Chris McGurk Talks Cineverse’s Streaming Gains

Cineverse’s chairman and CEO, Chris McGurk, shared with FAST Festival viewers how the company is driving gains with its assortment of streaming services, FAST channels and new search and discoverability tools.

McGurk’s keynote conversation with World Screen’s Kristin Brzoznowski, which you can view here, wrapped day two of the FAST Festival.

“There’s been explosive growth in both FAST and AVOD over the last few years, driven in large part by the rise of connected TVs and also the fact that most consumers find it to be a much more comfortable viewing experience and a much less expensive one than subscription,” McGurk said.

While the landscape is now super competitive, Cineverse has an early-mover advantage, McGurk explained, with the company having launched its first FAST channel in 2017. “We have 30 streaming channels in total, a combination of subscription, AVOD and FAST channels.”

With its 20 FAST channels, Cineverse is taking a targeted approach, McGurk said. “Each channel is targeted at a very specific fan base or branded content that’s well known, which gives us a leg up. We do a lot of analytics behind that before we launch a channel. We developed and own our own proprietary streaming and content management technology called Matchpoint. A part of that is called Matchpoint Insights, which gives us a huge analytical database to develop channels and give the platforms and consumers what they want to see when they want to see it.”

On the monetization front, McGurk says Cineverse benefits from having broad distribution for its portfolio across major platforms, as well as its own direct advertising sales team. “We’ve been building an omnichannel approach to advertising. We have 80 million monthly active viewers now across all 30 channels. We’ve got a robust podcast business, which is advertising-driven. We’re very big with entities that we own, like Bloody Disgusting and others, on social media and apps. We market across that entire footprint, which is important for advertisers in terms of brand recognition and value. That’s what we’re doing to up our game from a monetization standpoint.”

McGurk then discussed Cineverse’s approach to content acquisitions across its portfolio. “We’re data-driven and analytic. We use our technology to build a huge database and [identify] what’s working and what’s not. Plus, we’re also a studio. We have a 70,000-title library, and we’ve distributed hundreds of thousands of films and TV shows over the years. We have the knowledge base of what works in the marketplace, and we apply that against our channels. At the beginning of FAST, people threw a lot of channels up to see what would stick. Now the business is evolving to be more like basic cable, where it’s really important that you have programming expertise. We make sure that programming drives our acquisition process and not the other way around.”

Cineverse’s FAST channel bouquet includes several single-IP services, including The Bob Ross Channel, Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Barney and Garfield. “Those are all long-term, evergreen, beloved properties that have huge fan bases, have stood the test of time and are very repeatable; they don’t get stale.” The company also operates multi-title branded-content channels, among them Dove Channel and Comedy Dynamics.

“Discoverability for streaming is still the biggest issue in the business, particularly for general-entertainment channels, where it takes a consumer, on average, ten minutes to find something via search,” McGurk said. “We’re designing channels in a way that targets a very specific fan group who know exactly what they’re going to get when they come to the channel; they don’t have to sort through endless menus. We follow that up with quality, well-branded shows and IP. We have thematic blocks on our channels that help us. We try to be ubiquitous across every platform on our channels. Those elements tackle 90 percent of discoverability. But the future in discovery is AI.”

On that front, Cineverse’s 80-person engineering team is developing AI tools that will aid in programming channels “and make the interaction between a consumer and a channel much more natural than it is right now. Some of these discovery tools and menus are from the 1990s and 2000s!”

The company also partnered with Google on developing cineSearch, which McGurk described as the “Siri for streaming. It’s in beta right now, and we hope to launch it very soon.”

Cineverse’s channel slate is about a 50-50 split between owned-and-operated and partner services. McGurk said the company expects to maintain that balance. “We create more value over the long term for the channels that we own, but the risk/reward profile on channels like The Bob Ross Channel and Dog Whisperer are outstanding, particularly since the content requirements and investment are de minimis going forward on those.”