American Film Market Dailies

AFM wrapped its five-days of Conferences with the dedicated 90-minute session, The Rise of AVOD, with all the major players in the space and moderated by Bruce Eisen, President, Digital Advisors.  Hope you can include in your news.  Should you need additional quotes/information or are interested in receiving the video of the panel to review for a story, please let me know. 

Jeff Shultz, Chief Business Officer, Pluto TV, Adam Lewinson, Chief Content Officer, Tubi TV, Anthony Layser, Vice President, Partnerships & Programming, Xumo, Floris Bauer, President, Gunpowder & Sky, Julian Franco, Senior Director, AVOD, Vudu

Panellists:

Floris Bauer, President, Gunpowder & Sky

Julian Franco, Senior Director, AVOD, Vudu

Anthony Layser, Vice President, Partnerships & Programming, Xumo

Adam Lewinson, Chief Content Officer, Tubi TV

Jeff Shultz, Chief Business Officer, Pluto TV

SELECT QUOTES

DISTRIBUTION CONFERENCE

The Rise of AVOD

Jeff Shultz, Chief Business Officer, Pluto TV

“The counter-intuitive model of television is most people don’t know what they want to watch. They stumble upon our James Bond channel or on Unsolved Mysteries. We identify the catalogue, we turn it into a linear channel and immediately it [the James Bond channel] was one of the top 5 channels of our 200 channels. Who would have known?”

“We can appeal to audience members who are cord cutters. Our audience will lean back, scroll, find something to watch.”

Anthony Layser, Vice President, Partnerships & Programming, Xumo

“We’re offering a live TV experience for the non-cable subscriber. Xumo is creating an AVOD substitute for cable. We are seeing certain channels coming over and performing well on a space that was previously only on MVPD’s.”

“We see deep catalogues creating really interesting channels…we recently did a deal with “This Old House” with 40 or 50 seasons. No one in a VOD environment is going to go to 1985 episode 3 of “This Old House” specifically. What they would do is watch the linear channel and leave it on for hours at a time because they have a comfort level with that content brand. You can monetize deep catalogue household name series just like that. That’s the way that we look at this space as more of a cord-cutter cord-never live TV experience.”

Adam Lewinson, Chief Content Officer, Tubi TV

“We are a technology based company. We have to talk about the tech beneath the VOD world and about discovery. What I love about our tech is machine learning…the more we have a viewer watching, the more we understand their viewing behavior, the easier it is for us to feed recommendations and that’s where discovery happens. On Tubi every single day when I look at our data or internal ratings I see tons of indie movies performing at an incredibly high level and sometimes that’s a higher level than the brand name TV show or big studio feature.”

Julian Franco, Senior Director, AVOD, Vudu

“Most people go for free over paid…if you offer 10,000 movies available for free, chances are that most people just want to watch something to relax and unwind with.”

“People go for the free stuff, but a lot of our partners like Disney and Warner Bros. do a great job of creating demand for big blockbuster tent poles as well as independent films. They’re still really smart about how they release them so they will day-and-date them on TVOD sometimes and we will come in and license an AVOD window exclusively so we’ll take it on day 91 after the Home Entertainment window. This is the first year that we’ve seen that more people are engaging with free over a transaction, but the transaction is still a much larger piece of the overall revenue.”