PlessTV - Sean Atkins W Freewheel 797

[Beet.TV Innovators in Video] [Series presented by FreeWheel] [FreeWheel: Serving the Video Revolution] [Sean Atkins, SVP, Digital Media, Discovery Communications] I'm on a panel called Unbundling: Creating Content from Multiple Platforms, and our panel today is going to be talking a lot about how media companies and content providers are really getting much more aggressive about creating content from its very inception that sits on multiple platforms, whether that's mobile, VOD, different distribution opportunities over-the-top, Internet, and the like. Including not only just making original content, but repurposing content that may be done in a core business and expanded to multiple platforms. You know, it's sort of a natural evolution for Discovery, because Discovery is one of the few media companies that owns all the rights to what we make. We already have entities such as an internal studio, both on the international and the domestic side. We've had a very strong digital business that's been making content in short form for a considerable period of time. And most recently, we acquired Revision3 who is probably the most high-quality, original video creator in the Internet space. So using all those assets is kind of our DNA of what we do, trying to become the number 1 nonfiction company, not only as we are already on the traditional platforms, but against every screen. We really think that we're going from a hundred-million-household world to a billion-screen world. And so in executing on that, we naturally think, at all times, when we create an asset, what's an additional asset that we should be creating simultaneously? Where else can we put it? Where else can we put them? Who should we be partnering with to make sure we have the best experiences for our consumers? And really just taking the DNA of what was historically done globally, and making sure we kind of consider the multi-platform from a consumer's perspective at all times. As soon as we merged with Revision3, within a matter of weeks, Phil DeFranco, who's a huge Internet talent and a member of the Revision3 family, came and hosted Shark Week for us, which is our biggest global footprint. So if there was a case study on synergy, that's probably the best place to start. It was successful for everybody. If you look at the social footprint in the cable networks during that time, we controlled over a third of all social conversation was going on about what was happening with us and Shark Week. So it was very successful for us. We even have great examples, historically, that are going the other way. Our "How Stuff Works" group has great talent, such as Josh and Chuck, who do "Stuff You Should Know" podcasts, which are very successful for Apple. We've actually moved them, and they're going to be doing a live series on the Science Channel coming next year. And the third example that we like to talk about is, when we go with our production company partners and we produce traditional TV shows, we often partner our original video studio team to make additional content. One of our most recent examples is, we did something with Long Island Medium which provided additional content after the show for fans to watch. It was so successful online that we repackaged it, put it on air, and it actually got the highest ratings for that time slot in the last 3 years. So some pretty good success so far. Obviously, you can tell Discovery's getting to be very aggressive in this space in terms of our Revision3 acquisition, our internal investment in--we have an original studio that already invests in the space, and part of that is because we know--our consumers have told us-- they are already engaging with what we're doing. We see the trends in the marketplace, and our approach is, let's satisfy what we've always done as a company, which is satisfy curiosity regardless of platform, and we'll not follow, but we'll do as many experiments and as many successful campaigns as we can and find out where it's going to go. We're big believers in second screen; it's early days. Nobody knows. Is it going to be one platform? Is that Twitter? Is that Facebook? Our answer is, let's try all of them and see what the consumers tell us is the right answer. You know, what are the right business models for video? Is it subscription basis, is it advertising? We don't actually know, so we're doing all of them as experiments as well. And so it's really--we have a very experimental attitude towards the space, because we believe that by engaging with our consumers and taking a lot of those shots, we're going to find the answers, along with the entire industry. [Beet.TV Innovators in Video] [Series presented by FreeWheel] [FreeWheel: Serving the Video Revolution.] [The root to the media revolution Beet.TV] [www.beet.tv]