the upfront sales season, allowing the company to pitch the service now. And of course, the BET Awards are, as Mills calls it, “the single biggest night of culture, the Black Super Bowl in the cable television space. So that was really the perfect venue to communicate it to our audience. And we’ve also been communicating it to our advertising partners in the upfront.
“Our clients are able to build it into their plans for the next upcoming season, really is a nice one to have. So our audience becomes aware of it when they go into the BET Awards and our partners are able to plan for it in an aggressive way, starting with Q4 of this year. We’ve already had really great conversations with major partners about being launch partners for AVOD, because people are so excited about it. And we have so many of our partners are major partners in the BET Awards. And because Devin smartly decided that he would use the BET Awards as a platform to launch this, those same partners are saying, well, I’m in the BET Awards, you’re launching this in the BET Awards, and therefore I would like to be a launch partner for this new functionality.'”
As for adding a lower-cost ad tier, Mills noted, “one of the things we always say about BET is, the Black community is really heterogeneous. “People don’t think about how diverse the black community is. And one of the things we wanted to do with the approach to access to BET+ is to really make sure that we had as diverse array of access options as the diversity exists within our community. And so we have some people who are going to clearly prefer the premium service without the ad experience, but there are going to be a number of people who are really going to value the ability to access the service at a lower price point. And so that we really thought particularly given our insight into our community, it was a really important thing to deliver.”
