Exclusive Interview: Blue Ant Media’s Michael MacMillan

PREMIUM: Michael MacMillan, co-founder and CEO of Blue Ant Media, talks to World Screen about the vision in building the company, which has investments in production outfits across the globe specializing in premium factual content and channel brands distributed on various platforms.

MacMillan started making feature films when he was a teenager. In 1978, he co-founded Atlantis Films Limited, then acquired Alliance Communications and formed Alliance Atlantis Communications, which encompassed film and television production and distribution. In 2007, he sold Alliance Atlantis and retired from the entertainment business. But the pull of making and selling films and TV programs was strong and in 2011, he co-founded Blue Ant Media.

WS: How different is it to run a company today than when you were building Alliance Atlantis?
MACMILLAN: When I think back to that Neolithic age it seemed so different! But when you think about it, it’s also pretty similar to today. How exciting and discombobulating it was running a company when they invented the videocassette and then the DVD! It seems so ancient today, but at the time it was revolutionary and changed how you could watch TV shows and movies. When you’ve been around the block a few times, you realize these waves of change have some consistency to them. At its core, what we do is still very similar. Our job is to think of or spot good ideas, and more importantly, to spot great creative talent and to provide a home where that talent can feel nurtured, supported and trusted and can take chances. It is a chancy business. All TV shows and movies begin with great intentions; we think they are all going to be great and of course, they’re not all great. But that’s the inherent risk in this. So support for talented people was always and remains at the heart of what a successful content creator will be. One difference is that back in the Alliance Atlantis days, and prior to that in the Atlantis days, because it was so much more costly to make TV shows and movies, because equipment was more cumbersome, film required more light, more gear and everything else, technology and money back in those days were two of the biggest barriers. They were the two enormous factors that qualified people to either make a program or not. Today, with new technology, where we are all producers on our cell phones, we can all broadcast by posting to YouTube or whatever. Tech and money are not the real deciding factors. Talent is. Good ideas are. And in this new economy of abundance instead of scarcity, it’s really exciting that quality and talent have become the big differentiating factors. We like that because at Blue Ant, although we are very proud of what we have accomplished, in the larger scheme of things, in the world of the Disney and Fox or Discovery and Scripps mergers, we’re still a relatively small fish. We know the size of our wallet won’t be the thing that distinguishes us; the fact that we are an attractive home for talented people and talented creators might be.

WS: After you sold Alliance Atlantis, you took a break from the business? What brought you back?
MACMILLAN: Three things really. I did retire from this industry, but I missed the competition of the business world. Equally and perhaps more importantly, I missed the fun and crazy people in the media world. Since I was a teenager, I had been making films and then TV shows. And third, I remember fiddling around with my new iPad, six or seven years ago, thinking, Wow this is interesting, yet another wave of change: I can see myself consuming a lot of movies, TV shows and other audiovisual entertainment on this small screen I can carry around. Small screens are going to be a game changer and this could be a really good time to get back into this business and create a company if it had the benefit of experienced people without issues of being wedded to the status quo.

WS: What’s been the vision in building Blue Ant?
MACMILLAN: The vision was to create a company that in the long run is able to develop and create and own interesting IP, programs and movies that are distinctive, that stand out, that appeal to an audience, so content ownership with an international perspective firmly in mind. We are very proud to be based in Canada; it’s a super place to build a film and TV company. However, Canada only has 36 million people, 28 million English speakers; it’s a pretty small market. If you want to be doing interesting content creation, you better have the world as your target audience. So our strategy in building Blue Ant is content ownership and content creation with the international market in mind through a mixture of building equity and acquisitions. When you start from scratch, as we did with Blue Ant six or seven years ago, acquisitions need to be an important part of that growth strategy. If we had only been growing internally, we wouldn’t have been able to grow at a sufficient speed to get to the scope and size we want to get to now, because now we see enormous opportunities for us. Looking forward, I think we’ll continue to use both acquisition and internal growth to carry out that international content ownership.

WS: What type of content is Blue Ant Media mainly focused on?
MACMILLAN: Up to now, our main thrust has been factual, documentary and factual entertainment, which also includes lifestyle. We are also very proud of our progress in the natural history area, which is also part of factual. The progress we’ve made with our Love Nature product was one of the reasons we wanted to invest in NHNZ, which is one of the best-regarded producers of wildlife and natural history. NHNZ also gave us a smart entry point into the kids’ business, which we had been looking at for a while and trying to figure out a sensible way to make our first foray into that. NHNZ already is a children’s producer, as are Beach House Pictures in Singapore and Northern Pictures in Sydney Australia. Those are the three production companies we acquired in 2017. We’re now in the kids’ business, mostly through wildlife and natural history. So kids’ is the second content area after factual. As we look forward at Blue Ant, we are interested in growing our genres beyond what we have.

WS: What motivated the acquisition of the RTL CBS channels in Asia?
MACMILLAN: We think we can make them a profitable asset for us. We saw an opportunity to build out a team of programmers and marketers in Singapore for the RTL CBS channels (recently rebranded as Blue Ant Entertainment and Blue Ant Extreme) that would also be good at growing our ZooMoo and Love Nature channels in Asia. We’ve seen that Love Nature has a lot of potential in Asia and having the same team marketing ZooMoo, Love Nature, Blue Ant Extreme and Blue Ant Entertainment all together, would be better than if we didn’t have those two new channels.

WS: In your portfolio of channels, some are free-to-air, some are streaming only and some are traditional linear channels. How do you decide whether a channel brand should be free to air, pay TV or streaming?
MACMILLAN: We know that there are two main ways to pay for broadcast content: advertising and subscriber fees. So we shouldn’t get too caught in firm rules, it all depends on what the product is and what the market can support. We intend to play in both, but I would say if I look out five to ten years from now, I want to make sure the most significant part of our channel business is in the subscriber-fee-funded business. The reason is that with the internet there is no shortage of new real estate. There is so much to watch and much of it can attract advertising dollars. You can see if it were only an ad-supported economy it could be a race to the bottom because the CPMs would decline. We don’t have a crystal ball; it does depend on content and the geographical market, but I would want to hope that a good chunk of what we do is subscriber supported. It’s probably going to be the more premium kind of content and in a world of overwhelming choice, I want Blue Ant to be a creator and owner of premium content and not just stuff that fills in the gaps.

WS: Two years ago, the Canadian regulator, the CRTC, mandated that cable operators provide smaller channel packages and allow subscribers to select the channels they want through Pick and Pay. How has that been received?
MACMILLAN: I think we all know we are moving to the on-demand world, where you can choose what you want to watch, when, and so on. We know that consumers want to have and exert more choice over what they are getting. In our case, in Canada, [we haven’t felt] a huge impact of [the new regulation]. There already were some cord-cutters, cord-shavers and cord-nevers. But Blue Ant’s channels in Canada weren’t in those smaller basic packages that were available in 95 percent of homes. Ours were quite modestly penetrated and usually often in the great big packages. Will a lot of our channels, like Smithsonian or Love Nature, be chosen by a greater percentage of customers that currently get our channels? Yes, quite possibly. I think consumers have also discovered it’s a pretty good deal to buy big bundles. It’s always been a pretty effective pricing device to give customers the broadest range of channels at the lowest per-channel price. Today, when you pick your own package, if you add that all up and you get half the channels you had yesterday at the same price, which has actually created a backlash among consumers. And with basic cable, broadband, telephony and probably Netflix, their bill is quite possibly higher.

WS: Looking ahead 12 to 24 months, in which Blue Ant businesses do you see potential for growth?
MACMILLAN: I think there is room for growth in all the parts of Blue Ant, including our Canadian and New Zealand domestic broadcast operations and our Canadian consumer-show business. But creating and distributing content internationally has got to be the place where our growth potential is biggest. That’s why we set up the production units in Los Angeles (Blue Ant Digital Studios), London (Antenna Pictures) and Toronto (Look Mom! Productions) and purchased production companies in New Zealand (NHNZ), Australia (Northern Pictures) and Singapore (Beach House Pictures) and building another one here in Canada—all so we can have an international focus.

I’m an optimist and I think this is a great time to be a creator of interesting programming. Yes, it’s confusing; yes, old supply chains are being broken apart and replaced with other ways of content being created and distributed and received by the user. People all over the world like to watch moving pictures and listen to sound. It’s an exciting time to be a producer.