David Zaslav

October 2008

Discovery Communications’ bouquet of more than 100 networks stretches around the globe to 170-plus countries and territories and reaches 1.5 billion cumulative subscribers. President and CEO David Zaslav is well aware of the value of Discovery’s many assets, including Discovery Channel, TLC and Animal Planet. He previously spent nearly two decades at NBC Universal, where he first was involved in developing and launching CNBC and MSNBC and later directed NBCU’s new-media strategy, leading the efforts to sell the company’s content on all relevant platforms. This experience is indispensable as he guides Discovery forward, building brands across all media, as well as securing new ones. Discovery Communications and Oprah Winfrey, one of the most well-known names in television, have entered into a joint venture for the 2009 rollout of OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network, which at launch will have distribution in 70 million U.S. homes, replacing Discovery Health. Zaslav talks to World Screen about his vision for Discovery.

WS: When you started at Discovery, what were the strengths of the company?

ZASLAV: I saw three strengths at Discovery. First, it’s a fantastic platform company that was very aggressive about getting channel real estate all around the world. When you look at our footprint, we have more than ten channels in the U.S. and we have between two and nine channels in 173 countries around the world. We have one [advertiser-supported channel] called DMAX in Germany, but aside from that all our platforms are dual revenue stream, [generating] subscriber fees and ad revenue. So because of these platforms, I thought the potential of the company was enormous.

Second, it had real strength in nonfiction—an area that has real potential, not just for growing viewership, but because if you do great nonfiction content, it has the potential to create benefits over time: most of it you own and most of it is just as interesting this year as it will be in a few years.

From a broad perspective, the company was in a great niche with nonfiction and they had great platforms, and the third thing would be that they had some fantastic brands. Discovery is the number one TV brand around the world. It’s a leading brand in nonfiction and one that people feel passionate about and connected to. So the strength of the brands, together with our platforms and the nonfiction niche, makes us a very unique media company.

WS: What was the mood at the company when you joined?

ZASLAV: I worked in the cable business inside the U.S. and outside the U.S. and there was a time when Discovery was the number one brand in cable, period. And there was an enormous amount of pride and confidence that went along with that. When I joined Discovery Communications, there was a fantastic team with strength in branding and programming, but we needed a little a more confidence. We needed to all remind ourselves how great Discovery was and how great it could be—what Discovery is when it’s at its best. So we tried to excite the entire organization around the idea that we have great brands: Discovery, Animal Planet, TLC, that we own genres like crime, forensics and history, and that if we [boosted] our confidence, invested in content and built those brands, we could be not just the number one nonfiction media company in the world, but we could be a really strong growth media company as well.

WS: What are Discovery’s most important growth areas?

ZASLAV: Our international platform is, I believe, as strong or stronger than any media company. And we have a great opportunity to build on our strength in more than 173 countries, and that has been a focus for the last year and a half and will continue to be a big focus for us in the future.

WS: How do you make sure you are in all the places where people watch your content? And how do you do that in a cost-effective way?

ZASLAV: That’s a good question and I don’t think any of us have the answer. A concrete example would be when we decided we wanted to launch Planet Green, we also decided that we [couldn’t consider] that as just a cable channel. So we had to go out and buy a very robust and authentic website that had strong credibility and a meaningful audience. That’s very different than when I launched channels at NBC. Then the goal was to attract an audience on cable. With Planet Green, we started out believing that if we were going to be successful, we had to have a big audience online and that it would probably take us too long to build it. So we bought TreeHugger.com, something that maybe only two or three years ago we would have thought differently about.

We have 20 years of programming in our library and it’s like a fire hose. We don’t have to have that fire hose wide open right now because we think our content is really valuable and we are monetizing it by building channels around the world. We are [showing our content] on a lot of platforms but we haven’t opened that hose wide open because, on a number of these platforms, it’s a balance. There are people consuming content on these new platforms but we also have to be careful that there is a business model on those platforms that makes sense. We also have to offer the right content. Long-form, 30-minute programming for a lot of those platforms is just not right. And so we need to be measured about where we put it and fight for a good business model, but we also have to be thoughtful about putting the content on in a way that makes sense for a particular platform. On the web, a lot of what we are having success with is much shorter form. [Rather than offering full episodes] of Mythbusters, we’re finding that we get a lot more interest when we’re offering little pieces of the show that might be funny or serious, or from which people might learn something, and then promoting to another type of platform, where people might watch [the] long form.

WS: Would you give an example of how you offer content across platforms?

ZASLAV: We have a show called Deadliest Catch. And it’s one of the top shows around the world for men. We’ve placed it in 173 countries and it does very well. But the old thinking would be to take Deadliest Catch, put it on cable and sell advertising and promote it. Now we try to think a little bit differently. One, we move the content around the world much more quickly. Two, we launched a video game on XBox with Deadliest Catch. Three, two years from now here in the U.S., Deadliest Catch will also be syndicated on a broadcast platform. We are using pieces of it either on Discovery.com, which we offer around the world, or on HowStuffWorks.com to further inform viewers. So we are trying to look at our content in a 360-degree fashion, not just domestic and worldwide, to really assess how we can use that content to inform on all platforms.

WS: What can you reveal about OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network?

ZASLAV: The theme of the network is “Live Your Best Life,” and like Planet Green, The Oprah Winfrey Network has two big businesses that are attached to it. The first one is the cable channel that we will launch in the U.S. in a year’s time, which will be in over 70 million homes. And we are also [fifty-fifty] partners with Oprah in the Oprah Winfrey Media Company, and that includes oprah.com, which has a very strong digital presence and has a real connection with people all over the world.

In fact, a few months ago, Oprah made an announcement that she wanted to try something really unique that hadn’t been done before on the web. She wanted to teach a course with Eckhart Tolle, the author of A New Earth—it was one of her book choices that she really connected with. So she suggested doing this really innovative approach on the web. In order to take the course, you had to buy the book, read the book and sign up on oprah.com. Over a million people signed up and, to date, there have been over 30 million web downloads. So when you talk about where content is going, there is the power of content on cable, and there is also a real possibility to reach out to people on the web in a way that is more personal. And I think Oprah took a very big step forward with that course, and the fact that so many people went online to take that course gives you a chance to use the cable network as a kind of a broad net and use the web as a place where you can drill down with communities of people who are like-minded, or with communities of people who are interested in learning about similar subjects, and do it in a way that helps people. And in Oprah’s case, she will always be doing it in a way that helps people with their journeys. The journey to live your best life is a very simple concept, but it’s a journey that we are all on.

WS: How are you extending your brands and content in today’s multiplatform world?

ZASLAV: We recently launched a new channel in the U.S., which we think has some real potential to [be offered] in pieces or in its entirety around the world and that is Planet Green. As part of that launch, we acquired TreeHugger.com, it’s the number one for-profit website in the green space. We put those together as a strong green offering and it’s doing very well in the U.S. One of our challenges is that at its core, Discovery has been a worldwide cable-programming company. One of our focuses over the last two years has been to reinvent ourselves as a worldwide nonfiction-content company and not just a cable company. And part of that is changing the way we think about our content and our desire to build up strength on new platforms.

WS: And you recently acquired a website that ties in to your content.

ZASLAV: One of the big assets that we acquired is HowStuffWorks. If Discovery Communications as a company is about satisfying curiosity through video, HowStuffWorks is about satisfying curiosity on the web. They have gone out over the years and acquired huge libraries of articles, books and pictures. So if you are on Google and you hit hybrid cars or sharks or quicksand, the number two or number three entry is HowStuffWorks. So we focused on HowStuffWorks as being a bookend to our overall mission. They were satisfying curiosity through text and pictures. We were satisfying curiosity through video. We acquired them, and we put it together with Discovery. If you search “quicksand” on Google now, it will [direct you to] HowStuffWorks, but while it used to have a number of articles and some pictures, now there is video of Bear Grylls, the host of our show Man vs. Wild, demonstrating how to get out of quicksand.

We have been inserting our video into thousands and thousands of search terms, so that as people reach on to the web and are curious about something, Discovery Communications will be able to inform them, not just through video, but through text and pictures, too. That has been a big step forward for us, and it’s helped as we push to change our culture from just being a cable company to a content company.

WS: Discovery has a history of offering some terrific tentpole programs. Do those remain important to the channels?

ZASLAV: They do. [Our programming consists] primarily of two categories. [The first] is the big 6- to 8-hour epic mini-series like Planet Earth. We just did one with NASA—When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions—where we took the majority of the content in NASA’s library and up-converted it to HD. We spoke to all the astronauts on camera and documented what they had to say about their missions. We got a significant amount of their home movies, and we spoke to their families. And out of that we built a series. It’s all in HD. We had access to everything, and we tell a story. And we believe that story is going to be compelling three years from now or ten years from now—if you do it right. Planet Earth is another [tentpole] that we had last year, and it’s just as dramatic now as it was a year ago.

There are tentpole programs that provide the big view of history, astronomy, our planet and adventure. And we usually run those on Sunday nights. That’s when families sit down and make appointment viewing with Discovery.

And then we have our regular series like Mythbusters, Deadliest Catch and Dirty Jobs, and those are the bread and butter. Those are big economic engines, but they also are the series that people fall in love with and they identify Discovery with. It’s those two things—the big events and big stories where we satisfy curiosity and then fun series across all of our platforms—that really engage people.

On TLC, we have a show called Jon & Kate Plus Ei8ht, one of the top [female-targeted] shows on cable in the U.S. It’s about a family with twins and then they have sextuplets. You see them going through all the perils that we all go through in bringing up a family. And it’s a very strong performer for us. When viewers think about us, about any cable network, often it’s the two or three series on that channel that they relate to that probably come to mind first.