- Neal, Kim, welcome Neal to you first,
how has streaming disrupted media advertising?
- Oh, that's... in some ways we're sort of coming back
to advertising is disrupting streaming.
It's been that long in some ways.
So, you know, the quick story as you know
is we all watch television and we watch cable.
Then all of a sudden Netflix came out.
Netflix is selling you a sub, you're watching this.
There are no ads.
Everyone's like, this is so great.
I'm just watching TV.
Of course, I'm paying 10, 12, 15 bucks a month.
Then I get a couple other services.
Soon enough I'm spending a couple hundred bucks a month back
to the way I used to with cable
after I cut the cord. All of a sudden I wake
up as a consumer and I say, "Oh my God
I got like a hangover from how much I'm spending."
All of a sudden I'm like, you know what?
Those advertisements weren't so bad after all.
And so consumers have gone back, then Pluto
and Tubi came around and then every streaming service
every single streaming service now has
an ad-supported tier.
So in some ways it hasn't disrupted.
In fact, what's happened is as consumers have cut the cord
they've all sort of now gone back
to watching ad-supported television
and the advertisers are thankful
'cause now they can reach consumers with their messages.
- Kim, how are you thinking about on-demand advertising?
- I think Neal did a great job of summarizing.
I would add that I do think it's actually a bit more complex
for advertisers, however, though
because people are watching when they want, where they want
how they want, that's the new premiere.
It's not Sunday night at nine o'clock
where you can anticipate 2 million people
to tune in at the same time, hit your reach
and frequency goals with two units and be done with it.
You've done your marketing campaign,
you've pushed it out to the scale you need.
Now you're talking about dozens
if not hundreds of units over a longer time period.
Or if you do have a tight window
like theatrical release or something like that,
you have to place potentially thousands of units
across multiple services to get the same number
of people at the same time.
So I do think it's gotten a little bit harder
for the advertiser and I think that
everyone's earning their paychecks these days.
- Yeah.
In terms of live content, with streaming
how are you thinking about that?
- So live is a really, I feel like it hasn't
it hasn't kind of, the wave has not crested yet.
I feel like, you look at...
so we have live through our own services.
The viewership is not actually what we anticipated candidly.
We also have our fast channels
on our services and the viewership there.
The streaming or live,
I'd actually kind of put both, meaning real time.
When I say streaming, a linear feed of content.
So continuous programming with a guide, this is on
at this time and it's going to keep going
whether you tune in or not, versus on demand.
I think when people are coming to services
they've been trained by the Netflix of the world.
I'm watching this when I want now
which is very different than live.
You're catching mid show.
It's appointment television is something that
I don't think has broken through yet.
Do I think live will break through?
I do, certainly with news and sports
and once they make the the leap over the hill,
I feel like the viewership will follow.
So there's opportunity on that frontier
which will help with the problem I described earlier
around reach and frequency goals in a realtime moment.
So I'm bullish on live in that format.
But where do you see this heading?
What are the indications, the trends
the things we should be looking out for?
Where's the future headed?
- Not to oversimplify it,
but I would say quality content always wins.
I still believe content is king and I think viewers
and consumers are smart.
I think that they are going to find what they want.
I think they're willing to put their wallet
where their eyes want to be.
And I think if you stay committed to that,
you're going to be just fine.
I think that being everything to everyone
is a very expensive, time-consuming proposition
that not many have been successful with.
So we're going to stay our course
and we think it's a winning model.
- That's a lesson for life, Kim.
Neal?
- Yeah, look, I, even though I'm not a sports guy
I'll use a baseball analogy, we're sort of
I think in the fourth inning or so,
maybe when we're in the top of the fifth inning,
so maybe we're halfway done.
We got a number of innings to get through
to figure out how this industry is going to play out.
And we don't yet know exactly where it's going to go.
Even in Cannes, you see it reported often
that there's rumors of some of the majors again
being brought together.
Whether that happens because of regulatory concerns,
I don't know.
But more consolidation's going to happen, but it's early on.
- Neal, Kim, thank you so much.
- Thank you.
- Thanks very much.