‘Big Brother: Over the Top’ Is All the TV You Can Handle and Then Some

Clear your schedules and rest up, Big Brother fans.

The new season of the long-running series — and the first that will be available exclusively on the CBS All Access premium streaming service — starts Wednesday night, and Big Brother: Over the Top will have no pauses, no blackouts, and no holds barred.

“Sometimes with the broadcast version we have blacked out certain things so that we don’t give away plot elements of the episode, but here we’re not doing any of that,” says Marc DeBevoise, president and COO of CBS Interactive. “It’s just live.”

On the occasion of the premiere, DeBevoise said down with Decider to talk about how the new season of Big Brother will be different than previous versions and what else is in the works for CBS All Access.

DECIDER: What will the beginning of Big Brother: Over the Top be? With there be an episode on Wednesday or just the live coverage?

MARC DEBEVOISE: This week, the houseguests will be announced, and they’re going to move in on Wednesday evening. That’s when the live feed will go, well, live.

That’s an important thing to point out. This is actually live — not something recorded three months ago.

Right. For the last seven years, we have had a live-feed product for subscribers. Before All Access, it was a subscription. This season we’ll base much of the show on the live feeds, whereas the broadcast version the live feed is an ancillary service for superfans. The idea here is that if you want to follow every move, you can watch the live camera feeds.

We’ll do a episode starting a week from Wednesday that will result in a live eviction at the end of the episode. You’ll be watching a taped, edited piece for 40 or 50 minutes, and then it will cut right to the live eviction.

Will there something like a mini-show or a summary during the week?

Each weekday we’ll do a 5- to 7-minute piece that we’re calling a Weekday Recap. You’ll be able to watch that to catch up and then jump back into the live feeds. And then we’ll publish times for various events during the week like veto ceremonies and diary room sessions and other things that’d you’d know from Big Brother. We’ll let viewers know when those things will be happening live, and then we’ll be recapping them daily with short episodes and weekly with full episodes.

How will the communication work — notifications on iOS, emails, etc.?

Yep. And we’ll post all of it as a schedule on all of our platforms. The Weekday Recaps will be at the same time every day at 10 p.m. Eastern and 7 p.m. Pacific, and the weekly episodes will post on Wednesdays at 10 p.m. Eastern and 7 p.m. Pacific.

Will the cast be aware at all of what’s going on in the outside world this season? Are you doing that any differently?

They’re sequestered and won’t be aware of anything outside. They know the format of the show, and they know that “America” — subscribers — will have a great influence over them by picking the final winner. America is the jury.

So they won’t be getting any kind of feedback or any interaction — what’s trending, what people are saying.

No, they won’t have any of that. The game will still be the same game.

On CBS All Access, you have the last 1,200 episodes of The Bold and the Beautiful. Do you get a sense from that or from other shows where you have big catalogs of what the appetite is for ultra-deep binges?

About 70 percent of our viewership is of something current — episodes from the current seasons or live broadcasts. And then about 20 percent is from past seasons of shows and another 10 percent from library shows like The Brady Bunch or Cheers. For All Access, Big Brother was already one of our top three or four shows, so this was a great opportunity. It’s part of the reason we greenlit The Good Wife spinoff that we’re planning for early next year. That fanbase watches a ton of episodes, including back-season episodes.

Do you think there’s a big contingent of viewers that will sit in front of the Big Brother live feeds for just hours and hours every day?

That has already been happening for us with Big Brother because we’ve had the live-feed product for several years. We have hundreds of thousands of viewers who have watched millions of hours of Big Brother. For All Access, we were looking for premium users for a premium service, people who are big enough fans to want to subscribe.

What do you think drives that long engagement — The Truman Show aspect of it? Seeing people in this live microscope?

It’s the most successful game of its kind. It plays around the world on the voyeuristic, Truman Show level of watching someone else’s life. What’s also unique about this show is the sequestration of being cut off from the outside world and that it’s a game of survival. It brings out interesting things about people. They become bigger versions of themselves in that environment.

Are Survivor and Amazing Race conducive to this kind of live treatment?

Those are incredible reality competition franchises, but they don’t play out live. They would be challenging to live both from the standpoint of logistics and story. You could do pieces of it live like a competition — and we’ve done things like that — but the logistics would be fundamentally too challenging to do the whole thing live.

For The Good Wife spinoff, Star Trek: Discovery, and other shows you have in development, are you approaching those shows as products that are especially suited for streaming distribution — things like webisodes or interactive bits — that are different than the way they would work on linear TV?

Yes and no. We are going after core streamers with a format that they recognize. The weekly show for Big Brother: Over the Top will be 40 to 50 minutes with a live eviction that will feel like a traditional TV episode. The Good Wife spinoff and Star Trek: Discovery are headed down the path of one-hour TV. These shows are sold internationally and have to fit into certain parameters.

As to additional things, we’re frankly looking for that even on broadcast — extras that we can do — but it come down to how good the core content is and whether you can make that successful. Big Brother is a little different has a ton of elements that we can put together to make a weekly experience and not just a weekly episode, but it’s also a weekly episode.

For scripted, how conducive is All Access for things like pre-shows, post-shows? Is that where you think the bigger shows are headed?

We’re toying with things like after-shows or other things for superfans. For Star Trek, we’re having an archivist capture everything we create. We’ll get all of that into our organization and then figure out closer to the time of that show what it’s going to be. Even after-shows — something like Talking Dead — are not that far off from what you get with DVD extras. It’s directors and actors commenting on the episode. Some shows like Star Trek scream for more of that kind of engagement.

Are you planning to greenlight a particular number of original shows for 2017?

We have talking in terms of having four shows in the first 12 months. Big Brother is now. The Good Wife spinoff is in the February timeframe. We’ve talked about Star Trek being in May. Our fourth will probably be in late summer, and we haven’t announced anything on that yet.

You haven’t announced, but do you know what that show will be?

We’re narrowing the field. We probably won’t announce that until sometime next year.

A comedy? Another scripted drama?

We’re targeting things that we think will attract and retain subscribers to the service. We’ve talked about our strategy as being a premium version of CBS, so we think of it as targeting the CBS fan who wants more and will pay extra to get. It’s not necessarily outside the genres of CBS but plays to a narrower audience that will pay to get access to that programming.

The CBS All Access app does not authenticate for cable and satellite subscribers as most of the other network apps do. Is that something you’re still thinking about, or are you set on this being a product that sits outside of the cable ecosystem?

We have authenticated our live local feeds with two smaller operators, and we anticipate launching more over time. The five most current episodes of shows are available for free online and on our mobile apps, so consumers do not need to subscribe to CBS All Access to get recent episodes. If you want more, you have the choice to get CBS All Access.

Does the sign-up page for All Access nudge viewers toward either the ad-supported ($5.99) or ad-free ($9.99) tiers, or is it completely neutral?

It starts with the core product and shows you the commercial-free version as an option. It’s more targeted to the $5.99 product, but the ad-free option is there.

Is the ad-free option getting much uptake? Is it close to 50/50 with new subscribers?

We’re not releasing data on that yet. We’re not even 30 days into it yet, so the data wouldn’t tell you much yet. Adding an ad-free version was one of the biggest pieces of feedback we got, and we’re pleased with the result. I think it’s going to be a big part of the growth of the service. We want consumers to have the option.

Is the most recently announced subscriber number 1 million?

The most recent announcement was 2 million subscribers between All Access and Showtime that was approximately evenly split.

Did you see new subscriptions for premiere week consistent with what you expected?

Yeah, absolutely. We had a great launch for the season.