On Thursday, January 22, however — the same day the Sundance Film Festival kicks off for the final time in Park City — AMC Networks is rebranding Sundance Now to be the definitive streaming destination for indie film… just like the festival Sundance is for indies.

Sundance Now will feature more than 1,000 hours of programming, and it will now have curated collections of indie films as well as a selection of IFC titles, which also shares AMC Networks as a parent company. Each month will have a new premiere, including upcoming films like “Violent Ends,” “100 Nights of Hero,” “The Plague,” “Forbidden Fruits,” and “Over Your Dead Body.” The service will also highlight a title every Friday, and it will feature curated collections of indies, starting with movies that have been standouts at film festivals like Sundance and others.

A few of the film titles that will be available at launch include “Boyhood,” “Ghostlight,” “The Babadook,” “Speak No Evil,” “How to Survive a Plague,” and “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work.”

Sundance Now is also an official sponsor of the festival and will be hosting a panel discussion on Saturday, January 24 at 1:30pm MT in Park City. The panel, titled “Building a Home for Independent Voices & Storytelling,” will feature Jay Duplass, Amy Redford, and Natalie Erika James — whose film “Saccharine” was just acquired by Shudder ahead of its festival debut — and head of AMC Networks’ IFC Entertainment Group Scott Shooman.

“As the global leader in targeted streaming, AMC Networks brings deep expertise in building streaming products that connect with passionate communities,” said Courtney Thomasma, executive vice president of AMC Networks’ linear and streaming products. “We’re thrilled to offer Sundance Now as a home for both filmmakers and film enthusiasts, leveraging our in-house film group and festival partnerships to promote access, discovery, and affinity for culture-defining stories and storytellers.”

“As audiences have more options, and become more demanding, we wanted to recreate the film festival experience by showcasing a program hand-selected across all genres, by some of the best curators in the business. Our company has built a legacy around nurturing new creative voices, thought-provoking stories, and boundary-pushing cinema. Sundance Now deepens that commitment, furthering our ability to showcase independent film across our full distribution ecosystem — from theatrical to streaming — and deliver a taste-driven gateway to audiences craving the best in independent storytelling,” said Shooman.

Streaming service Sundance Now is one of AMC Networks‘ “targeted” streamers, a collection that also includes AMC+, horror-centric Shudder, and ALLBLK for African American audiences. Yet even though the streamer shares the name of the Sundance Film Festival and Institute, the content on Sundance Now has largely been for scripted series, highlighting shows like “Close to Me,” “Motherland,” and “This Close.”

On Thursday, January 22, however — the same day the Sundance Film Festival kicks off for the final time in Park City — AMC Networks is rebranding Sundance Now to be the definitive streaming destination for indie film… just like the festival Sundance is for indies.

Sundance Now will feature more than 1,000 hours of programming, and it will now have curated collections of indie films as well as a selection of IFC titles, which also shares AMC Networks as a parent company. Each month will have a new premiere, including upcoming films like “Violent Ends,” “100 Nights of Hero,” “The Plague,” “Forbidden Fruits,” and “Over Your Dead Body.” The service will also highlight a title every Friday, and it will feature curated collections of indies, starting with movies that have been standouts at film festivals like Sundance and others.

A few of the film titles that will be available at launch include “Boyhood,” “Ghostlight,” “The Babadook,” “Speak No Evil,” “How to Survive a Plague,” and “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work.”

Sundance Now is also an official sponsor of the festival and will be hosting a panel discussion on Saturday, January 24 at 1:30pm MT in Park City. The panel, titled “Building a Home for Independent Voices & Storytelling,” will feature Jay Duplass, Amy Redford, and Natalie Erika James — whose film “Saccharine” was just acquired by Shudder ahead of its festival debut — and head of AMC Networks’ IFC Entertainment Group Scott Shooman.

“As the global leader in targeted streaming, AMC Networks brings deep expertise in building streaming products that connect with passionate communities,” said Courtney Thomasma, executive vice president of AMC Networks’ linear and streaming products. “We’re thrilled to offer Sundance Now as a home for both filmmakers and film enthusiasts, leveraging our in-house film group and festival partnerships to promote access, discovery, and affinity for culture-defining stories and storytellers.”

“As audiences have more options, and become more demanding, we wanted to recreate the film festival experience by showcasing a program hand-selected across all genres, by some of the best curators in the business. Our company has built a legacy around nurturing new creative voices, thought-provoking stories, and boundary-pushing cinema. Sundance Now deepens that commitment, furthering our ability to showcase independent film across our full distribution ecosystem — from theatrical to streaming — and deliver a taste-driven gateway to audiences craving the best in independent storytelling,” said Shooman.

Sundance Now is available for $7.99 per month and has a 50 percent off introductory discount when using the promo code SN50.

None of the outlets is a mass-audience juggernaut, but that’s never been the plan. As a portfolio they have grown steadily and offer the company more options for how to connect with consumers, some of whom are cutting and shaving the cord. Executives tell Deadline the four services combined will have north of 2 million subscribers by the end of 2019 and are on track to achieve profitability by the end of 2020. That’s a meaningful development for a company navigating a dramatically transforming pay-TV ecosystem.

“We’ve been moving increasingly into direct-to-consumer streaming. But we see our businesses as complementary with the major streaming services and not as a replacement for them,” COO Ed Carroll told Deadline in an interview.

Acorn TV, the oldest of the services (the others are Sundance Now, UMC and Shudder), is already in the black. It touts itself as the No. 1 North American purveyor of streamed British and international shows. London Kills, the first straight-to-series commission about a Scotland Yard detective team, is currently Acorn’s top draw, according to company data. Another popular title is Manhunt, which stars Martin Clunes in a drama about a series of crimes in London in 2004. ITV is a producer, with Acorn taking exclusive rights in North and South America.

Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror is an original Shudder documentary that is one of the horror-focused service’s most-viewed titles. It features Jordan Peele and others who trace the role of African-Americans in Hollywood through horror movies. Shudder and Sundance Now both streamed A Discovery of Witches, a fantasy drama that quickly became the most successful title in the two service’s history, driving record viewing and subscriber growth. Urban Movie Channel’s ramped-up original slate includes Monogamy, from director/screenwriter Craig Ross Jr., and the Daytime Emmy-nominated Bronx SIU. Eight to 10 new scripted and unscripted originals have been commissioned for 2020.

In parallel with the four subscription streamers, the company also operates commercial-free SVOD services AMC Premiere and IFC Films Unlimited, which are overseen by those networks’ teams. The latter debuted on Amazon Prime Channels and AMC Premiere launched in 2017 on Comcast before adding YouTube TV.

The streaming strategy began to take shape after AMC Networks took a minority stake in Acorn’s parent, RLJ Entertainment, in the fall of 2016. It went on to gain a controlling 80%. The company will report its quarterly earnings on Wednesday and while executives have touted modest overall subscriber gains in recent quarters, streaming is certainly part of the reason for that uptick.

Even as it looks to control more of its destiny, AMC Networks is still doing business with the major streaming services. At its Penn Plaza headquarters, there is a distinct lack of the kind of rhetoric coming out of traditional media peers like Disney, WarnerMedia and NBCUniversal about vows to reclaim their originals and the supposed shortcomings of established platforms. (Bob Greenblatt, who joined WarnerMedia as entertainment chairman and head of DTC efforts, told NBC soon after he came aboard that “Netflix doesn’t have a brand. It’s just a place you go to get anything — it’s like Encyclopedia Britannica.”)

As AMC’s first crop of originals Mad Men, Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead — started gaining momentum a decade ago, licensing deals with Netflix created more awareness for the company’s shows and also helped Netflix attract subscribers. Carroll called the company’s long-term relationship with Netflix a “win-win. Getting the Netflix money on the back end allowed us to make more shows.”

A key executive in the streaming mix for AMC Networks is Miguel Penella, president of global direct-to-consumer and also CEO of RLJE. He echoed Carroll’s assessment of the landscape.

“It’s not by happenstance that Netflix and Amazon are ahead of everyone,” he said. “One strength of theirs is expertise in customer relationships. That is a skill set that is fundamental. In our business, we look closely at all aspects of the customer experience. Things like credit card cancellations – we look at all of those details. In cable programming, it is a different animal – you are programming for prime-time events.”

Penella got to Acorn 15 years ago, when it was primarily focused on the DVD business. “That focus gave us a lot of understanding about the preferences of consumers and how to program to their interests,” he said.

Retaining subscribers remains a priority for AMC, as with all players in the streaming wars. The experience of streaming is designed to entail less friction than traditional pay-TV, but the ease of signing up and then cancelling a service — “churn,” in industry parlance — is a constant concern. It’s a distinct difference from the pay-TV world, where revenue streams are set for years at a time through carriage deals.

Because of the niche appeal of the AMC services, Penella said the company has churn rates that are the lowest in the industry. Also, at a time when Apple, Amazon and Roku and others deliver third-party apps to broad audiences, AMC Networks is resisting the urge to let those large tech partners dictate their strategy.

“Our churn is lower on our DTC platforms than when subscribers come in through Amazon or other avenues,” Penella notes.

With more options than ever, Carroll said, “We will be looking much more at the individual qualities of each show and making decisions about where it fits best.”

I admit there were several times during my stays in Park City in the years I covered the festival that I longed for a different way. On days when a current of warm air would turn the town’s plentiful snow into wet mush I would carry around on my ankles from one screening to another, or when a car full of high-school students would flip me the bird en masse for the sin of walking into the parking lot they were leaving, I would think: Wouldn’t it be great if you could go to Sundance without actually leaving your town, or even your house? I dreamed of a festival perk by which films would be simulcast to screening rooms in Manhattan. After all, we do have the technology. What’s missing, I presume, is the business model, and that thing they used to call corporate synergy.

In the meantime, Sundance Now, a streaming service started in 2014, at least carries the festival’s ethos, or portions of its ethos, to the home viewer. (These days, the Sundance cable channel functions as much as an outlet for nostalgia television as for movies and original programming.) Sundance Now, which is available as an app and an Amazon Video add-on, and also streams on the web, Roku, Chromecast and other boxes, costs $6.99 a month after a free trial month, and feels immediately closer to the film festival. Which is not to say that the service can make hits from the festival available by default. A lot of news from every festival, after all, has to do with the deals made for the many films that go to Park City without a distributor. The festival itself is not in the business of actual movie acquisition.

George Schmalz, the service’s curator, said that Sundance Now has “a genuine relationship with the festival.” He added: “There’s a constant dialogue about how to bring the festival and the service together. I’m hoping that someday soon there’ll be a joint project we can roll out with.” Meanwhile, the service keeps close to the festival by inviting filmmakers who have made a mark there to create collections of their favorite films from the service’s library, sometimes with brief text introductions.

Mark Duplass and his brother, Jay, are Sundance veterans — more than half a dozen films they either co-directed, produced or appeared in have had their premieres at the festival. Their Sundance Now picks include “Fish Tank,” “Raising Victor Vargas” and “Daddy Longlegs.” On the site, Mark Duplass wrote of the films: “There are a surprising number of elements in common: pinpointed point of view, an early film, nonprofessional actors, an uncontrolled style, low budget, raw emotion, and performances that make your subconscious wonder at times if it’s a documentary. These films feel like they have been made by someone specific.”

The comic actress Jenny Slate unveiled her collection at the end of February, writing, “I feel invigorated and encouraged when I watch films about unique, lively, vulnerable, often lonely people” and choosing, among others, “Crystal Fairy & the Magical Cactus,” “Heathers” and the documentary “Who Is Harry Nilsson?” The service also reaches outside the movie world for its guest curators, including the renegade chef and TV host Anthony Bourdain and the writer and activist Dan Savage.

Asked to cite a thread uniting various curators, Mr. Schmalz allowed that it was interesting that “maybe half the new guest curators have chosen ‘Gimme the Loot’ as one of their favorite films.” This 2012 film is an exuberant picture about young graffiti artists that A. O. Scott of The New York Times called “loose and rambunctious.” The site’s noncelebrity-selected categories reflect the assumed aspirations of the indie buff: There’s “Fix the Planet,” with a dozen titles, including both “Crude” (about oil) and “Crude Impact” (about the impact of oil), and “Sexual Discovery,” with a relatively meager four, including the 2014 James Franco-produced documentary “Kink.”

The site is fun to explore without a docent, too. It’s full of movies whose reputations, or those of their filmmakers, were made at Sundance: Neil LaBute’s still-shocking 1997 “In the Company of Men”; the aforementioned “Raising Victor Vargas” (2003), a coming-of-age drama directed by Peter Sollett that is set in a Lower East Side Latino community; Tom DiCillo’s still-funny 1995 comedy, “Living in Oblivion.” Perhaps not surprisingly, a good number of films featuring the indie icon Greta Gerwig have come to roost here, from the acclaimed 2013 “Frances Ha” to the more obscure but still worthwhile “The Dish and the Spoon,”from 2012. Foreign films are not prominent, but the titles in that category include two by Eric Rohmer, which is never a bad thing. And as is almost always the case on streaming services, there are a couple of head-scratchingly random selections, such as the 1971 made-for-TV sports tear-jerker “Brian’s Song.” The site has also branched out from movies and is now offering the second season of an original series, “The Bureau,” about a clandestine wing of the French Secret Service.

In 1999, the first year I went to Sundance, the horror picture “The Blair Witch Project” was the talk of the festival, to the extent that a young filmmaking couple I encountered one day on a relatively empty bus was pretty downhearted about the lack of attention their own movie was getting. They had brought their film, which made waves the year before in Toronto, to the “alternative” festival, Slamdance, which takes place in Park City simultaneously with Sundance, but it wasn’t getting any buzz. They were the director Christopher Nolan and the producer Emma Thomas. The film they had brought, “Following,” which has some interesting relations to Mr. Nolan’s subsequent blockbuster “Inception,” is also available to view on Sundance Now.

A cinematic playground for film lovers, this on demand streaming service brings you the very best in award-winning films, documentaries, and original series. With a mission to provide its audience with the very best in ground-breaking entertainment, Sundance Now celebrates and embraces new and diverse creative voices with enthralling content not found anywhere else.

From captivating documentaries to hard-to-find releases, Sundance Now offers a little something for everybody. Interested? Here’s everything you need to know about Sundance Now!

I’m a busy man, woman, or very advanced child: How much is Sundance Now gonna cost me?

Sundance Now is available for just $6.99/month or $59.99 for an annual membership ($4.99/month). Interested? You can sign up for the service right here!

Does Sundance Now offer a free trial period?

They do! Sundance Now offers a 7-day free trial period that allows you to sample the website.

Where can I watch Sundance Now?

You can access Sundance Now through a variety of devices. You have the ability to watch instantly on Apple TV, Android, Roku, Chromecast, or the web — all with a single account! Currently, the service is only available in the United States and Canada.

Do subscribers receive ad-free content?

They do! Sundance Now is an ad-free, premium subscription video on demand service.

What kind of content does Sundance Now offer?

Sundance Now attempts to bring the Sundance brand to streaming by offering members high-quality storytelling through an intriguing mix of independent film, TV shows, documentaries, and original series.

Sundance Now can even help the ficklest of film fanatics find something to watch with their curated collections. From Mark and Jay Duplass to Mackenzie Davis to the team behind Documentary Now, Sundance Now offers a variety of different movie and documentary suggestions from some of your favorite filmmakers.

Can you provide a few samples of films that are currently available to stream on Sundance Now?

Sure! A complete list of the films, documentaries, and series currently being offered can be found here, but beloved indie favorites like Liberal Arts, Heathers, Hannah Takes the Stairs, Bottle Rocket, Weekend, Off the Rails, and Frances Ha are available to stream along with captivating documentaries about bands like The Velvet Underground and The Flaming Lips.

Here are two of our favorite selections currently available to watch:

In Search of a Midnight Kiss

An engaging, bittersweet exploration of love, sex, and romantic potential, In Search of a Midnight Kiss follows two strangers as they get to know one another in a sometimes sweet other times abrasive manner.

The Myth of the American Sleepover 

David Robert Mitchell’s The Myth of the American Sleepover is a poignant slice of life that deeply evokes all the ups and downs of adolescence. Stream this indie gem on Sundance Now today!