Xumo on Platform Differentiation, Studio Partnerships and Aggregation Strategy
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You're listening to Inside Content, the TV Industry Podcast. This show is brought to you by Three Vision. A global TV industry consultancy specialising in content acquisition, strategy, research, and business development. Each episode, we give you VIP access to the views and experiences of senior TV executives and discuss the latest TV industry trends and insights.
Hello and welcome back to Inside Content. I'm Hayley Bull, VP at Three Vision, and today I'm joined by Stefan Van Engen, Head of Content and Partnerships at Zumo. In this conversation, we dig into what's actually working in the far space right now, from the enduring appeal of classic TV to the dominance of crime, the role of news during major movements, and why sports and shoulder program is becoming a powerful driver of engagement. We also get into discovery and editorial influence, why genre based house channels became a key part of their strategy, and how distribution partnerships create new entry points for audiences. Enjoy.
Introducing Video Markets Tracker from Three Vision, your go to source for global TV data. We offer regularly updated regional and global reports covering PayTV, SVOD, AVOD and FAST across Africa, MENA, the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific. Make smarter decisions with insights you can trust. Learn more at threevision.tv Now on to the episode.
Well, hi Stefan. Thank you for joining us in Inside Content. We're really pleased to have you with us today. Um, shall we get going by uh you introducing yourself to uh to our inside content listeners?
Sure. Thanks. Thanks so much for having me. My name is Stefan Van Engen. I'm the uh head of content and partnerships uh here at Zumo. Um I look over everything that touches our ad-supported content from lead generation to acquisition, uh to programming, editorial, and distribution across uh Zumo Play. A on the ad supported ecosystem.
Fantastic. Um now for kind of our non-US audiences, perhaps you could um explain who Zumo are and I know they offer kind of multiple media products and services, so it'll be really good to understand um perhaps all of them and then where you sit.
Yeah, for sure. So uh Zumo is a joint venture between Comcast and Charter, two of the largest cable companies and uh internet providers here in the US. Um We started a long time ago actually, specifically as a fast platform. Um we launched right around the same time as Pluto, actually, uh all the way back in in 2015, 2016. So we've been around doing the fast ad-supported thing for for quite a while. Um but now as part of this joint venture, there's sort of three distinct businesses. There's Sumo play, which is our direct to consumer fast platform and app, um, which lives both on our own devices but also on third party devices such as Roku and Amazon. uh Samsung televisions, et cetera. Um and uh And that is largely US based, though we do have distribution um in Canada as well as the UK via Sky Q and Sky Glass, um with a with the Zumo play app.
So that's one side of the business, the direct to consumer ad supported content play. The other piece of the business is our Zumo devices. Um Uh this includes the Zumo stream box and that is offered through our parent companies, Comcast and Charter. We have a growing list of operators such as Cox, MediaCom, and GCI that also offer this product.
And that
is an actual device. Um for for customers. And uh part of that device uh outlay is also Zumo televisions. So we work with OEMs like Sharp and Westinghouse and Element to distribute uh the Zumo operating system across smart TVs. Uh and both of these products, Zumo Smart TVs and the stream boxes, are US uh US product. US. And then the third part of our business is Zumo Enterprise. And this is our most international business. And this is our sort of B2B service for fast and AVOD content, where we power over 2,000 channels to 30 different platforms. And the way that came to be was in the very early days of Zumo, we actually built the technology to stitch channels together to create. Linear fast ad-supported streams.
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