What’s a better way to celebrate a holy holiday weekend than watching hours of content exploring the myths and mysteries of religion? Just don’t tell your grandmother.
XiveTV is running 18 different documentaries this weekend as part of their “Easter Revealed” package, with titles like: “Digging for Jesus,” “Jesus: the Cold Case,” “Pilate: The Man Who Killed Christ,” “Shroud of Christ,” “Leonardo: The Man Behind the Shroud,” “Who Wrote the Bible,” “Notorious Women of the Bible,” “The Michelangelo Code,” and “Who Wrote the New Testament?” among others.
XiveTV (pronounced “zive”) is an OTT launched in February by two television vets Greg Diefenbach (PBS’ “Empires,” NatGeo’s “Explorer,” and Ken Burns funder) and Thomas Lucas (“SpaceRip,” NOVA’s “Monster of the Milky Way”). With both of their backgrounds, the network focuses on “factual” content, focused on history, science, space, and the like.
Since its launch this winter, a spokesperson told me over email that the SVOD already has:
500,000 subscribers, and streams over 20 million minutes of programming each week. Users are very engaged, with the average viewer watching over 67% of each program. This figure can rise to 90% on some of XiveTV’s most popular series.
Watching 67% of each program is better than the .05% I make it through “Frasier” on Netflix. The ethos behind Xive is to grab the attention of millennials (and almost millennials). Lucas and Diefenback call it a “new media revolution” in which viewers are fed up with the reality show craze and believe that “people crave informative, meaningful and entertaining content.” Science and history are a good place to start; last month, Discovery channel’s founder John Hendricks launched CuriosityStream, another SVOD with a science angle.
XiveTV is available in both app stores, Hulu, Amazon, and YouTube.