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 by Chris Davison, chris@lthmedia.com
Rick Feldman is the President of NATPE, the National Association of Television Program Executives. Rick began his career at a local station in Baltimore and has since worked in many areas of the business, from broadcast to cable to online and mobile. I recently had a chance to speak with Rick to discuss B2B, the LATV Festival, and evolution versus revolution.
Q: Can you tell us about your background and what made you want to work in entertainment? How did you get involved with the HRTS?
-I was always a TV kid. I went to NYU for Film & Television and after I graduated there I started working at a Westinghouse station in Baltimore, as a promotions guy. For the next 25 years after that I ran independent television stations for Metromedia and for Chris-Craft, ending here at KCOP Channel 13 in 1999, when the station was sold along with our other Chris-Craft stations to FOX. I also worked for Barry Diller for a couple of years at USA, running four independent stations, and then I came to NATPE five years ago. HRTS has obviously been part of the fabric of the television business for the many years that I've lived in LA. I also used to go to the IRTS when I lived in New York, and I moved out here 25 years ago. Certainly HRTS is one of those things that, like NATPE, tries to continue to connect various people in the business on a regular basis. We are good friends with the HRTS and
NATPE enjoys having a nice relationship with those guys. As it happens right now, Lionsgate President of Programming & Production,
Kevin Beggs, who is our Board Co-Chair with
Roma Khanna, President of Global Networks and Digital Initiatives at NBC Universal International, has also become a big macher at the HRTS, so we have even more in common with HRTS right now.
Q: NATPE and the HRTS are both membership groups of television executives, how would you compare the two groups?
-I think that we are first and foremost, a market. We are a membership organization that creates the biggest video content market in the U.S. and we also highlight content at our LATV Festival in July as well as with the things that we do all year round. We also have an educational foundation, and we have all kinds of programs during the year for college students, and also we have a faculty fellowship program. And so the way we are organized is just different than what HRTS does, the ‘H’ in HRTS stands for Hollywood, and we are much more of a broad-based global organization with about 4000 worldwide members at present. NATPE is a larger, more heterogeneous group, and we service all the various aspects of the TV business and the video business, so it’s broadcasting, cable, advertising, agents, satellite, it’s multiplatform video content. So we really kind of do different things, although they are also about connectivity of people. Obviously it's important for us when we give the 7500 people who come to NATPE, the more than 1000 people come to the LATV Festival, obviously we try to connect them as well. Our mantra for this year is Content, Commerce, Connections, those are the three guide words for us.
Q: On September 23rd you produced a web seminar “An Insider's View of the New Fall Season” in association with Microsoft, how did that come together?
-It's also presented in association with a company called TVtracker. The idea there is that TVtracker is an organization that culls all of the information behind all the television shows and does a significant amount of research which they give to the studios, so they have all the background on who is producing what and where, so we are friends with them. We're working with them to take a lot of the stuff that they have amassed, especially since our event is right after the Emmys, so everybody's thinking TV. We get this out to our constituency and hopefully we'll have three or four hundred people in our web seminar. We do three or four of these a year and they are all powered by Microsoft. Because we serve so many different aspects of the TV business, last year we had an interactive advertising kind of seminar, we've done a cable one, we’re doing this one now, we try to do different elements of the business three or four times a year and talk to different constituencies in our membership. All of our webinars are free, and that's because one division of Microsoft does this for us on the technology side and another division of Microsoft actually gives us enough money to do it, they are our sponsor.
Q: With NATPE and the CES both taking place in January might there someday be a partnership between your two events?
-No. There would be no partnership between us and CES, because we do totally different things. As much as they try to say that they have some content involved in their show, and they say it a lot, they are out there and I understand why they're trying to do that, but the bottom line is, it is a consumer electronics show. The CES is very big and a partnership just doesn't make sense because we are very focused on the video market. Producers are not going to flock to CES to try to find ways to distribute their content, it’s a consumer electronics show and we are a B2B show. They are early in January, we are late in January, some people crossover but for media professionals who are involved in the actual creation or advertising or distribution or monetization of video content across all platforms, we are the place to go. If you're interested in seeing the latest and greatest in TV screens or car radios, you go to CES.
Q: What was the impetus behind the Los Angeles Television Festival?
-The idea there was that NATPE was big and we wanted to do something of a smaller show, more directly geared to professional television producers, independent producers. The United States is a very difficult place for independent producers to make a living, in a lot of other parts of the world you are able to hold onto your rights a little bit better, you're able to make a business out of it like in the UK and Canada but in the States it's a tough business and so we are trying to connect independent producers across all levels with people that are already professionals in production & distribution. We celebrate independent producer content and try to show the really good producers, who want to go up a notch, how they best might be able to negotiate the rocks and shoals of Hollywood, we found there was a real hunger for that. We started it as a boot camp but frankly, when you start a thing as a boot camp you're relatively dealing with lower level kinds of people. We wanted the LATV Festival to be about more experienced people and so we have upgraded our program, and we have upgraded the level of person who comes to the Festival, and we try to handle people in college or right out of college in other ways. We are really looking at the LATV Festival to handle fully-born independent producers who have some content and are just looking for ways to monetize it and get distribution. If you don't live in New York or LA it is sometimes hard to figure out who to talk to, so we try to connect the dots for those people, that's how it came about. It was very successful, we were very happy with it and we'll be back next July and will continue to grow every year. You look at how the economy is not great right now for anybody and it’s silly for anybody to predict the year after will be any better but we hope it will be and we work really hard to try and make sure we are protected; you never know what will happen but right now, all things look good.
Q: How do you see the industry changing over the next 3-5 years?
-It's really anybody's guess, I think that fundamentally it is going to be a slow change in the way things develop over the next three years. Probably at whatever point in time that online video really starts to have breakthrough hits that advertisers really want to pay for, those eyeballs are really attracted and everybody knows what they're talking about, then there will obviously be some sort of shift. We also know that the network TV model kind of has to be changed, you can't continue to produce expensive hours of television if they're only going to get one run on a network. There are things that are revolutionary and things that are evolutionary, and I don't think any of us really know what the revolution is on the horizon. From an evolutionary standpoint, though, we do know that it is going to continue probably to be more fractionalization, although at some point, you know if it's just like the situation where there were so many cable networks and cable stations, at home people maybe watch 10 or 15 networks, they don't watch 300 and it's similarly impossible for people to go online and see a thousand websites. There will only be 10 or 20 websites that can really work for someone and ultimately it’s those 10 or 20 that will be bought by Warner Bros. or Disney and all the other guys. How all of this will eventually develop you don't know, but what you do know, what's really great from our perspective, is that NATPE is about the creative juices that create original video content for multiplatform. The one thing we know above anything else is that over the next couple of years there'll be more of it than ever. Not all of it necessarily will be great but it will almost certainly make a lot of money and will almost certainly be seen by someone. We are an organization that celebrates and highlights the people who are in this business creating original content and there will be more content created in the next five years than ever before. So, while this creates a lot of turmoil it also creates a lot of opportunity, and that's what NATPE is all about, connecting people so that they can take advantage of those opportunities across any and all platforms. There is no digital or analog anymore, everything is digital by February, everything will be digital and so there’s no point really in talking about ‘digital’ if it's all digital, if we are all digital. Next year in January the conversation will be about all of the opportunities that video creators have to get the content out there, and the really difficult part ultimately is how do you make money? This will all develop over the next couple of years and it’ll be really interesting to see what happens.
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