Been doing a lot of reading on successful media personalities. A few stories that stuck out today:
Jeff Zucker, CEO of NBC Universal, from his Wikipedia page:
He went on to Harvard, serving as President of the school newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, during his senior year, surprising many who thought the post would go to Michael Hirschorn. As President of the Crimson, Zucker encouraged the decades-old rivalry with the Harvard Lampoon, headed by future NBC colleague Conan O’Brien. (The Crimson’s editors now joke that since Zucker is O’Brien’s boss, those who want to get ahead in life should choose to join the Crimson over the Lampoon).
When he was not admitted to Harvard Law School, he was hired by NBC to research material for its coverage of the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, where he worked for host Bob Costas.
Zucker was diagnosed at age 31 with colon cancer, worked through two bouts of it, and had a large part of his colon removed, then endured more than a year of chemotherapy. He scheduled his chemo treatments for Friday afternoons, so he could be back at the office on Mondays. Zucker’s cancer is in remission, but he still thinks about its impact. “It put my life into perspective,” he says. “I want to win and win honorably. But heck, it’s only television.”
On Sumner Redstone, from his Wikipedia page:
As National Amusements grew Redstone believed that content would become more important than distribution mechanisms. There would always exist channels of distribution (albeit in varied forms), but content was always going to be necessary (his famous quote is “content is king!”).
Looking for a new business venture, he set his sights on Viacom International, a company which he had already been buying stock in as an investment and was a spin-off of CBS in 1971 after the FCC ruled that television networks could not syndicate programs they produced.
After a hostile takeover in 1987, Redstone won voting control of Viacom and led a series of acquisitions to make Viacom one of the top players in modern media (along with Bertelsmann, General Electric & Vivendi’s NBC-Universal, News Corporation, Time Warner, Sony, and The Walt Disney Company).
One of Redstone’s largest acquisitions came in the form of Viacom’s former parent, CBS.
After CBS and Viacom split in late 2005, Redstone remained chairman of both companies.
I could comment quite a bit on all of this, but the one thing that stands out right now is Redstone’s comment “that content would become more important than distribution mechanisms. There would always exist channels of distribution,” this is exactly the idea behind my comment that distribution has now become commoditized and content so scalable.
It’s always very easy to knock on established, successful media moguls, but I must say, as a media guy myself and content producer, Sumner Redstone’s staunch defense of content and copyright is a breath of fresh air.
He said a lot of things today that were true (“It seems fairly clear that advertising will for the most part pay the way on the internet, just as it has on traditional media platforms. …I think in all the public clamor in all the doomed fortunes of traditional media, people miss the greater trends at work”), one thing that certainly stuck out was the following:
“Professionally produced content only increases in value as digital platforms multiply.”
I agree 200%. We see this day in, day out. We’ll produce content and publish it on WatchMojo.com, simultaneously we’ll syndicate it across the Web to places like YouTube, Veoh, Revver, MySpace, etc.
But then, we’ll also branch off into wireless and out of home digital networks. The web is still a pretty young place, and web video much younger. Wireless and out of home are embryonic at best… but the beauty of broadband content is that it can spread like crazy. I’ve given up trying to track where our videos pop up.
Regardless, the statement that professional content rises in value as distribution rises is very true. In fact, when you start a business, you’re always looking at scaling, but scale is a function of content production and distribution. I have yet to figure the right balance and mix of production vs. distribution in the scale equation, but we’re getting there.
Not the first time I find myself agreeing with Redstone. I thought there was nothing crazy about CBS working with YouTube while Viacom was suing YouTube (he’s Chairman of both). It’s odd, had one deal gone the other way, Redstone would have been my boss, indirectly, of course (turned out Rupert Murdoch got that title, albeit briefly). Funny how life has a way of unfolding.
Read more on Forbes and Paid Content.
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