Steve Smith

World Screen Weekly, January 11, 2007

Managing Director

Playboy Television International

Nowadays it is nearly impossible for a person right out of college to approach a major media company and get hired on the spot. But that is exactly what happened to Steve Smith, who is now the managing director at Playboy Television International. “Back in 1980, I just walked in to HBO, filled out an application,” he says. “They were trying to hire enough people to deal with all the growth they were experiencing. I landed a job in the finance department based on my psychology degree,” he quips, “and I was administering affiliate contracts and doing billings and collections on cable-operator invoices.”

Smith spent 17 years at HBO, moving up within the company and eventually taking charge of HBO Central Europe and moving to Budapest. That began a 12-year stint overseas that also took him to Asia, where he ran MGM Gold Networks as well as Channel [V], the music network operated by News Corporation’s STAR. He also spent some time in China, as executive VP and COO of Encore International. He returned to the U.S. in 2003 to head up the International Channel, which he rebranded as AZN Television, a service that caters to Asian Americans.

Nine months ago, he joined Playboy, and although he had worked for well-known entities before, he marveled at the power of the Playboy brand. “The brand transcends time and competition and new media,” says Smith. “It’s quite remarkable. I’ve read some research that shows that Playboy is the fifth-most [well-known] brand in the world, which is amazing. The perception that people have of the brand is quite interesting, and it varies. For older people, the brand [is associated] with the Playboy Clubs of the ’60s that appealed to upscale men. In Asia, teenage girls buy the apparel and it’s a fashion brand. In Europe, we’ve got a whole raft of high-quality magazines that have positioned the brand as the Good Housekeeping seal of approval on nude content. And Hugh Hefner, the icon behind the brand, continues to appear on television. He’s currently on The Girls Next Door on E! and has been on Entourage and Curb Your Enthusiasm. The brand is almost ubiquitous.

“Any door we knock on opens up, and that is across mobile phones, online, television and publishing,” says Smith. Playboy operates channels in Latin America, Europe and Asia. While these services rely on the programming Playboy produces in Los Angeles, Smith wants to start up local productions in Europe and Asia.

While television currently takes up the majority of the business, Smith sees mobile and online as the growth engines for the next five years. “In mobile, we offer everything from still images to ring tones—or ring ‘moans’ as we call them—or video clips as well as full streaming mobile TV channels,” says Smith.