While noted television producers Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy have been scooped up by Netflix in multi-year deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars, the celebrated director/performer Tyler Perry — best known for his blockbuster Madea franchise — has his own streaming ambitions.
Asked about his future career plans, Perry told Cheddar that he wants to launch his own streaming service. “If you would have asked me this four years ago, I would’ve told you that I wanted to own a cable channel,” he told the outlet. “[Streaming] is the wave of the future, no matter whether we ignore it or not. That’s the way everything is going.”
That streaming service, however, may be a long time coming. In July, Perry signed a five-year deal with Viacom to produce 90 episodes annually of original series for its BET network and other cable channels. As part of the deal, which doesn’t go into effect until 2019, Viacom will also exclusively distribute all of Perry’s short-form video content, and its Paramount Pictures division gets first-look rights to Perry’s feature film ideas. Perry was formerly in business with Oprah Winfrey’s OWN Network.
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Though the service may not launch for some time, Perry is already brainstorming potential pricing tiers. He told Cheddar that $5 per month was “somewhere in the sweet spot,” but notes that established services like Netflix can justifiably charge more given the caliber of the content offer.
