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The conversation with Alan begins at the 18:24 mark. Or read through the transcript below.

EVAN: I want to bring our next guest and this man’s name is extremely French so I may need some assistance. Do you want to try it? Yeah. Yes, please. Try it. Go for it. Can you bring up one of the founders and CEO of Filmhub?

MARION: Alan, I have to read it, d’Escragnolle

ALAN: Thank you. Got it right. Thank very much. We needed a native French speaker here. That was very helpful.

MARION: I can't even do it. Even I messed it up. d’Escragnolle, d’Escragnolle, d’Escragnolle

EVAN: It sounds like the snail right? So Matthew attacks the discovery end of the ecosystem from one end of it, the operating system end of it. You come to the discovery end of content from the publisher, from the creator, from the rights holder end of the ecosystem. Filmhub specializes in basically connecting specialized content via various different portals, some paid, some free, some ad supported, some not. With audiences and creating economics of scale around certain content. Did I capture that correctly?

ALAN: You want to join my marketing team?

EVAN: Yeah, so you can leave now. But in your own words, you know, you're, this is one of the most, I spent a very drunken night at a sushi bar with this man. And I curated and you paid. Where do you think it fills in the white space? What does it do in the, if everything is the creator? The economy now, as I said earlier today, what services is it providing to the firm and the client?

ALAN: Yeah. So if we look at the world of content. There are 10 million pieces of content in IMDb alone. And that's a gross undercounting of what's available to actually license in the industry. And let's look at, you we talked a little bit about YouTube earlier, winning the space. Why are they winning the space? Massive amounts of volume and personalization. And so if you're going to build a streaming service in today's modern era that is going to win and is going to compete, you have to be investing 10 million titles. And there's no distributor in the world that is trying to bring all those together and make it possible for streaming channels, broadcasters, whoever, to license those. And we saw that opportunity and we're on a race to bringing the 10 million titles available in the world to license.

EVAN: And so there have been actually a couple of other folks on here. We maximized kind of the reach of individual pieces of IP to the end user.I mean, we talked about this, and the machine that you've built there is very unique. Why? I mean, it's Bond villain-like. Explain what it does, how it was built, why it exists. What is it set loose in the world to do?

ALAN: So I think you have to understand kind where it's from. So I come from a technology background. My co founder Klaus is a world reknowned composer behind Pirates of The Carribbean, Gladiator, The Thin Red Line, Mission Impossible 2. And in the sales and distribution world, there have always been sales distribution companies. They're amazing at selling, amazing at getting content in places, but they've never had the technology to help them scale. And so we paired up ultimately to bring the two together to build the world's largest distributor.

And within that, what you have to do is you have to build a fully vertically integrated distributor. Asset ingestion, royalties, contracting, asset management, delivery, analytics, insights, everything that major studios somewhat have into cobbled together tools and solutions. We built in one platform that is used solely by our team. We don't license it out, it's proprietary to us, and allows us to scale faster than any other distributor.

And to give you an idea, most distributors probably work with a couple hundred rights holders max. We have over 6,300 rights holders, everything from digital-first creators through major studios.

EVAN: And you're monetizing, I talked about this earlier. So one of the key watch, three watchwords of the current user-centric era are fragmentation, fragmentation, fragmentation, right? And it's all the creatpr economy now. so you work with both ends of the... We talked about a couple of different case studies there. But you also, I said, at the same time, the rules of the creator economy have greatly, greatly changed. It's not just getting clicks and selling ads and hoping the best works out or even doing brand deals and videos anymore. It's now much more a complicated, nuanced mix of models. And that's where your machine works. The endpoints for the distribution are incredibly multifaceted and kind of changing all the time. But, for example, talk about the spectrum. You're one of the biggest suppliers to Amazon. Am I getting that correct?

ALAN: Biggest suppliers to Amazon. Biggest providers of Apple.

EVAN: Say that again. You're one of the biggest suppliers to Amazon. Yeah. Explain that.

ALAN: Well, ultimately, you have Amazon. They recently shut down their Prime Video Direct Upload portal, right? They need content providers to get content into them. And we've acquired rights from the 6,300 rights. We have thousands of titles. We And we make it happen super simple, fast, quick, all in one place.

EVAN: And you just do this repeatedly.

ALAN: Repeatedly. And then another provider who you might take, Roku Channel, right. You know, another partner that we work with. You know, also, same thing. They need to ingest large volumes of content, right? That's one of the, you know, very important. Realshort and vertical video, right?

EVAN: Stop. Go right there for a second. Who here has heard of Realshort? Raise your hand high. The rest of you, go learn about Realshort. It's a hot thing right now. So explain what Realshort is really quickly.

ALAN: Yeah. So Realshort is vertical video serialized in short, instant content. So take a full-length feature film and sell it as 80 episodes. And they are geniuses in terms of monetization and eeking people out to pay more and more money. And so when you look at our friends running advertising services, no offense, but the amount you make per view...Probably 10, 20 cents, maybe. They're getting up to $20.

EVAN: Yeah, so vertical drama, serialized dramas of a couple minutes length, really a movie, verticalized and cut into shorts. I've gotten five calls from reporters wanting quotes on that loan in the last two weeks. So if you want to buy a futures thing, go look into that. I also argue it will spill into things like serialized nonfiction reality as well, because they're basically the same thing. They're soap operas at the end of the day. Anyway, the big thing is cliffhangers in them, right?

ALAN: Cliffhangers, you know, if they had to be cut, they had to be shot in a certain way. But at the same time, you know, this is a new platform, and it's honestly, hate to say it, but it's sad that, you know, only half of this room has heard of them. They're one of the largest distributors of content in the world.

EVAN: They're now, to be fair, they're in China, and so they have a huge install base. It's, yeah, who's captive. So the, you have, they have a huge audience there. And that's a mobile first when the competition isn't that big either as well. But they are also, I think, the fastest growing app in the United States right now as well. Is that true?

ALAN: If you log in to your app store and look at top entertainment apps, there are probably at least one or two right now.

EVAN: So if you own one film or you own a thousand films, what you would tell someone, if you were giving advice right now and they didn't want to work with you and they said they want to go out on your own or your friend, you'd say them is you would have to learn how to, you need to learn how to manage all of these various platforms, correct?

ALAN: Correct.

EVAN: And know how to market on all these platforms too, correct? Correct. And when they say that sounds hard, you're going to say, it's really hard. It's really hard, right? And so that is it. That is part of it. It isn't just go up on YouTube. I've talked a lot about YouTube. You just complained out loud on a podcast about me talking too much about YouTube. I hear you, mom. But that's a therapy session for another day. But the key element of it, it's not just as easy as that. If you want to produce your own films or you want to monetize your own library, it's this complicated, nuanced, multi-levered flywheel that is operationalized and A-B testing all the time.

ALAN: Yeah. And I mean, also don't forget, it's not just endpoint, right? It's still relationships. You still have to sell into these folks. You still have to maintain the relationships. My team's here at Stream TV talking to every single buyer that's here.And you still have to build the relationships. But the key is... If you wanted to go do a deal for your film across 30 different services, good luck. You're going to be here for years.

EVAN: And you're absolutely... We're the relationships where you can't get the distribution without it. But because you reach such scale, that's why you will plug so in all these various endpoints, right? You do it thousands of times and no single IP holder can hope to reach that scale. And they can, but do they want to build that infrastructure to the point where they're always amazing. Every day, the technology and the machine learning that they're working on.

ALAN: I mean, when I say that our team does scale, we've sold 320,000 licenses to films and delivered and fulfilled those assets in the last couple of years.

EVAN: In the last 320,000? So talk about one of them, Bounce Patrol. This is a creator-led project. Yes. What is it?

ALAN: It is, so for these of you that have kids, you may have been subjected. Kids animated YouTube channel, 30 million subscribers, and they were jailed to YouTube. And their content was solely on YouTube. It was on their own channel. And they realized, hey, we need to diversify. We need to get out to all these other endpoints. We need to get everywhere. We need to be discoverable in XYZ AVOD service. Be in libraries. We need DVDs purchasable. It's purchasable. That's one of the things that we focus on for them. And so we took their content that was in one location, even other…There is a YouTube that they can't access, right? So many of you may not understand, but YouTube is actually for professional film and TV is broken up into two sections, UGC upload, as well as free with ads, transactional section as well. And so you can't get to those sections, which is actually where content monetizes even more without a distributor relationship. And there's very select few distributors that have that relationship. We are one of them because of the volume that we have and even getting them there, even though they have a 30 million subscriber channel on YouTube, YouTube wouldn't do a deal with them. And, you know, that's one of the areas where we've helped them get now 114 different territories across 30 different exhibitors and generated them over six figures of revenue.

EVAN: How many hours of content we have?

ALAN: With us, probably about 20 hours.

EVAN: That's it? Yeah. Wow. And you're doing all those things. Do you have a question that you want to tell them?

MARIAN: Well, so how does that actually work? Or did you, how do the platform choose the content? Because it's, I'm going to be the devil's advocate for a second, but. It's great to have the platforms on one side and the content on the other, but how do you make sure if you have so much content that you are super serving everyone, right? Are the platforms not playing, you know, picky, so to say? And therefore, there's a portion of your catalog that doesn't get picked. How does that work?

ALAN: Well, we all know we have curators at each of the platforms that, you know, are very excellent at their jobs at curating and are very good about picking exactly what their users want to watch. Even though they don't know me and know that I like weird Brazilian documentaries. And guess what? That means that they're missing out on opportunities there. And so, yes, they're playing picky. Yes, we do have an AI, you know, data engine that creates and figures out which titles might be right paired for them. We have a team, though, that takes that data and then pitches it to them. And it is a mixture of, you know, human in the loop with AI to help make sure we curate what's needed for each and every person. And, you know, yes, there's stuff, of course, that sits at bottom. There is stuff that sits at the top. We're excellent at finding out stuff that was sitting at the bottom that happened to make successful.

MARION: Do you also work, because we talked about content discovery, and it's one thing to be live platform, it's another to be discovered. Are you also helping on the marketing piece, meaning, you know, providing assets and all of that platform, right?

ALAN: Yeah, so we're building a bunch of tools right now that help with metadata creation, asset creation, A-B testing of artwork, as well, is a big thing that we're launching soon. And all of those things are absolutely necessary, right? We're building paid media tools for our filmmakers. We offer standard marketing services that a distributor does. You have to be a full service place in order to actually do this well. And, you there's certain parts of it that scale, and there's certain parts of the business that don't scale. And you have to understand what those parts are. And, you know, we, you know. We live in an industry of power laws. We all know that. The key is finding out what is the top 10%. It's a random few 10% right now based upon us selecting what people want to watch.

But guess what? We are constantly surprised when you actually put a machine and let things go out in the world, no one's going to predict things that are successful. I mean, I'll give you a prime example. Like, you know, we were the distributor behind hundreds of Beavers this past year, one of the darlings of the indie film world. And I'll tell you, I told the filmmaker, no. You know, it's just like, you wanted our marketing support. You wanted us to get, and I was like, listen, I'll put it out. We'll get it out there. But like, gone deal. Well, Kurt proved us wrong. He's like, dude, this is going to be big. That is now a title that is one of the, you know, number three on Letterboxd this past year. On, you know, theatrical road tour. It's like going back into theaters again. And there are literally, if you search Hundreds of Beavers online, you'll be amazed at what you see. It is wacky, zany. I would have never picked it for a winner, but guess what? That's because I'm me. And, you know, it's funny because like, well, you know, we'll pitch this to buyers and say, hey, there's something here. Like, we didn't believe it. Like, oh yeah, we don't believe it either still. And I'm like, guys, the data shows it. And so it's, you know, it's a constant game.

EVAN: Yeah. that gets to, we had a debate here earlier about who's responsible for discovery and ease of use and less friction. Is it the publisher, the rights holder, or the platform? We have one of each of you, ultimately, Alan, you represent the publisher, you represent the creator, you represent the IP, the rights holder, and you are actively engaged in getting the content discovered. Matthew, you are the platform in this case. And you have said to me in the past that there are economic or businesses that have biased platforms. You're dedicated to avoiding it. I would ask each of you, and I'll start with you, Matthew, what do you think, where do you think the responsibility lands with the publisher? It does sound like regardless, even if there's an agnostic platform or a complicated platform, the rights holder has to be the marshal of their own engine. But the platform holds so much. They decide who, as the emperor says, who lives and who dies. So where do you think it lies?

MATTHEW: I think it has to lie with the platform. mean, the operating systems, no matter which generation of computing we're talking about, always had this power, whether they wanted it or not. Usually it's been used, not for great use sometimes, but we intend for it to be different. And so to your point, that's why objectivity is so important to us, right? Because we know that when somebody turns on the television and our software comes up, we want everyone to have a fair shot for that. We're not going to have our own content service, anything like that. So that's the sort of way our responsibility with objectivity. I think that means that the platforms need to be content first, not necessarily app first all the time. Because for a user, having to surf from app to app is not an... And so I think, you know, I don't blame publishers in the current environment for not allowing the platforms to really do that and giving them access to their libraries in a certain way or to the metadata. But we're seeing publishers for us willing to do that. And I think that's going to lead to better, honestly, acquisition and churn reduction for the publishers at a subscription, better outcomes for the advertiser supporting ones as well.

EVAN: Marion, I'm interested. Where do you, I don't know if it's solid debate, but you've heard Matthew's very thoughtful answer there. Where do you, what do you think?

MARIAN: So I am kind of in between the content and app. I feel there's space for both, right? Well, we've seen these last few years, who has leaned heavily app first. When I was working with them, folks were saying, Marion, the UI is so awful. Like, why, you know? You but it was taking people to content, you know, as fast as possible. In the meantime, had other platforms I won't be naming who were making sure you were spending half an hour looking for content. So I think there's value in doing both content and app because sometimes I don't want to go through 20 pages of drama or whatever. I want to go to Netflix and I want to check out what's on it. So I think there's a lot of learning that I will say. I think it will be hard for you guys and it is hard for a lot of companies to take people as quickly as possible because they want you as a viewer to spend a bit of time. This is eyeballs. This is time that they're monetizing. So I don't know what you guys are planning to do, but what I've noticed is they like that I dwell on the own page because that placement, sometimes it's editorial, very often it's paid for. And so I agree with you when you say that, you know, they have something in it that they don't want to fix that content discovery problem.

MATTHEW: Yeah, no, I agree. I just. Whether we like it or not, there's just an order to it, right? That's based technically. And so what we're trying to figure out is not just the content first stuff, but how can we give publishers control over a certain element of our home screen too, right? Because they ultimately want people in their app. want, because that usually relates with return reduction and that type of stuff. And so we'll find that balance as well. And each person may want to do it differently. But I think ultimately, especially for the broader ecosystem, the way that we can bring everything together in one unified home screen, the more everything has a chance.

EVAN: Yeah. And so I think that's right. But what's interesting is you say that the platform should have, it's their responsibility to a certain extent, but then you want to give the publisher control over certain parts of the area. And I think to your point, it's a marriage of the two without question, because if they don't bring the content out, and Alan I'm going to ask you the same question, who do you think bears the responsibility? I think I know your answer for it.

ALAN: I mean, ultimately, it's the platform, right? It really is the platform that really from a curate. Not the publisher, not the creator.

MARION: You're surprised. You thought you could take control.

ALAN: Yeah, but at the same time, right, the biggest services will be the ones that aggregate everything and curate and personalize the best with their services.

MARIAN: I second that. I think that's where Tubi is amazing. They have the biggest library, and yet people are spending an insane amount of time with them watching content.

EVAN: It's very tailored to a very specific audience, yeah.

ALAN: Well, I think, you know, there are many services, right, that are, that got their, you know, that are semi-trying opportunity, right? Really, the only one that is actually pursuing that strategy in today's world is still YouTube, right? We need to, you know, and this is where, you know, you realize platforms complain about churn every day. It's self-inflicted. It's like, if you're a platform and you don't have Bounce Patrol, or you don't have Hundreds of Beavers, that thing has generated millions of dollars, you’re screwed.

EVAN: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And so it's like, on the other side of that, for the, from the. Publisher's standpoint, because of that fragmentation, because of the control of the platforms and YouTube, yes, the top 20% of YouTube channels drives 98% of viewing.

ALAN: That's the entire industry, though. It's not just YouTube. That's the entirety of the industry operates in that power law.

EVAN: Yeah, that's right. But that's a million channels. And so that's fragmentation on fragmentation on fragmentation. In that case, if you don't know your audience, if you're not finding, if you're not seeking out the audience, the platform's not necessarily going to help you find your audience.I'm saying. I mean, if you're NBCUniversal or Disco Bros or The Mouse House, yes, because you've got the greatest IP in the history of the world and wherever you go, audiences will follow. But if you have a film made for $65,000, which is one of the things you specialize in, know, finding audiences for those types of films, it's up to you as a creator or as an IP holder. Or if you have a library of a thousand hours and that's all, 20 hours and that's all you have, it's up to you.

ALAN: Well, so I think we're talking about separate things in some ways. Like I fully agree with you, right? Like Hundreds of Beavers example is that example where like finding his audience is up to them, right? That's where like finding your audience is up to them. The platform's job is to continue finding more people like that audience, right? New audiences. New audiences. It's finding the lookalikes. It's finding the next group of people that are going to like that, right? It's like realizing like, oh, I like UFO documentaries. I might like Bigfoot documentaries. Who knows, right? Like that's where I think it kind of comes in. It's like up to you to figure out and identify who your initial audience is and then utilize the platform.

EVAN: And the real answer at the end of the day, think we lead to, and the reason I do these silly debates in the first place is it's both of them.

MARION: Hey, partnership, right?

EVAN: Right. It has to be between the content because the platforms will ultimately use the content to sell the platforms themselves. This was a great conversation. We're going to continue it at the bar right after this. But first, I want to thank you, Marion, for joining me on stage at the first Media Universe Summit. Let's have a hand for. My co-host, Marion Ranchet, thank you, Matthew Hennick, who runs Ventura at Trade Desk, thank you, best of luck on that. Thank you, Alan d’Escragnolle. That's as good as you're going to get it. You want me to say it again? No.

MARION: Thank you, Alan d’Escragnolle. Is it okay?

EVAN: So thank you, Alan, again, from Filmhub for being here. Thank you very much, audience, for being here. This has been the Media Odyssey podcast at Media Universe Summit at Stream TV.