The Media Odyssey

TMO - Merzigo (audio)
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Dilip Bala: [00:00:00] As you said, it's like Facebook seems to be the forgotten platform and you know, not a lot of people pay attention to it. Frankly, I'm not even sure how much attention Meta is paying to it, except that it is huge and it has still got a lot of scale.

Marion Ranchet: Welcome to this week's episode of The Media Odyssey. This is Evan Shapiro

Evan Shapiro: And that again is Marion Ranchet.

Marion Ranchet: Why do you say again? Of course, again?

Evan Shapiro: 'cause two weeks in a row we're together. We were apart for a month, and now we're together. I guess we should get over that. But you said we were on a break and that still upsets you.

Marion Ranchet: That's true. But we're a couple. We're back together. And so again, we're together this week. No, what's fantastic is that we have an amazing guest coming up and we're gonna be talking about YouTube. It's [00:01:00] one of our favorite topics, I will say at the moment.

Evan Shapiro: Yeah, it's, I think it's one of our favorite topics because if you work in television right now, the conversation is about how YouTube has become television before television could become what it needs to become, which is this next evolution.

And we've had a lot of really good guests who have given us some case studies on, we had Paul McGrath from CBC and Matt Risley from Channel 4. And at Cannes Lions, we're gonna be doing some interviews with some folks to talk about this more extensively. But what I find interesting is, when you look at publishers like Channel 4 or BBC Studios or ITV who have really embraced YouTube a lot of them are building the machinery for distribution on social video internally.

But there's another way of going about that, and that's really what we're gonna talk about with our guests today. But when you look at the big publishers who are embracing YouTube traditionally, it's the studio or commercial arm of the publisher or the broadcaster. Why do you think that is?

[00:02:00] Why do you think the broadcasters themselves are so resistant to embracing this new distribution platform? That very clearly is where younger generations are watching television, not just video.

Marion Ranchet: We spoke to that at length with everyone and both on and off the pods, right? It's those major fears around losing control, cannibalization.

There's also one thing around the amount of work it represents, right? If you look at what needs to be done as an IP owner, as a broadcaster, as a streamer today to exist, the number of touch points are so important across traditional and then social media and then YouTube on top. I wonder if a lot of these guys are also concerned with the return on investments and at this point I'm talking at large, right?

Not just ad dollars, but changing how their teams are working, training those teams, hiring people from [00:03:00] the outside, et cetera, et cetera. All of that to something that is very instant when we're in a business that tends to do long processes, right? So we see it ourselves. It feels like a hamster flywheel, right?

So that's what's interesting about the guests that we have today is I wonder how, publishers and IP owner at large can actually be helped.

Evan Shapiro: It's interesting. I watched Tim Davey do this, press conference last week, and he talked about how they are finally, after me imploring them and after watching Channel 4 and ITV both embrace social video as a distribution platform, they finally said, oh, okay, now we're gonna embrace YouTube with news.

But rather than just put the news up on YouTube, they're producing in specific bespoke short form content for YouTube as opposed to simply taking the nightly news and putting it up on YouTube. And I think that misses the point, don't you?

Marion Ranchet: Yeah. So [00:04:00] I will say one thing is that you are often saying, oh, they weren't doing anything.

If you look at all of these guys, they've dabbled with YouTube for years, right? You look at when those pages were created and I did a piece on Streaming Made Easy about UK broadcasters, and actually the BBC was one with, perhaps the highest number of platforms, views, et cetera. So I wouldn't say that they're starting from scratch, just right now.

Evan Shapiro: Is that BBC or is that BBC studios, because BBC studios has Bluey and Earth, those are two of the highest, biggest channels on YouTube. But that's a studios arm not the proper BBC model.

Marion Ranchet: Yeah, but no, you have a BBC news. You have a BBC news YouTube.

Evan Shapiro: But it's clips and shorts. It's not.

Marion Ranchet: Then you're right. There's the question is of, are they going at this the right way? And I think there's been phases, right? So initially, people were just putting stuff on their what we're seeing is that it's getting more and more professional. And what's interesting is I think it is getting more and more professional thanks to creators, and we'll [00:05:00] speak about creators.

These guys have found a way to massage the algorithm. And they've shown how much effort needs to be put on the title, the thumbnail the description, all those things that actually us as well as, at our level, but for our pod we are doing as well.

And for sure what's happening right now is that people need to really understand that each of those platforms, YouTube and others have specific codes to abide with and that it's, yeah, not just putting stuff from one universe to the other. That's not it.

Evan Shapiro: Yeah, you're absolutely right.

When you go back and watch or listen to the Matt Risley episode, which I highly encourage you to do, he talked about hiring the right people to do the work. That was step number one. Same thing with Paul McGrath hiring the people who understand the platforms to do that work. And I think there's, resistance from major publishers and platforms to do that because it's expensive.

It's a sunk cost before you're seeing the reward, right? But that, that I think is a really nice segue to [00:06:00] our guest this week from Merzigo, which is one of these outsourced, really expert partners that you can go with, you can partner with, sorry to be redundant there, but you can partner with folks as opposed to simply trying to invest all of it internally and guessing at what might work or not.

So with that, if that's okay, Marion, I'm gonna introduce our guest. Is that all right?

Marion Ranchet: Yeah, of course.

Evan Shapiro: All right.

Marion Ranchet: Permission granted.

Evan Shapiro: Thank you. Let me welcome to the stage general manager of the United States for Merzigo, Dilip Bala.

Dilip Bala: Thank you, Evan. Thank you Marion, for having me. It's a pleasure to be with you both. And thank you by the way, for the setup. It's totally relevant for us and what we do at Merzigo.

Evan Shapiro: What do you do at Merzigo? What does the company do?

Dilip Bala: Yeah. So in a nutshell, we help premium content owners, so think broadcasters, studios, media companies, and everyone in between that owns IP. We help them grow revenue on YouTube and Facebook, which we can [00:07:00] talk about a little bit later as well.

We do this through a combination of our algorithm expertise, so our secret sauces and the algorithm expertise on these platforms, and we have a team of over 500 people on staff that are dedicated to providing channel management and content optimization services. Think of it as we are doing the posting, the editing, the captioning, and all the best practices that are required to really help surface and discover and engage with the content.

A little bit more by the company. It was founded in 2018 in Istanbul, Turkey. Fun fact, one of the founders is a former YouTuber, so you know, knows a little thing or two about creating viral videos and in the first couple of years, they grew very quickly within the Turkish media market. And in fact, I know one of the case studies we have coming up is talking about that, but, since then, the company has expanded well beyond the Turkish borders [00:08:00] today. We have clients all across the world. Our website has a lot of the key clients, but I'll just mention a couple. Disney in Turkey is one of our major clients. We also have deals with Warner Discovery in EMEA.

Fremantle. More recently we've entered the live sports area in the US here with Anthem Sports and Entertainment, doing some of their wrestling and fighting properties combat sports properties. So manage over 6,000 channels today. And listen, I'll just say, prior to joining, I spent a long career at Disney, over 20 years in partnerships in BD, primarily on the digital team and the distribution team as well.

And I'm very familiar with the complexities. Part of my charter was how do we monetize on these social platforms and video sites, and I think just coming over and joining Merzigo has just been an eye-opening experience because I. The [00:09:00] revenue opportunity is very real and substantial for those who are willing to, really lean in and take advantage of it. And we are here to help help you along the way.

So that's a little bit about the company.

Evan Shapiro: So Dilip, you run 6,000 channels, but they're not called Merzigo channels, are they?

Dilip Bala: No, that's exactly right. Almost entirely we are doing this on behalf of our partners. So it's the partner's channel, the partner's show, the partner's brand and we're working hand in hand to make sure we're within brand guidelines. Understanding the property and the IP and and posting and managing accordingly.

So this is not like us putting, we've got a Merzigo channel. Just give us your content. We'll put it up there. No, this is yours that we're doing on your behalf. That's the service we're pro providing.

Marion Ranchet: Can I ask, what's the typical, I don't know, journey, maybe, that you are going through with your clients? So they come in and they say, we wanna be on YouTube. Is that it, or do you, are they [00:10:00] actually coming with a bit more a bit more, strategy in mind and you are more in the advising and execution, et cetera?

Dilip Bala: Yeah. No. It's a great point. I think, typically the journey is w we'll start having discussions with a partner around specific shows or properties. Hey, we're thinking about X, Y, Z show. Maybe it's a current series. A lot of times it's from the catalog or the library. And, what do we think it's gonna make?

One of the questions is, does, is there an existing YouTube presence? A channel? And if there is, we can, at least gauge like, how is it performing today? And sometimes it could be pretty minimal. But then how much content is there to work with? And based on that and running our data and our models, we can give a rough estimate on what the potential is in terms of audience growth and revenue.

And, sometimes we'll be like, look it, it's not there, there isn't maybe enough there. But a [00:11:00] lot of times we will identify, mutually identify, properties and shows or movies to work with. And then once we establish, what that IP is, we are off to the races.

Typically the model is we're working on a rev share basis. And if there's existing business there. We, the kicker is we actually give minimum guarantees, which really helps the content owner size it and figure out how much the potential is.

Evan Shapiro: I work with a lot of clients who are like eager to get into FAST. So they're sitting on large libraries and they jump into FAST.

And I think because it's on TV, they're just more comfortable and it's linear and it feels like television. They're just more comfortable to jump into it. And then I'll talk to 'em. I'm like so what's your YouTube strategy? And they're like we're on FAST. I'm like, you know that there's probably 10x the potential on YouTube than there is on FAST?

And they're like, why? And I'm like, because there's 10x the viewership.

Dilip Bala: Yeah.

Evan Shapiro: And that's a major differentiator between the two. And both now are on [00:12:00] TV. Over 70% of all content that's watched on YouTube is now over 30 minutes or longer. And to Marion's point from earlier, you're watching people like Dhar Mann and Mr. Beast and other known creators, really looking at long form versus short form.

But when you partner, so one of my favorite case studies that you have is you guys were responsible for making the Turkish soap opera a worldwide hit. And that to me, like globally just massive Latin America, massive hit in Latin America, but also around the rest of the world.

And we have some data on that. When you went to the Turkish broadcaster who controlled these rights, this, you're talking about a huge library of content at the start there, right?

Dilip Bala: That's exactly right. Yeah. I think, you know, the market, the good thing about it is that they're very pragmatic in that market and essentially they're driven by revenue right from the get go. And this example I think that you're gonna pull up [00:13:00] is of a broadcast show that started out initially with pretty tepid ratings. They were having higher expectations. It's on the level of This is Us. It was like a big family drama.

And at the start, as I mentioned, the ratings were pretty modest, but they started a YouTube strategy of posting it next day. And literally over the last few months as the season has progressed, the ratings of that show have increased as the YouTube audience has been consuming it. And keep in mind, of course, it's a younger audience on YouTube that's viewing this.

And so now it's essentially the number one show in Turkey. And this is holy grail kind of stuff, right? It's like how do we use platforms like this to drive back to broadcast and increase ratings? We talk about that a lot here as well in the US. We are seeing just as [00:14:00] Netflix or other platforms have had that, effect on content.

Right? YouTube now is wielding that same power. We're seeing it through our data, so it's really fascinating.

Marion Ranchet: Is it those numbers are Turkey only or global?

Dilip Bala: Yeah. This particular one is Turkey only.

Evan Shapiro: For those of you who are listening, we have a chart on screen that shows a trajectory of both TV viewership and YouTube viewership. And what they're, what we're seeing is that over the last, let's call it eight months not only has YouTube viewership climbed, but simultaneously, and even more largely, viewership on television has climbed with it.

And so not only is there not cannibalization, to your point, Dilip, there's a reason to believe that the YouTube viewership is actually helping create more viewership on television as well.

Dilip Bala: That's right.

Evan Shapiro: So these are, to go back, these are to Marion's question, these are viewership both for YouTube and television just in [00:15:00] Turkey. Correct?

Dilip Bala: The television numbers are definitely just Turkey. The YouTube numbers are global, but majority of the traffic is really coming from Turkey.

Marion Ranchet: Yeah. Even if in Latam there's a, Evan said it at the top, this is a region that's grown super fun of Turkish drama when they had their own drama for so many years.

Dilip Bala: Yeah. No, listen, this is another great use case of how to leverage the platform is, you've got current series, like the graph here, but there's also catalog and library content.

And we have some amazing examples. There was a show a few years ago that was this huge period piece drama in the market, on the scale of a Game of Thrones almost. And, high budget, high production. Merzigo helped bring that back to YouTube almost like seven, eight years after the broadcast run and, we've dubbed it into 50 different languages, taken it globally, and it's become just a huge [00:16:00] revenue driver for, almost unexpected revenue driver for the content owner.

I think Marion, the thing you're talking about is how do we leverage, not only the current stuff, but the deep library and localize it. That's something that, we feel we're really, we're good at. And take it into different languages.

And it's so interesting with localization, by the way. I would just say, taking it, dubbing it into Spanish is one thing.

Marion Ranchet: Yeah.

Dilip Bala: But Arabic is a great example where you're not only dubbing to Arabic because of native speakers in that region, but you're actually also targeting the diaspora that live elsewhere in high CPM markets like US and Western Europe that would rather watch the Arabic version in those markets than the English version. So it's just fascinating how you can drive more consumption through localization.

Evan Shapiro: I think I, that's one of the things that, that you guys, you had said you have 500 employees working on this. And it's not just, you're tapping into a machine of 500 employees who are expert at this. You're also [00:17:00] plugging into the muscle memory of the entire organization because like machine learning, your team gets smarter with every pass. You get more data in, what works, you know what regions are better for certain content than others. And have really become just total experts in both the Facebook platform and the YouTube platform in a way that very few teams internally at a publisher could ever manage to do given their own resources.

Dilip Bala: Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And look, by the way, there are teams that we, companies we talk at that have in-house teams that are 20, 30 deep and or more, that are dedicated to this. And so it's certainly not, something that is completely

Evan Shapiro: Mutually exclusive. Yeah.

Dilip Bala: But I think you said it before, right? It requires sort of an appetite to invest in higher head count, which can be challenging these days for a lot of big companies. And so it's like we're here, you outsource it to a company like us to basically test it out, prove out the model, if you will, and then [00:18:00] decide down the road how to pursue it.

So I think that, yeah, it does require that investment into this. It's not just, it's, you can't just take this, throw it all up there and put up my episodes and how come I'm not seeing any uptick? It's like the spray and pray approach. It's like you've got to invest to really get the most value out of it.

Evan Shapiro: And this data we have on screen now, which shows the demographics of the viewership of this show, this Turkish drama on YouTube, I imagine. So what we can see here is that over half is under the age of 35. And I imagine that's substantially younger than the shows viewership on, say, broadcast television.

And this kind of makes a much larger point, which is the same content. And this is the point I was making about BBC earlier, Marion. The same content, the identical content that's airing on television and on YouTube is gonna find two different audiences on these platforms and this younger audience is almost impossible to reach on pay [00:19:00] TV or broadcast.

Dilip is that, and you're finding that this is one case study, but I think most of your clients are finding the same thing. That this is a distinctly different audience on social video than it is on television.

Dilip Bala: No, absolutely. I think, not only by the way, a distinctly younger audience compared to broadcast television, I think that generally is pretty widely accepted.

But even with, and you were talking about FAST platforms. When we're seeing the data, this actually skews even younger than FAST. There's and people are like, Hey, listen, I've already got my stuff on FAST. Am I worried about, putting too much of it up on YouTube?

It's, listen, there's different audiences and more importantly there's different behaviors and the way they're engaging and interacting with the content that you can tap into when you're on a platform like YouTube. And so I think that is, has been, one of the biggest learnings.

I think, listen, the other thing is, and you said it, is the scale and the content selection is so vast on a YouTube. It's not about putting too [00:20:00] much of it on there. It's really like, how do you find this stuff and get it discovered? So that's where,

Marion Ranchet: And it's easier, right? It's funny that you have people from the FAST world being a bit resistant. It is tougher to whip up a FAST channel from scratch, right? From, you have the content, kudos, but you need a scheduling tool. And then you need someone, you need a TI, a technical integrator. And those negotiation with platforms, the ku, the Samsung on the world, those are really done one-to-one and they can take months.

I can whip up and I did it myself, right? Both for the pod and for my business. I did my YouTube channel in just a few minutes, right? All of those tools are here for you to grab. I will say though, that I can understand how some folks are. So there's the worrying a bit, being overwhelmed, but I think there's that being overwhelmed from the work that needs to be done.

And also [00:21:00] you don't wanna be putting any effort for a shot in the dark. So I wanna circle back on your algorithm thing because I'm curious. 'Cause there's one thing in FAST that doesn't happen is you don't get MGs, right? Very rarely do you get MSG.

Evan Shapiro: Once in a while.

Marion Ranchet: Once, yeah. But it's, you know.

Evan Shapiro: If you work with, let's put it this way, if you work with Eshap, my agency, we can get you one.

Marion Ranchet: Yeah.

Evan Shapiro: It takes a very special pool of content. Really, it does. And thousands and thousands of hours.

Marion Ranchet: And its big brand. And so that's why I'm saying, it's just not what you, it's not that common, just circling on that piece and the business model, right? It's interesting that you do that, but that does mean that when you do that forecast on the potential, it's really clear cut for you because you're not gonna put an MGs on something that may be working.

Dilip Bala: Yeah, no, that, exactly. Look, it is a very compelling value proposition that we offer up to our partners and we've got years of data and experience doing this, [00:22:00] and so yeah, we absolutely are fortunate to be in a position to be able to put those minimum guarantees on the table.

And by the way, we're open to licensing models as well in select cases. It depends on the IP.

Marion Ranchet: Yeah, of course.

Dilip Bala: By and large the rev share and MG approach works for us and works for the partner because they know at the end of the day they're getting a check.

Evan Shapiro: Let's talk about monetization for a second. Specifically on YouTube, but I do wanna get to Facebook. 'cause that's a platform that Marion and I have not spent any time talking about. But you guys have really mastered it and it's, and I think it's a platform that a lot of people sleep on, but it has a tremendous upside, but going back to monetization on YouTube for a second.

Channel 4 talked about this. CBC talked about this. They're selling their inventory through the partner program Yeah. That YouTube runs. You handle this how? Sometimes your partners sell their inventory. Sometimes you guys sell it and it varies by region?

Is that, am?

Dilip Bala: Yeah. No. Good question. No. And listen we come across this from time to time too. At the end of the day, we are creating more inventory and ad [00:23:00] impressions. And by and large, if you don't have your own direct sales teams, it's all gonna be filled with programmatic AdSense.

If you as a partner have a direct sales deal or you wanna send it on the preferred program, we're fine with that, right? The economics generally work the same way in terms of the rev share, but the partner wants to sell it directly 'cause they're gonna hire CPMs. It's perfectly fine with us.

We're just creating more inventory and avails for them to sell it. So that's really our approach. We're completely agnostic to that and welcome it.

Evan Shapiro: And having heard this directly from Pedro Pena on stage at MIP London and separately from YouTube's ad sales team.

They'd prefer you to sell your channels too, the publisher because you're gonna generate higher CPMs. And so it actually works out for everybody. But Marion, one of the great big pieces of pushback I hear when I, when I evangelize this strategy to folks as well. Why would I give YouTube part of my [00:24:00] revenue?

And I'm like aren't you doing that on FAST? Is Roku just distributing your FAST channel because they're nice people or are they taking a piece of your effort?

Marion Ranchet: Yeah. No, but it's the same debate, right? Folks do not like to pay the middlemen, and that's how they often see platforms. They see them as middlemen between them and the end viewer.

And again I worked at many companies where there's a reason why we need a cut somehow. We're bringing instant access to millions of people, those at YouTube do that with a different scale altogether. No, I get that. The one thing where I will say on a minimization have been hearing a lot of pushback is folks are saying that, the viewership is there, but the monetization doesn't follow as quickly regardless of who's selling.

And so that's why sometimes YouTube is stuck in this thing and actually so is FAST right now. There's a lag between viewership and monetization.

Yeah. But it's a bit stuck [00:25:00] in, we're doing it, but it's not our bread and butter and we can't only build a business on that. It is, this is extra pocket money is a lot of what we're getting from people.

Evan Shapiro: And it can grow to be meaningful pocket money, but I also think the better that the sales team gets at selling that inventory, they can raise the CPMs so that they start to approach television CPMs because it's being watched on tv. Yeah. It's not necessarily only being watched on phones, but let's do move into Facebook. 'cause I don't wanna be accused of only talking about YouTube on this podcast.

Marion Ranchet: It still exists? Sorry.

Evan Shapiro: It does still exist.

I haven't been on it in years but Dilip, you guys are finding a tremendous amount of upside on Facebook, right?

Dilip Bala: Listen, this is one of the other things, after joining this company, I found so interesting and fascinating. As you said, it's like Facebook seems to be the forgotten platform and not a lot of people pay attention to it.

Frankly, I'm not even sure how much attention Meta is paying to it, except that it is huge and it is still got a lot of [00:26:00] scale. And facebook video, many years ago it was the Facebook watch product. And back in the day, the heyday, they used to have a whole sort of licensing, clip licensing business around that, which is subsequently shuttered. But today there's still monetization from their programmatic and you're not putting, we don't put full episodes up on Facebook obviously. It's a lot shorter content, like four to eight minutes in length give or take.

But the behaviors are very different. You're looking for those key moments, those key trending clips that are shareable with family and friends 'cause that's what the algorithm will reward. We're creating more Reels content, stories content. And so I think through all of those optimization tools we're able to make a meaningful opportunity out of it.

And I will just say from a genre perspective, things like reality shows and game shows, sports that tends to work 'cause it's very snackable and you can chop it up and share it. That works really [00:27:00] well on Facebook. Dramas and scripted can work too, but it requires time to build an audience. It doesn't, happen instantly.

But that's part of, I think, when we talk about the economics of what we do is we factor in a Facebook component, which can sometimes be very significant in the equation when we're coming to the table.

Marion Ranchet: Does that mean that for a given company and library, you could be showing different things on YouTube and Facebook because the consumption on Facebook is answering a different need state than the one on YouTube?

Dilip Bala: That's precisely right. Yeah. Even in the way you're presenting content, right? So one of the things we do is we'll verticalize it, you'll put subtitles, captions it's all more of a scroll experience on mobile devices. So you're many times optimizing for that. And that's part of what we do to help really drive engagement and ultimately monetization.

Evan Shapiro: Yeah. Marion, I think that, go back to your point from earlier, which is, we put it up there and the monetization doesn't turn on [00:28:00] right away. I think what IP owners, the owners of libraries of good content need to understand is this is not no longer just a one channel business.

That you have to put your IP at the center of, at the hub with all these spokes on it. And yes, pay TV and yes, broadcast. And yes, sell it to Netflix, but then also, yes, YouTube, and yes, Instagram, and yes, Facebook. And eventually when TikTok goes horizontal and comes to the television screen, which they're going to do if they survive the ban that will never happen.

You have to embrace all of these things. It's a husk and all strategy. And you don't necessarily have to make different versions, you just have to cut different versions. Yeah. For different platforms.

Marion Ranchet: Or wrap it differently, wrap the, yeah. Yeah.

Evan Shapiro: The fact that Merzigo is prepared to pay minimum guarantees on these things and put [00:29:00] proof in the pudding, put their skin in the game, is a demonstration to the ecosystem that there's a moment here. And if you can learn how to live in this new moment.

Something I'm gonna talk about at Stream TV in a couple of weeks is it's all the creator economy now. And if you embrace that set of rules, yes, you're gonna be on pay TV. Yes, you're gonna be on paid streaming.

But you have to see yourself as a creator the way Mr. Beast does. The way that Jake Paul does. The way that Alex Cooper does. The way that Dhar Mann does. If you can do that, these publishers can actually wind up being some of the biggest creators in the ecosystem and enjoy the rules of this new economy. But if you're gonna avoid it, you're gonna be overwhelmed, and I think eventually you're gonna become irrelevant.

Marion Ranchet: But what does it take to succeed Dilip? If you, because you've been talking about your secret sauce, but when you've seen companies within your portfolio succeeding, what have you noticed? What it's, what are those traits that make them? [00:30:00] Because I hear a lot of people who get started and the, I think they have the wrong goals, right?

They wanna go viral, they wanna succeed right away. So what are those key ingredients in your opinion, where you're like, okay, aside from the content itself, this is a partner. I can take these guys far.

Dilip Bala: No, listen, it's, I'll just say on the content piece, that is a key component, right?

It's this whole holistic flywheel content strategy approach where you're not just putting up episodes, you've gotta create shorts, you've gotta create short form, you've gotta create compilations and collages, live content. If you do all that, all of it ends up, rising. So that's a key component of best practices that we're using.

And then I think it's just the partners really leaning in on the IP and the types of IP. I mentioned obviously reality shows, entertainment and dramas always work on YouTube, but you've gotta be willing to put the full episodes, even if it's back catalog stuff to [00:31:00] really bring in that new audience.

People are used to doing clips and things like that. But it's like taking that one step further to say, it's okay, this is gonna help me overall grow the business, I think is what we look for in an ideal partner.

Evan Shapiro: And if you time it well, Paul McGrath talked about this a lot on that CBC episode, if you time it well, it has a hugely beneficial effect on the IP itself. You're seeing viewership go up on the TV. You're seeing app downloads increased from new users, younger users who wouldn't have otherwise known the app even existed. And you're finding this, you have 6,000 channels and this is what the data's telling you.

Dilip Bala: Yeah. That's exactly right. Yeah. I mean it's, not to use a cliche phrase, but all boats rise, but we are literally seeing that through our data. And I just say, the other takeaway is it's amazing how older series and programs too, you breathe new life into it.

And I think that's the power. It is, it's [00:32:00] if you do some refreshing and optimization, that it suddenly now revives it and it becomes, something that may have been sitting on the shelf, not licensed anywhere or anything, all of a sudden becomes a real opportunity. I think that's been the other really interesting observation and all of this.

Evan Shapiro: Yeah. And in a test and learn environment, having 6,000 channels of data coming at you allows you to learn more and more quickly than you can just with one or two channels.

This has been a fascinating conversation. Dilip Bala from Merzigo. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for sharing the data with us. We'll put a link to the company's info and your info in the metadata of this episode.

It's been great talking to you. I'll see you in a couple weeks in Denver.

Dilip Bala: Yes, thank you. Thank you both for having me. And it was a pleasure.

Marion Ranchet: Thank you for coming.

Evan Shapiro: Marion, that was a lot of fun. This is a different perspective. We've been talking to the channel owners and now to talk to somebody who's an operator behind 6,000 channels, it just feels like you can get a little bit more perspective on [00:33:00] where everything's going.

Marion Ranchet: Yeah. And I want them to run our channel.

Evan Shapiro: Hey, maybe you think they'll give us the minimum guarantee.

Marion Ranchet: I dunno.

Evan Shapiro: For our 25 episodes?

Marion Ranchet: Are we viral? There's viral material in this.

Evan Shapiro: We've have moments. I think we have some, I think we have some virality coming up when we go to Cannes and do some interviews there. We're gonna be in Spain next week at Gemma, and then we're gonna be together in Denver doing another live episode on stage, which I'm really excited. Getting to be on stage with you a lot in the next two months.

Marion Ranchet: Yeah, three times. Yeah. That's nice. Wow. I'm gonna get used to it.

Evan Shapiro: We're not taking any more breaks, right? Not for the foreseeable future.

Marion Ranchet: Again, you've said it while I was away, but I'm French, I'm European. I'm taking my summer break. So we're gonna have to break a little, that's also how I keep,

Evan Shapiro: But not that kind of break. Not Ross and Rachel break.

Marion Ranchet: No not that big break. Just a proper summer break. No. But yeah, it's been fantastic. Super interesting to have these guys these guys on. I have a mini announcement to make because [00:34:00] after the summer, it's a long way coming, but I want people to book time for IBC because we're gonna be at IBC next and the day before IBC starts on September 11th, Streaming Made Easy goes live.

So I'm launching my own event and enough with the digital all the time, just like we've been saying, nothing trumps being together. And so I'll share more about that. Hopefully you'll be around.

Evan Shapiro: Oh, I'll be there. I am. I'm already booked and ready to go. I can't wait.

So I'm doing my day in Denver and you're coming to that, and then you're gonna do your day in Amsterdam, which is your hometown these days. Yeah,

Marion Ranchet: It is.

Evan Shapiro: and so I'm gonna come and be a part of that as well. I can't wait.

Marion Ranchet: Okay, cool. Awesome. I love it. This is it, right? Can we go?

Evan Shapiro: I'll see you. I'll see you in Bilbao in a couple hours actually.

Marion Ranchet: No, you'll see me at the airport because we're on the same flight on

Evan Shapiro: On Amsterdam. That's exactly right.

Marion Ranchet: You'll see me.

Evan Shapiro: We're flying together. If that plane goes down, there's no more podcast.

Marion Ranchet: Oh yeah. People will be so devastated. [00:35:00]

Evan Shapiro: Yeah. Paul will have to take over.

That is Marion Ranchet and your newsletter is called?

Marion Ranchet: Streaming Made Easy on Substack. And you are Evan Shapiro, your newsletter is.

Evan Shapiro: Mine is Media War and Peace, also on Substack. It was great seeing you. Thanks for tuning in for the Media Odyssey Podcast. We'll see you next week.

Marion Ranchet: See you guys.