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David Nevins, president of Showtime, admits that having the company’s shows scattered across different stations in the past meant viewers didn’t always identify with the brand.Darren Calabrese/The Globe and Mail

Showtime is pushing more aggressively into Canada, looking to establish itself as a household name alongside the likes of HBO thanks to a sweeping rights deal signed with Bell Media in January. David Nevins, the U.S. network's president and the driving force behind its edgy, adventurous programming style, admits to some frustration: Having the company's shows scattered across different stations in the past meant viewers didn't always identify with the brand. He likes making "heterogeneous" shows by "idiosyncratic" creators, and he wants audiences to expect that from Showtime. And at a moment of upheaval in the television world, the network knows it needs to stand out. After a recent launch event in Toronto, Mr. Nevins discussed the tricky business of making premium television.

You said [at today's launch] TV is at an "interesting moment of structural change." What do you mean by that?

Clearly consumers are demanding: they want what they want, when they want it, where they want it. So it's kind of our jobs to give them choices, opportunities, different ways, different places to get the content [they] want. And let's be honest, everyone's lining up at the starting gate – all the big media companies – with new ways to deliver content over the Internet.

What is Showtime's strategy for streaming services?

Well in the U.S., it's certainly evolving. And [the CEO of CBS Corp., Showtime's parent company], Leslie Moonves, has said we're going to have a streaming service with our current distributors, with new distributors, in some fashion this year. So it's fairly imminent. But, you know, we make an enormous amount of money in the current ecosystem. And we want to augment it, we don't want to disrupt it. So we're all balancing the same thing. But there's a lot of people shaking up the status quo.

There's also lots said and written about entering a Golden Age in television, that there's more good content than ever, that people want more challenging shows. Is that true?

Yeah, I think it is true. And audiences have gotten narratively really sophisticated and they're willing to sit and watch really sophisticated, complicated, challenging television as long as it's compelling.

How did you make them that way?

I think we figured out how to monetize niche audiences, sophisticated audiences. I think there's a straight line of the more stories you watch growing up, the more sophisticated stories you'll consume as you get older. And my 12-year-old son is way more sophisticated, narratively, than I was when I was 12. He's able to read clues faster, he's able to know where things are going. So the pressure's on us to remain surprising and remain unpredictable.

Can the changing business model sustain that?

The business model has fostered that because, in a subscription model, you don't need as many people as you do in an advertiser-supported model. The advantage that the HBOs and Showtimes have is that people are used to the value proposition of having to pay every month for it. They get that it's valuable. And that's what everybody in the media business wants.

I've read that you still green-light shows on intuition. Streaming services provide more granular viewer data on viewing. Will you tap into that?

I'm suspicious. It will be interesting to see … I love data. And I'm certain it will be particularly useful if I'm targeting a particular demographic on this site – should I be featuring Ray Donovan or should I be featuring The Affair? It's not going to tell me what the next breakthrough programming is. It will tell me, keep going with something that's like something else. But at the end of the day, the things that make your brand are the breakthrough things.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

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