Leaders on Streaming, AI and More

From AI to webtoons to advertising and distribution innovations, the discussions featured Jan. 8 at the annual Variety Entertainment Summit at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas ran the gamut of hot topics driving the business of media and entertainment.

The daylong conference opened with a panel of top programming executives who weighed in on the big shifts in streaming content and the business focus of major networks and platforms.

Beatrice Springborn, president of NBCUniversal’s UCP and Universal International Studios, cited “the new normal” of commissioning and production volume following 2023’s actors and writers strikes and the wave of consolidation among media giants.

“There is an adjustment from the peak TV era where we’re not making hundreds and hundreds of shows. There’s more of a focus on what I’d say is Marquee TV,” she said. One welcome development she cited was the fact that networks and platforms are more open to partnerships and creative windowing for shows. “These partners who’ve never partnered before are doing projects together. And you’re able to see a wider audience and more exposure.”

Barry Jossen, president and head of A+E Studios, said the decline in volume has been good for the industry all around. “We’re working at a level right now that’s well-suited to the appetite of the platforms,” he said. ‘There’s always an appetite for [shows that] buyers feel are good. And it’s our job to deliver them and to provide them with a lot of choices.”

Rahul Purini, president of Sony Pictures Entertainment’s Crunchyroll anime streamer, pointed to the growth in interest in material from well outside Hollywood and New York. “There is growth in the aperture for content and stories that are not conceived or produced in the U.S.,” he said. “We are seeing that accelerate.”

Angela Russo-Otstot, chief creative officer of the Russo brothers’ AGBO content company, home of Amazon Prime Video’s “The Citadel,” pointed to revolutionary tools that are vastly expanding and streamlining virtual production capabilities. Epic Games’ Unreal Engine platform, which allows for speedy rendering of visual media, has been a game-changer. But she acknowledged it takes time for the creative community to get comfortable with the tech.

“The beauty of the Unreal Engine is what we can accomplish in animation there, and I’m really excited for partners to embrace it,” she said. “We’ve worked with several animation directors who were highly allergic to the idea when we first brought it up as a possibility. And then when they saw how it opened up so many creative opportunities for them, it became life-changing.”

Fernando Szew, president and head of Fox Entertainment Studios, was the first panelist of the day to mention AI – but he wasn’t the last.

“We call ourselves AI optimists,” Szew said, emphasizing that his studio is not looking to reduce human creativity with prompts fed into AI platforms. “We’re not thinking about letting people go, but we are definitely spending a lot of time and meetings and doing productive thinking through how can we use AI and what’s coming — and learnings from different aspects of the industry – as co-pilots as we navigate the future.”

Of course, the menu included a panel that drilled down on the generative AI initiatives and innovations that will have the biggest impact on entertainment. Fox Corp. CTO Melody Hildebrandt said the company is looking at two “top-down, big swings” when it comes to AI. One area is content discovery, to provide a “semantic understanding of content” that can produce relevant recommendations. She cited Fox’s Tubi, the free streaming service with some 200,000 titles; with AI, a user might enter a search like “elder millennials looking to watch a throwback hit,” which could suggest a movie in Tubi’s catalog like “13 Going on 30.”

Fox’s second area is to embed generative AI into its consumer apps to provide a more interactive and engaging experience — in a way that matches the voice of a particular brand. “ChatGPT is very bland, middle-of-the-road,” Hildebrandt said, referring to OpenAI’s chatbot. “One of the exciting things for the creative community is [for gen AI] to sound like us, to have a real diversity of voices.” For example, she said, an AI-enabled Fox Sports app might be able to understand and provide a snappy answer to a query such as: “Give me five facts for why Jaden Daniels is going to take the Washington Commanders all the way.”

A panel on breakthrough trends in technology yielded a lively exchange of perspectives on AI capabilities between Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, chief negotiator and national executive director of SAG-AFTRA, and Shahrzad Rafati, founder and CEO of RHEI, a content distribution platform that helps creators distribute and monetize content.

“More than 70% of content creators feel like they’re burnt out. Now we are entering an age where we’re transitioning from tools to [AI-enabled] agents. As humans, many times we think agents are a thing that is going to do a short task in a short period of time. Whereas actually agents are supposed to oversee long-term projects that you can delegate to them with very little supervision. So we are very much so excited about, you know, the ability to build agents that can actually act as these virtual team members that would allow for the democratization of creativity,” Rafati said.

Crabtree-Ireland, who leads a union that represents more than 160,000 performers, emphasized that traditional concepts of consent and compensation should not be subsumed by state-of-the-art technology.

“To the extent that these tools are being used to in any way replicate somebody to use their voice, their face, their body, their performance — that always has to be done with consent. And that’s not always being done with consent right now. There is a real problem with deepfakes. There is a problem with a lack of legal structure, giving people the right to control the use of their image likeness and voice. That’s something we desperately need to address.”

CES is all about discovering what’s new today and what’s coming down the pike tomorrow. David Lee, chief operating officer and chief financial officer of Webtoon Entertainment, came to the Entertainment Summit armed with eye-popping numbers that helped attendees understand the scope of the webtoon phenomenon.

The innovative medium started in South Korea but the popularity of the medium – think an online graphic novel presented as a blog-like scroll that is regularly updated with new material – has spread wide and far across the globe. Lee got the audience’s attention by noting that Webtoon generated $1.3 billion in revenue from millions of readers who pay small amounts (under $1 in most cases) to get early access to new material that is uploaded by DIY creators.

“For those in the audience who may not have heard of Webtoon, I have a feeling you may have seen a great live-action film and didn’t realize it came from us. And if you have friends and family who are in our core target, which is the Gen Z target, I know that they’re familiar with us,” Lee said. “We’ve got 170 million monthly active users, but we have 24 million creators who are creating over 120,000 stories every day. And the experience is truly digital and mobile, and it spans way beyond one genre.”

The upward trajectory of streaming platforms has been undeniable in the past decade. But for studios and other content creators, streaming profits have not kept pace with traditional sources of licensing and advertising revenue. Trade Desk is one of the companies looking to bridge that gap by offering easy one-stop shopping for advertisers and for streaming platforms. Even Spotify, which has no shortage of users, has partnered with Trade Desk to help bring in the blurb bucks. Trade Desk helps Spotify maximize sales volume and CPM rates.

“Just recently we’ve really taken a big step into the programmatic space and really opened up our inventory for the very first time to have real-time bidding across our platform with full addressability and with full data signals,” said Lee Brown, Spotify’s VP and global head of advertising business and platform. “That’s a big step for us and something we’re very excited about.”

Tim Sims, chief commercial officer of Trade Desk, emphasized that marketers need to rely on ad-sales aggregation efforts more than ever because, simply put, ubiquity matters. “A marketer should think about how they engage all of us as consumers in this holistic and omnichannel way,
Sims said.

“So when we talk about that holistic marketing, the North Star for people is really about having your media plan be more reflective of the consumer journey and the consumer experience on a daily basis. And we try to enable that in hopefully as easy as possible on our platform for them to execute and activate against that. They covet an audience. We want them to be able to reach that audience on Spotify,” Sims said. “We want them to reach that audience on Tubi and every other consumer touchpoint that they have throughout the day.”

Storytelling is another arena where the rigidity of old is giving way to much greater flexibility and choice that consumers have at their fingertips. That’s both a challenge and an opportunity, especially for the largest players in media.

“When we all consume content, whether it’s on a phone or a laptop, a device streaming, we want to feel seen, heard and understood,” said Carly Zipp, global director of brand marketing for Amazon Ads.

“Across all of our streaming reach, we have an audience of 275 million in the U.S. to serve up. And so the reach is there. If we can show people how to take that IP and stretch it across their devices and then show a brand, how to tap into that, then I think we’ve done our job.”

Michael Waghalter, senior VP and head of business development for the award-winning animation and stop-motion studio Laika, offered the content creator’s perspective on how important it is to tailor storytelling for specific platforms.

“What our fans really love about our films are how bold and original they are, and also the attention to detail. We do it at a level that really no one else in the world does,” Waghalter said. “We put a lot of time and care into what we do. And so anything we do when we launch a new platform, we want to make sure not only are we honoring and authentic to that IP and meet the fans’ expectations there, but we also want to make sure that it feels authentic to whatever that platform is.”

Samira Bakhtiar, general manager of global media and entertainment, games and sports for Amazon Web Services, gave the 30,000-foot view on the growth of live events as a driver for streaming platforms. AWS has a unique vantage point given its role in powering streaming platforms for other media giants in addition to its formidable Amazon Prime Video service. Putting a live sporting event or awards show on a streamer is harder than it sounds.

“Events are highly spiky with unpredictable amounts of traffic that you have to prepare for, not only to stream with high resolution and high quality, but also to be able to support the monetization ecosystem,” Bakhtiar said. “What we have to do to really understand what we’re garnering from that first-party data and helping our customers who have that data really figure out what they could do with audience segmentation, and then use that segmentation to personalize the experience for the advertiser as well as the consumer. It’s a privilege where we get to sit.”

Mike O’Donnell, chief revenue and strategic growth officer for Vizio, the streaming platform recently acquired by Walmart, echoed Bakhtiar’s observations in terms of the importance of innovation to maintain steady and repeat viewership

“When we think about how do you continue to engage, how do you continue to innovate, we think around ad formats,” O’Donnell said. “Advertising is an important business for not only us, but for all the partners here up on stage. I don’t have the attention span to sit through four-minute ad pods anymore. For the marketplace to continue to evolve, we need to start thinking more and more about how is content delivered. And then think about the ad formats that need to support it so that you can still create a great free

solution for customers and also be able to keep them engaged for long periods of time.”