“In the nineties… it didn’t matter what your legacy media business was – you could be a newspaper, radio station, magazine, local TV station – you became a digital business too… So, I feel in the [two-thousand] twenties, streaming is analogous to that. Whatever your other media business is, if you’re a mid-to-large publishing or media company, you will also be a streaming media company.”
With Netflix reportedly expecting to lose subscribers for the second quarter in a row, is the oversaturated streaming market finally doomed? Not according to Navdeep Saini, the Co-Founder and CEO of DistroScale, Inc. Listen to learn how the company is giving publishers back the power by providing video as a service, and why audiences should be excited about the future of media.
Mentions:
- “Navdeep Saini. DistroTV.” (“Up Next with Gabriella Mirabelli” podcast)
- “The Netflix Bubble Is Finally Bursting” (“The Atlantic” article)
Key Insights
What’s Unique About How DistroScale Deals With Publishers and Content Creators?
“I think the key differentiator of our model is we do all of these things for publishers, but we take a cut off the advertising revenue essentially. So we provide the entire platform – infrastructure, hosting, building the channel, syndicating the channel – [and] all of that at no up front or fixed costs to the media company.”
According to Navdeep, the pervasiveness of streaming across the entire media landscape will shift the market away from the traditional subscription-based model and toward the ad-supported approach he has implemented at DistroScale and its streaming service, DistroTV™: “I think in the next five to ten years… ad-supported streaming is going to be a much bigger ecosystem than the subscription-based streaming ecosystem.”
How Has Connected TV Impacted Marketing and Advertising?
“From an advertising perspective, this makes media buying and advertising a lot more addressable, right?… When you buy advertising on a website, you can see engagement on all that. And TV advertising has traditionally been more like, at least the impact has been — is calculated using estimates or surveys… But now, essentially every impression that is delivered, you can actually track… So it becomes a lot more addressable. You’re essentially buying TV advertising the same way as you would be buying any other digital advertising.”
Is There Room For Free Ad-Supported Streaming TV Services in What Many Think Is an Oversaturated Market?
“Subscription-based streaming services… are essentially, the way I look at it as sort of… like [the] big studios now… and they can bring you great content. So, they can bring you a lot of original content… If they become more like big studios, there will always be independent creators too… And the people who don’t get bought by the big studios, now where do they go? So that’s where I think FAST platforms [come in]…”
Since subscription-based streamers have come to so closely resemble traditional television studios, Navdeep has seized upon an under-tapped market: “You have to have an avenue for independent creators and other content to have the maximum reach to audiences, right? That’s where I feel we have the opportunity.”
About the Guest:
“Navdeep Saini is a co-founder and the chief executive officer of DistroScale, a content marketing platform and marketplace for delivering, managing, and measuring native content across websites, mobile web, and apps. Previously, he was the senior vice president of ad products and engineering at Glam Media.
During the course of his career, Saini was a vice president at both DoubleClick and Yahoo!, all before he was a lead engineer at Med-link Technologies. He was also a co-founder and the chief technology officer of Buysight.”
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