Chris Pfaff moderated a timely session – ‘Defining the New Pay TV Bundle and the Path to Growth and Engagement’ – with Barry Tishgart (ex-Disney, ex-Comcast) and Chris Defendis (ex-Warner Bros.) at NAB NY at Jacob Javits Center in New York City on October 25, 2023.

You can watch the entire session at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QO1bbuID8S0

Chris Pfaff, Barry Tishgart, Chris Defendis, and Dan Rayburn (executive producer of the NAB Streaming Summit)

Chris Pfaff, Chris Defendis, and Barry Tishgart, after the panel

Barry Tishgart, conveying a point during the panel

Chris Pfaff moderated an all-star panel on the FAST industry sector – ‘FAST Times: Keeping Up with the FAST Ecosystem’ – during the virtual Streaming Media Connect conference, on August 24, 2023, with Christina Chung, from Estrella Media; Damian Pelliccione, from Revry; Marisa Elizondo, from Fubo, and Jeff Flanagan, from HARTBEAT.

You can watch the entire session at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZglJiD-iy5A

Read Steve Nathans-Kelly’s piece on the session in Streaming Media, dated November 7, 2023 and Tyler Nesler’s piece from September 15, 2023 below:

The State of FAST: Around the Horn with Fubo, Estrella Media, and HARTBEAT

With all the talk of FAST 2.0 and the explosion of FAST channels to the point of approaching market saturation, is FAST’s self-reinvention a foregone conclusion, or even advisable at this juncture? What are the new and emerging FAST growth strategies that are driving growth today, as opposed to a year or two ago? And how have the strikes in Hollywood that consumed at least 2 quarters of the year impacted channel and content development? At Streaming Media Connect 2023, Chris Pfaff of Chris Pfaff Tech Media posed these questions to three executives from key players in the FAST ecosystem: HARTBEAT, Fubo, and Estrella Media.

For Kevin Hart-founded entertainment network HARTBEAT (formerly known as Laugh Out Loud), the emerging FAST strategy has been surprisingly YouTube-focused. “We’re seeing more growth in viewership minutes and numbers, but with the caveat that where we’re seeing that growth is on the big ones–Tubi, Pluto, Samsung, Roku,” says Jeff Clanagan, President and Chief Distribution Officer at HARTBEAT. “We just launched a FAST channel on our YouTube page, which is doing extremely well. We’ve only been up about four months now. The advantage that we had in doing that is we already had a YouTube page that had five million subscribers on it. So what we were able to do–which I think only a couple of people have done– is launch our FAST stream on our YouTube page versus a separate FAST stream in another environment in YouTube. So we are able to tap into that audience that we’ve already curated.”

For sports-centric live TV streaming network Fubo, the strategy of leaning heavily into FAST with new channel launches has continued apace despite the writers and actors strikes that have largely halted the production or infusion of new content. “Fubo is a live streaming platform,” says Fubo VP, Content Strategy & Acquisition Marisa Elizondo. “We’re sports-focused. We’ve leaned in very heavily over the past year into the FAST space thinking, ‘There is probably a happy medium between the FAST world and the traditional linear networks. So over the past year, we were taking a slow and steady approach to launching FAST channels, and we actually leaned in quite heavily and launched about 100 FAST channels. And what’s unique about us is that we’ve mixed them in between all of the packaging. So if you pulled up our channel lineup, you would see that all of the FAST channels are kind of mixed in. And it’s been great. Despite the strikes, we have still had a ton of inbound requests of new networks that are trying to get launched, trying to get eyeballs. So I’m rather busy in taking all of those, but I don’t think the strikes have deterred any independent nets or new nets from trying to get additional distribution.”

“FAST has grown significantly,” said Christina Chung, VP Business Operations at Spanish-language multi-platform media company Estrella Media. “In the last three years, our business at Estrella has really grown from FAST distribution at $0 to a multi-million-dollar business. We work with a number of different partners such as Fubo where we have our four channels: Estrella TV, Estrella News, Estrella Games, and Cine Estrella, which is our movie channel. And we’ve seen astronomical growth because I think viewers in the world are looking for places where they can find content outside of just buying a cable subscription or a broadcast subscription. So it is an opportunity to have a free ad-supported television experience that is very similar to the traditional linear business. And Estrella has put all of our marketing dollars into FAST and do have our own app, but FAST is our bread and butter at this point. It’s grown into this behemoth where we work very closely with all of our different distribution partners and we work on different content strategies with each of them.”

How Premium Brands Are Leveraging FAST

by Tyler Nesler, Streaming Media

September 15, 2023

As with any other entertainment streaming genre, the engine driving FAST is the monetization of content, and as with large-scale live events in particular, FAST thrives on pairing brands with properties and serving those brands effectively. In this clip from Streaming Media Connect 2023, Chris Pfaff, CEO, Chris Pfaff Tech Media, Producers Guild of America (PGA), VR AR Association (VRARA), talks with Damian Pelliccione, CEO / Co-Founder, Revry, how Revry works with brands and the sort of brand identification with key Revry programming that enables the industry’s leading LGBTQ+ programming destination to thrive and grow.

“There’s more innovation happening every day in FAST,” Pfaff says. “Damian, what’s interesting is a lot of people think, ‘I’ve heard of these guys Revry and what they’re doing. They’ve got these brands, they’re FAST. This isn’t subscription, this isn’t even AVOD. How do you do that? Are [people] coming to you saying, ‘I see something really both subversive and also very clever in that strategy of pulling people in who have disposable income, brands who want to attach themselves because there’s an audience, not because they just like throwing cash around. Do you find other people who are looking to pay you flattery by imitation, or where is that going?”

“I think the biggest thing we did is we built distribution and we built audience,” Pelliccione says. “We’re over 5 million monthly active viewers across all of our apps and channels, with almost 80% of that coming exclusively from our FAST channel partners. And we’ve leveraged the opportunity to sell that inventory at really high CPMs. We’re selling at the height, during Pride season, at 50, 60 CPMs, the entry point being 35, because we’re a very affluent market. We have the [highest] amount of scale of video inventory in CTV addressing this market, and we’ve not been challenged. We’re really the thought leader in this space.”

Pelliccione emphasizes that the core of FAST effectiveness is having great and original content. “Obviously, that takes the cake, where our original programming is completely underwritten by brands, de-risking all of the opportunity, us owning all of that IP,” they say. “We did over 1.5 million views in two weeks for a Voguecompetition show that was completely underwritten by Henkel’s got2b brand, the hair gel and dye, which I’m wearing right now, and Nike, which I’m also wearing right now. I obviously like to support all the brands that support us. And a shout out to John Lear, Mark [Bracero], and Linda [Morel] at Triple Threat Productions. We’re seeing multi-Emmy award-winning producers. Mark has five Emmys for Queer Eye. He’s nominated currently. Linda, having won for Key & Peele, is currently nominated for A Black Lady Sketch Show. Producers from traditional media are trying to get into the FAST and the AVOD market and work with networks like Revry because they see us scaling our business, scaling our original content opportunity, working with brands, and creating. We only create unscripted content from an original standpoint, and seeing [opportunities] like Drag Latina, which Triple Threat is producing for us right now. We did a million live impressions when we announced that show [and] when we actually premiered season one last fall, and they’re producing season two right now as we speak in Los Angeles.”

Chris Pfaff moderated an expert panel, ‘Virtual Theatre: The Metaverse Smashes the Four Walls’ at Augmented World Expo at the Santa Clara Convention Center, on June 2, 2023, with Scarlett Kim, from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and Kiira Benzing, from Doubleeye Studios.

You can watch the entire session at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHwfARlXOBE&list=UULFutPI2lji_hFToXec7qOCFA&index=3

Chris Pfaff moderated an expert panel – ‘Driving Audience Engagement with Interactive Streaming’ – at the TV of Tomorrow Show at Fort Mason, in San Francisco, on May 25, 2023, with Evo Heyning, from RealityCraft; Tom Link, from MuxIP, and Adam Dornbusch, from EnTribe.

You can listen to the full session at:

https://soundcloud.com/chris-pfaff-1/tvotsf2023-driving-audience-engagement?si=bc23c4e854aa4fb0b62ff0017c6695ca&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

Chris Pfaff moderated a session, ‘Large-Scale Streaming for the Metaverse: Building for a World of Active Participation,’ at Streaming Media East 2023, on May 18, 2023 at the Westin Copley Place Hotel in Boston, that featured some of the leading immersive streaming pros, including Alan Bucaria, production manager for Media.Monks, Sean Gardner, head of video strategy and market development for AMD, and Joshua Johnson, senior director, solution architects, for EdgeNext.

AMD and Media.Monks had recently worked on a Post Malone Oculus VR project, ‘Post Malone’s Twelve Carat Toothache: a VR Experience,’ a virtual concert, and discussed the need for higher-resolution, low latency streaming for immersive experiences. The group also discussed the videogame industry’s work in large-scale virtual events – from Travis Scott’s Fortnite concert (27.7 milliion unique players, with 12.3 million concurrent users) to Sony PlayStation’s State of Play – and the increased use of Unreal Engine, Unity, and Lumberyard to enable creators to build their own worlds in 2D or 3D for large-scale audiences.

Check out the full session at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CI0lfi2r60&list=PLcSb1s2U3uyBUDeDrnavJrQB9WrIEZgVg&t=134s

Sean Gardner, Chris Pfaff, Joshua Johnson, and Alan Bucaria after their Streaming Media East 2023 panel

Tom Butts (left) and Chris Pfaff (right) at the virtual tvtech Summit – March 29, 2023

Chris Pfaff was the keynote speaker at TV Technology’s tvtech Summit, a virtual half-day event on March 29, 2023 that featured leaders in the production technology industry, in a conversation with TV Technology editor-in-chief Tom Butts. Titled ‘Why You Should Care About the Metaverse,’ the March 29th conversation dove into topics regarding persistent computing, VR and AR, and some definitional discussion over the course of 30 minutes.

You can watch the entire discussion at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzk61rqUEhc&t=3s

Tom Butts wrote this preview (see below) in TV Technology, which was published on March 23, 2023.

On Wednesday, March 29, TV Tech will be holding its Spring TV Tech Summit, a series of keynote conversations, panel discussions and case studies covering the latest advances in Media and Entertainment tech.

Opening the summit, TV Tech Editor in Chief Tom Butts will talk with Chris Pfaff, founder of Chris Pfaff Tech/Media LLC, and a leading new media and technology producer and strategist on “Why You Should Care about the Metaverse.”

Chris’s 30+ year background in the industry makes him uniquely qualified to speak about this technology which (some would characterize) as “emerging” for more than a decade.

For those of us who think the metaverse is just another name for virtual reality, Chris is ready to debunk that trope.

“The metaverse is a shared decentralized digital space where you can meet, create and share a personalized experience,” he said. “But you can do that in  virtual reality and in other technologies as well. And I think that someday soon, perhaps not that many years from now we will have more projectable holograms that will reflect how people currently view the future of the metaverse.

“What makes the metaverse different from virtual reality is that it has to be immersive and it has to be persistent,” Chris added. “It has to have some community which may have some connections to what you experience in the physical world. It doesn’t have to be a simulacrum of what you do in the physical world where you are just ‘layering on.’”

Making the metaverse more immersive is key, not just to entertain us but to educate us as well, Chris says

“For example, if you were studying meteorology or cosmology and somebody was teaching you about the stratosphere and the ionosphere, using the metaverse to provide a more fully immersive kind of experience could really revolutionize the way we communicate and teach,” he added.

 

The virtual and hybrid event production industry has benefitted from learnings forced upon it by the pandemic. Mostly, this involved the assurance that video delivery had reliability and Quality of Service (QoS). Interactivity, virtual backgrounds and immersive extensions delivered greater capabilities for audiences and producers alike. This was the background for the February 14, 2023 Streaming Media Connect session. ‘How to Do Virtual and Hybrid Events Right,’ moderated by Chris Pfaff and featuring John Porterfield, webcast producer from Social180 Group; Alex Lindsay, head of operations with 090 Media, and Dan Houze, VP, encoding & digital strategy with BCLive.

You can watch the entire session at:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7QkwVemzK0&t=2s

Tyler Nesler, writer for StreamingMedia.com, wrote such an excellent encapsulation of the session, that I am including it here for your reading:

Hybrid events have become much more common since the pandemic, but they have not proven to be as effective or engaging as in-person events. What are some of the issues that prevent the best QoE for hybrid participants, and how can they be remedied? Chris Pfaff, CEO, Chris Pfaff Tech Media, VR AR Association (VRARA), discusses these issues with Alex Lindsay, Head of Operations, 090 Media, and Dan Houze, VP, Encoding & Digital Strategy, BC Live in this clip from Streaming Media Connect 2023.

Chris Pfaff begins by pointing out that it was not too long ago that streamed live events were audio-only, and that it was only just before the pandemic that video began to be widely incorporated into the experience for virtual audiences. The pandemic accelerated the process of developing higher-quality streaming video at scale. However, even with the leap of improvements for QoE, much remains left to be desired. “I think for any event that you’re talking about, whether it’s a corporate event [or] a concert, that’s a huge issue,” he says. “So I really want to start with that as a topic because when we’re all involved in these events, I think we’re very forgiving. But you know, scale is such a huge part of this.” He asks Alex Lindsay of 090 Media, “What’s your take on how far we’ve come in terms of really getting that quality experience and that scale?”

“I think we’re starting to get there,” Lindsay says. “[But] I think we’re sliding backward a little bit. You know, now people want to come back into the room, and I think that the ways we’re coming back into the room have been sliding us back into the 2015, 2016 range.” He laughs and says, “You know, I’ve been doing this a bit longer than ma ny people…”

“We can tell by the gear behind you!” Pfaff says.

“2008, 2009 is when we really started streaming video,” Lindsay says. “And the main thing is that we aren’t doing it that much better now in some cases when we go back to physical events.” He refers to webinars such as Streaming Media Connect, “A lot of these events are starting to work. The problem is that there’s data that we have from 10 years ago that told us that the hybrid events weren’t working, and they’re still not working.”

Pfaff says, “So as an adjunct, that you’re a second-class citizen if you’re not in the room, you should be happy that there’s a camera with a terrible angle of five people on a stage. Is that what we’re talking about?”

“Yeah,” Lindsay says. “When we started, it made sense. You know, we’re streaming Dreamforce, and there’s 15,000 people in the room and 300 people watching, you are second class…”

“For those who don’t know, Dreamforce is Salesforce,” Pfaff says. “It’s Salesforce’s mondo over-the-top annual event.”

Lindsay emphasizes that the core issue is a virtual audience’s sense of not being fully connected to a live event, which ultimately colors their perception of the event’s significance. In that situation, he says, “They don’t feel like the event’s important. They don’t feel like the product is important. They don’t feel like a lot of these things are important, and we don’t talk enough [about that].”

“So you’re saying that in some respect, there’s a brand disconnect?” Pfaff says. That you’re damaging your brand to some extent?”

Lindsay notes that not only does this sense of disconnect damage the brand, but it hampers enthusiasm for virtual participants to return to the event. “It’s the most devastating way to do this because they don’t complain,” he says. “People who complain care about the event, they want it to be better. People who don’t complain oftentimes are just disappearing. We’ve called them and said, ‘Hey, why didn’t you come?’ ‘Well, I was just busy.’ You know, it wasn’t like ‘I’m mad that I felt like I was in the back of the room…’”

Pfaff points out that accessibility is also a critical issue that does not get enough attention. He asks Dan Houze of BC Live about his insights into audience accessibility, not just for digital-first events like webinars but particularly for hybrid events.

Houze narrows the accessibility issue down to consumer versus internal audiences. “I think that a lot of times the virtual shows we’re doing, or the hybrid shows or digital-first shows that we’re doing are sort of just corporate-driven and they’re sort of internal meetings,” he says. “It’s not necessarily launching a keynote for a new product or something like that.”

Lindsay agrees but contends that engagement matters no matter what the type of hybrid event, even corporate ones. “You still have to keep all the employees going in the same direction,” he says. “When you create an event where they don’t feel important, you’re not getting quite the same charge out of your corporate event.”

Jonathan French, Chris Pfaff, Jasmin Rezai, Jorge Balleste, Tony Kelly

Pfaff directed the conversation to the emerging FAST strategy in LATAM, including using FAST channels to upsell viewers to premium content, as Tony Kelly acknowledged for CINDIE. Jorge Ballesta’s Vix – which encompasses more than 40,000 hours of content in all genres – became part of the discussion. Pfaff discussed the “FAST is the new cable” mantra with the panel, and even discussed how FAST is also the new “independent TV.” With a shout-out to TelevisaUnivision’s Luis de la Parra, a leader in branded content, Pfaff discussed the growth of FAST channels as a promotional vehicle.

Chris Pfaff moderates the ‘Producing in XR: How to Navigate Challenges’ panel at the Immerse Global Summit Miami at the Fontainebleau Hotel on Wednesday, December 7, 2022.

Speakers included:

• Michael Owen, MediaCombo
• Grace Ng, ‘Crash Punks’
• Ian Beacraft, Signal & Cipher

Chris Pfaff moderated the ‘Virtual Theatre: The Metaverse Smashes the Four Walls’ session, which opened Day 2 of the Immerse Global Summit Miami, produced by the VR AR Association, on Tuesday, December 6, 2022, with an all-star panel, featuring:

• Alyssa Landry, Doubleeye Studios
• Brandon Powers, BP Projects
• Kiira Benzing, Doubleeye Studios
• Sylvana Levy, Sylvana Levy & Co.

The session opened with a salsa entrance – to Marc Anthony’s ‘Valió la Pena’ – that got the crowd up and dancing.