Blue Ant Media has gone full-bore into wildlife programming. Like, setting up a permanent camp in Zambia to shoot 4K footage full-bore.

The Zambia camp is where crews will shoot a chunk of the 300 hours of original 4K wildlife content Blue Ant has committed to producing each year to feed its Love Nature channel and content brand.

Love Nature is central to Blue Ant’s global growth strategy, explains Blue Ant CEO of television and digital, Raja Khanna. “We saw [Love Nature] being successful here, and Blue Ant is on a mission to expand internationally, and this was an obvious category to look at doing that. Partially because we saw the same gap which existed in Canada existed globally.”

And the deals are stacking up. Earlier this week, the media co announced it had launched joint venture Blue Skye Entertainment with U.S. net Smithsonian, to develop and distribute 4K wildlife content and in June, Khanna revealed at Banff that Love Nature would be offered as a standalone OTT app product in the U.K. The company also recently inked a deal to start filling that pipeline via an exclusive, multi-year output agreement with Toronto’s Cream Productions.

Blue Skye Entertainment ties the strategy together. The company will work to find global markets for the 300-plus hours of wildlife content (the majority of which will be made by foreign producers) Blue Ant is producing for the brand. That high production output also means Blue Ant can make a market-by-market evaluation on how they want to distribute programming, whether it be a sale to a third party, or retaining the rights and launching their own channels and SVOD services in certain markets.

“(Our target market) is the world. If we are not going to launch an SVOD service there, we are going to license the rights to somebody who is already operating there. If we are doing our job right, there won’t be a single country without Love Nature content,” Khanna said.

The focus on Love Nature as a global brand started in January, when Blue Ant announced it was rebranding its Oasis channel to Love Nature to address it saw as a gap in the market for high-quality, animal-focused programming.

The channel, which is 24-hour and commercial-free, has experienced ongoing subscriber and ratings growth in Canada since its launch, prompting Blue Ant to then start exploring how the brand could travel. Over the past five years, audiences for Oasis/Love Nature have grown by over 80%, and more than 500,000 viewers tune into Love Nature in any given week, according to Blue Ant Media. Khanna speculated that the appeal of Love Nature lies in its “immersive nature environment” and its status as what he calls “an antidote to traditional television.”

Facilitating the expansion of Love Nature is the growing prevalence of the technology that can be used for shooting 4K, he says, which makes wildlife content look particularly compelling, and the growing number of platforms, such as SVOD services, that content can be funneled towards.