Divaboxoffice.TV Is the Streaming Service for Queer Women You’ve Been Waiting For – Gizmodo Australia
We have reached peak streaming services. There are too many. At this point, I may as well have cable. If you’d told me a month ago that there would be an announcement of yet another new streaming service I would be excited about and keen to sign up for, I would have needed a quick break to go and scream into the void. However, we are now only days away from the launch of DivaBoxOffice.tv and it’s a service many queer women have been waiting their whole lives for, so maybe, one more streaming service couldn’t hurt.
If the DivaBoxOffice.tv name sounds familiar, that’s because it used to be the video-on-demand site for popular UK women’s magazine, Diva. Back in those days, it was a video rental service, but Christin Baker is relaunching it later this week primarily as a streaming service, but with some premium originals (like the new Christmas film Merry and Gay) available to rent or buy.
This is a similar premise to the Tello streaming service, also once launched and helmed by Baker, which offers premium holiday films for rent or purchase, like I Hate New Years, Christmas At The Ranch and Season of Love, as well as streaming shows. In an interview with Gizmodo Australia, Christin Baker said, “It differs from Tello in that I’m going to be able to do with DivaBoxOffice.tv what I wasn’t quite able to do with Tello, which is to make original content and do it more consistently.”
Her goal with DivaBoxOffice.tv is to get investors on board to be able to put up four pieces of original content a year, with some works already in the pipeline (including Scare B&B: The Hosts).
“Our pockets just weren’t deep enough to do all the things I wanted at Tello,” Baker said.
Aside from money, the other main difference with this new service is that Baker has more experience now.
“I first started Tello, like, 12 years ago. I was just a little baby entrepreneur being scrappy, doing what I can, and trying to figure out how to squeeze as much as I could from my nickel. I don’t know that anyone would have wanted to give me any money because I was unproven… So, now I’m coming to Diva Box Office TV having made all the mistakes. I know my fails, I know what not to do. I also have some amazing consultants and staff, people who are coming over with me,” Baker said.
Baker will still stay on as an owner of Tello, but won’t be involved with the day-to-day running.
Although having two streaming services for the relatively small and underserved audience of queer women sounds like it’ll split the market, or mean there isn’t enough content, Baker isn’t worried.
“Technically, there’s a third out there, there’s Lesflicks… I think there is enough content to support three. Though, that’s why I’m very, very committed to creating more original content for the community. At some point, I want to get our budgets large enough and ROI large enough to where I’m supporting other queer filmmakers to have on the site so I can say ‘hey, here’s X number of dollars, go make something original for Diva’. I just don’t think the community has quite yet gotten to that point where we’ve been able to do that and that’s my big, hairy, audacious goal: It’s to get large enough, not just to fund projects that I want to do, but also fund other up and coming, fantastic, lesbian and queer filmmakers.”
Besides, having multiple companies invested in making a lot of queer content can only be a good thing. There are heaps of services for white boomer women who want to see reserved English men solve crimes in quaint villages. Why can’t there be just as many services for me, someone who wants to watch women fall in love while also doing almost any activity during, not only a variety of festive periods, but also just a regular Wednesday?
I remember spending all my teen years trying to find someone who loved like me on TV so I could get a sense that it would be OK. It wasn’t until the later seasons of Pretty Little Liars that I got to experience the weirdness of femslash ship wars over two canon ships. Even six years ago you had to be active on Tumblr to find out where the great flamingo migration would be going to find the next lesbian on TV after your favourite died.
While there are so many more options now on free-to-air TV and streaming services, so many that you no longer feel forced to watch every substandard piece of content just to see a femme blonde’s painful coming out journey for the 100th time (which is important, but not the only story to tell), this progress isn’t guaranteed to last, as 2022’s trend of ‘cancel your gays’ has shown. One of Baker’s dreams for DivaBoxOffice.tv is to one day be able to save some of the orphaned shows that have huge fan bases.
Dia Frampton, who you might remember from season one of The Voice US, or films I Hate New Years and Christmas At The Ranch, is one of the stars of new movie Merry and Gay. It’s that desire to provide representation to people who have been deprived of it until shockingly recently, that keeps drawing her to being in these films.
“I feel like Christin does such a great job of just making human stories. There’s never a spotlight on anything,” Frampton said.
“It’s just the same way – I mean, this is a weird example – but people will always send me specific Asian movies and say ‘you should check this out’, and it’s like an Asian American film. And that’s great, I want to support all these, I’m Korean American. But I like to watch Asian American leads just in movies. It doesn’t have to be a spotlight on being Asian American. In fact, I like when there’s no spotlight on it, when it’s just telling a human story. And I think Christin does a really good job of that. It doesn’t have to be a painful coming out story during Christmas time, it can just be a warm, bubbly rom-com and you want these two people to get together. That’s why I love being a part of these movies.”
Merry and Gay and DivaBoxOffice.tv both launch on December 1. Head over here to sign up.