MIPJunior Keynote
“The future is everything”
FREDERATOR Studios is 2 US animation
studio focusing primarily on artists whowrite
their own shorts, series and movies. Founded
in 1997 by former Hanna-Barbera president
Fred Seibert, the company launched its first
series, Oh Yeah! Cartoons, in 1998,
Lastyear, having produced thousands f shorts
and series for other networks and its own nu-
‘merous digital channels, Frederator merged
with Canadian animation studio Rainmaker
Entertainment and Ezrin Hirsh, Ine. —whose
partners are Bob Ezrin and Michael Hirsh —
to form Wow! Unlimited Media
In his MIPIunior Keynote, delegates will
hear how Seibert has applied his experience
asa network e \d a previous life
in the music industry ~to working in today’s
multichannel industry.
n the business that almost all of us have
grown up in as producers, the system has
been more or less the same for decades,”
ibert told the MIPJunior Preview, But
today, where there “are a million channels
available to the billions of people around the
world”, he believes that controlling your own,
data is the key to success.
“And it’s one of the reasons that we start-
ed our own media channels 12 or 13 years
ago now. We ran our first media channel on.
tive
Apple iTunes and we did it because we want-
eda direct relationship with the audience so
that we literally could talk to the audience
th
‘ourselves; and so that we could start to g
cer data based on information that was avai
able 10 us from our own channels, in order to
make our own choices.
“A couple of years ago we changed the demo-
aphics of our CartoonHangover YouTube
channel from 70% men to 50-50% men and
women, based on reaction to a short film we
did called Bee And PuppyCat. And yet when
we brought the Bee And PuppyCat around to
networks and to movie studios they told us,
you know, that young women aren't interest-
ed in original animation. So in order to fund
the original mini-series around Bee And
PuppyCat we went to Kickstarter to raise the
money. We raised almost a million dollars
from almost 20,000 people.”
Seibert’s music-business experience also
‘comes in handy when considering new ides
and how to get them off the ground,
dedi aniiniaas Gepheumiied Wa
“A band with a computer in the rehearsal
room can create a demo that sounds amaz-
ing, and that low cost of try-fail in the music
iness is what is going on now in the video
ness,” he said. “We can make 25 videos a
week for the cost of less than one episode of a
traditional cartoon. It the television equiv-
alent of releasing a single to sell an alburn
However, Seibert believes that “no medium
dies — except maybe Vaudeville”. And to
prove it, his parent company Wow! Unlimited
Media recently bought a linear-T'V channel
in Canada, in partnership with Bell Media.
"A lot of my young online friends think we're
crazy that we are launching a brand-new lin-
car television channel into an on-demand,
online market,” he said. “But we believe that
there is alot of energy in linear television in
addition to all of these new platforms that
are coming up. We are players in all of those
platforms, and we know that when we launch
thislinear channel using all of our traditional
experience and all of our digital experience,
we are going to be able to use that channel
for partnerships across the world in coun
tries that are looking for the future, We be-
lieve the future is everything, not something
— it’s every medium, not just the new on-de-
‘mand media that are out there.”
+ Fred Seibert’s MIPJunior Keynote is
‘on Saturday, October 14 at 17.00, in the
Conference Room - G
JW Marriott
a