Ahead of StreamTV Show, Greg Diefenbach, EVP of streaming at Blue Ant Media, joins ScreenMDM Talks to break down why scale, brand clarity, and genuine platform partnership are the keys to surviving—and thriving—in today’s fragmented streaming landscape.
Diefenbach joined Blue Ant following its acquisition of MagellanTV, the factual streaming platform he co-founded in 2018. Joining forces with Blue Ant was the right move for the company amid this fragmented streaming landscape where scale and global reach are paramount, Diefenbach tells ScreenMDM Talks in our The SwitchScreen strand.
“When we launched the MagellanTV journey, it was a VOD journey originally and became a direct-to-consumer business that was both SVOD and FAST,” Diefenbach explains in the vodcast, which you can watch on YouTube and Spotify, or keep reading below.
“As we looked for future growth, we knew we needed a partner where we could scale beyond the boundaries of what we’d seen in the past. We needed more content and institutional reach.”
After meeting with several potential partners, Blue Ant, home to the Love Nature brand and a growing portfolio of channels, emerged as the best bet. “Blue Ant had done many of the things that we dreamed of doing. They took a strong focus on factual brands and successfully built and distributed them worldwide. So, if we were in a couple of dozen territories, they were in a hundred territories. I had watched and admired how they’d grown the Love Nature business. They had a strong pay-TV business. They had thought about the landscape in a much more ambitious way and had scaled and distributed globally.”
The Benefits of Multiplatform Reach
With his move to Blue Ant as EVP of streaming, Diefenbach can build on the company’s footprint, with further international expansion of the MagellanTV brand a key part of its ambitions.
“The pieces of the business that came together were really complementary. And now I see a landscape where we can take these strong brands and bring them out across a global ecosystem, not just in any one of these technology verticals, but with a mind to all of them. And they can complement each other in ways we couldn’t when we were just at MagellanTV. If you’ve got strong FAST channel audiences, that’s fantastic. But they’re not only FAST channel consumers. All of us are moving across technological platforms all the time. So we want to be in these different environments where we can serve their needs, programming interests, and passions across all these different platforms, whether it’s on YouTube or in an SVOD environment or a pay-TV product.”
Providing Content Solutions
Diefenbach weighed in on optimizing partnerships with platforms across the ecosystem, leaning into each service’s particular needs to engage audiences.
“It used to be that you were a channel delivery service and you gave it to the platforms, and the platforms put it out. The story wasn’t terribly much more complex than that. Those were the early days of FAST. In this evolution of the landscape, the platforms have become much more sophisticated in how they relate to their audiences and the content. And so, in this now very crowded landscape, the platforms are stepping up and saying, ‘We know our audiences.’ We want to play a major role in figuring out how to serve those audiences, cut through the noise, and compete with other platforms. We, as channel suppliers, have to re-envision our role in that relationship as a much more active participant and content solutions partner. We have to be very attuned to what their goals are so we can understand their business and then help them reach those audiences in ways that they think are going to be impactful.”
Case in point: a partnership with LG around the World Cup, tapping into interest in the global FIFA tournament while also counterprogramming against the event, which kicks off this week. World Pup “leverages our existing Love Pets platform on LG,” Diefenbach says. “Platforms can promote in ways that we can’t as channel providers. This is a good example of how we, as channel providers, have to evolve our role into content solution providers in close partnership with the platforms.”
Skilled curation is key to tackling the discovery conundrum, Diefenbach continues. “We’re programming across multiple landscapes. In a subscription environment, the user has a very specific expectation around curation. We’re also out in the channel and FAST environments. Audiences expect that the content they’re looking at will naturally and seamlessly align with their interests. We expect every piece of content we see to resonate with what we’re interested in. We’re going to have very low tolerance for poor curation. So we, as content providers, have to acknowledge that and then develop the tools and strategies to ensure those expectations are met. Right now, there is a lot of interest in how we’re using these emerging technologies to do a better job of this.”
The Power of Metadata
Enhanced metadata is one of the technologies Blue Ant is deploying to up its curation and discovery efforts, delivering the “granularity that’s necessary now to program hyper-specifically to people’s interests, to be able to take the show that they’ve recently watched and then align it with a whole tray of other content that we think will well serve them. We’re now leaning into enhanced metadata analysis of all our content to make sure that we can deliver these highly curated experiences for our viewers.”
Improved metadata tagging, thanks to AI, “has huge implications not only for programming and content discovery, but for marketing and for creating new content. Yes, it sounds a little geeky and a little dry; enhanced metadata doesn’t roll off the tongue with excitement, but I think it opens the door to all kinds of opportunity for us as content suppliers.”
Into the Stream
StreamTV Show, taking place in Denver next week, has become a must-attend for many in the streaming, FAST, and creator ecosystems. For Diefenbach, the event presents an unmissable opportunity to get “in tune with the desires and aspirations of the platforms—there’s nobody closer to the consumer than the platform. If Blue Ant steps squarely into that role as a content solutions partner, then listening to the platform partners is just absolutely foundational to our efforts.”
Diefenbach will also be keeping an eye out for new technology innovations.
“Even if that technology unfolded to address a question that you hadn’t thought applied to you, it’ll spark an idea about how you can move forward to serve these platform partners and the audiences in ways you hadn’t thought of before. I’m going to be talking to everybody about how they see technology changing the viewer experience on their platform.”
Those conversations will inform Blue Ant Media’s streaming strategy going forward, which is focused on growing distribution for a stable of 15-plus channel brands and the MagellanTV SVOD service—which has never been marketed globally—and promoting a customer journey across its brands.
“We can help our audiences move across these areas and discover our products and content more seamlessly. Everyone’s using different platforms, and they may not be aware of our products as they move across platforms. It’s our job to make sure that the experience they’ve enjoyed in one area, they understand that they can move across the whole ecosystem. So we have to communicate that better to our audience.”
A World of Opportunity
As fragmented and challenged as the landscape is, Diefenbach is excited for the prospects for international growth with language localization options, which were “prohibitively difficult just a few years ago,” he says. “And the bar has been lowered. It is easier than it’s ever been before. And this is really exciting to me personally, because I think it opens up all kinds of opportunities in territories around the world. Many of those markets are maturing now. We’re not rushing into them. But we see the opportunity, and we’re building for a future where the products we have today are actually much more global and much more internationalized than they’ve ever been before.”
