Seinfeld may have ended 22 years ago, but the comedy show is still remarkably big business. In 2014, Hulu paid $130m for exclusive streaming rights to the show. Then, last year, shocked by the sudden loss of Friends and the US version of The Office, Netflix poached it in an eye-watering five-year deal worth half a billion dollars. The sums that people will pay for Seinfeld are astronomical. If you own the streaming rights to Seinfeld, it is a demonstration to the world that you are a powerhouse. It means you are unstoppable.
I am telling you this because soon the British home of Seinfeld will be All 4, of all places. The first three seasons are scheduled to drop this Friday, with the remaining six becoming available weekly from then on. The world is filled to capacity with bigger, showier, richer streaming services all hurling bricks of money at anything that might nudge the needle of their market share a fraction of a millimetre. For a celebrated show such as Seinfeld to end up on All 4 is therefore massive. I have thought it for a while, but this cements it; in a quiet, low-key, very British way, All 4 is becoming the best streaming service we have.
All 4 doesn’t just have Seinfeld. Last year, it nabbed the rights to ER, another show from the golden age of network television that has refused to slip in popularity. It has a deal with Adult Swim, which means you can watch excellent offbeat programming such as Rick and Morty, The Eric Andre Show, Samurai Jack, Tim and Eric and the peerless Joe Pera Talks With You without having to chase them down on all sorts of dodgy, malware-ridden streaming sites. All 4 has Walter Presents, which remains an incredible source of hand-picked prestige foreign-language dramas that would otherwise go unnoticed in this country. It has a handful of Vice shows, The Shield, Community and The Other Two. It has just about every single thing that has ever been broadcast on Channel 4 and its clutch of sister channels. It is a phenomenal catalogue.
What I like best about All 4’s rise is that it has more or less come out of nowhere. Just a few years ago, I remember losing my mind at how terrible it was. I was trying to watch one of those nothingy late-period Homeland episodes, and couldn’t find it among All 4’s miserable, dropped-spaghetti-pile of a navigation system. Then, when I did, I was bombarded with what felt like three hours of unskippable full-volume adverts for terrible mobile games. It was such a miserable experience that made me enjoy Homeland even less than normal, if you can imagine such a thing.
But now everything seems to have clicked into place. The navigation is much less frustrating than before. If you really hate adverts, there is a paid tier that removes them. And the quality of stuff on offer – especially the imports – should be the envy of everyone else. Now that it is up and in decent fighting shape, the very existence of All 4 renders BritBox redundant.
It may not last, but what makes All 4 so special right now is that it has located a magical middle ground. It is smaller than Amazon Prime, which can feel like a dump truck of arbitrarily chosen TV shows. And its selection of imports just about noses it past iPlayer, which is terrific, but still quite narrow in scope.
All 4 is what you get when you let people with excellent taste curate a streaming service. Seinfeld is the cherry on the cake. We are lucky to have it.
