Sean Luxton 1_M1
By Chris Avena
Outdoor television certainly has evolved over the years. I fondly remember as a youngster watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom that aired on NBC. I would sit intently, hanging on every word as Marlin Perkins would describe these exotic species while poor Jim Fowler wrestled a python somewhere down stream for our entertainment. Fast forward twenty plus years as Steve Irwin emerged onto the outdoor scene, achieving international fame as The Crocodile Hunter that aired on the Animal Planet network. What was considered new and exciting outdoor television at the time, I still consider the infancy stage of outdoor television. Hit the fast forward button once again to the year 2010 as we witness the birth of the Outdoor Channel. The Outdoor Channel burst into every hunter’s living room and soon, everyone wanted to be the next television hunting star. With the growth and evolution of outdoor television, My Outdoor TV(MOTV) soon emerged.
Chris: Sean, the outdoor industry has changed so much in the past 20-plus years where TV was the end-all and everyone wanted to be a TV hunting star. Then it started to evolve to streaming video on demand and that's where My Outdoor TV (MOTV) has taken a strong foothold. You're actually the leaders of the industry in that space right now.
Sean: Yes, I would say that is where we started with on-demand content. We have 17,000 episodes of on-demand content. But as we were discussing earlier, the market has changed dramatically in the last two and three years. In addition to all the on-demand content, we have three live TV scheduled channels. What we know now is when people get home from work, they order dinner, tuck the kids in bed etc, sometimes you don't want to search for a show or topic. They just want to find. Now people can go to MOTV and if they want to search, they can do that. If they want to just watch something, they press one button and they watch a hunting show stream which is our scheduled live channel. So that's what we need to do to evolve. We do have the on-demand content, we have the scheduled channels, we have a new content category called “Just Shot.” So that is content that is on our platform within two weeks of being filmed in the field. Again, if you want to go back to time, we've got content if you want it. What is happening right now in the whitetail season, we've got just shot content for you.
Chris: That's really huge data base.
Sean: It's a massive amount of content and a massive amount of data that helps people find what they want from that content.
Chris: How do you store all of that content?
Sean: A whole bunch of servers. The story in a sense is the easy part. The hard part is when somebody comes to the platform, they want to find Iowa Whitetail, we have to make sure that our metadata is right and all the episodes are there so the person can type in Iowa Whitetail, find all the episodes and watch them when they want. So, our hope is that that whole technical back end is visible. You come to the site and hopefully you can find what you want right there. If not, we hope that we have done some work so you can find that content really easily.
Chris: Is the content basically everything that's on the Outdoor Channel that you get on MOTV on demand what you want, when you want it, you miss an episode and you can just follow up?
Sean: It is not all of it, but it's almost all of it. All the biggest stars and producers of content are there. Again, what we find is people will find a show or what they love and then they will binge-watch and go all the way down. We have 12 or 13 seasons of content for some shows.
Chris: Long time.
Sean: Yeah. And people really like going back and seeing those producers way back when and then seeing them how they’re hunting today.
Chris: How does MOTV differ from YouTube or Rumble?
Sean: I think it is different in the amount of content. We have much more content than everyone says. We have much more of the established, very popular content, most of it explicitly. And you can watch MOTV on a big-screen TV, an iPhone, Samsung Smart TV, Vizio TV. If you want to hunt and peck for your content, you're going to be able to do that on YouTube. If you want to sit back on your couch and watch your big-screen TV and find whatever you want, and go from one show to another show, a live stream, to on-demand, to just shot. That's what we mean.
Chris: But I can also pull it up on my computer or cellphone?
Sean: It's available everywhere. Big screen, small screen. It's available everywhere.
Chris: What is the sweet spot as far as programming?
Sean: As far as hunting categories, one would think that the category is just one homogenous group, it's not, right? We have many different audiences and that's where the big challenge is, as some of these come in and they are bow hunters and they are not interested in anything else. We are constantly playing with having present content. If you want a water fowl content, we want to make it easy. Predator hunting? I’d say it’s not like other channels because all those audiences are different.
Chris: How much have you grown over the past few years?
Sean: A huge amount. I'd say we did a lot more learning than growing initially. It was a brand- new space, we were brand new in the space. We know a lot more now. There is still a lot that we do not know. Platforms are growing hugely. We just launched on YouTube TV. We launched on Amazon Prime Channels. So, these are brand new platforms in the case of YouTube and Amazon Prime Channels that is only a few months old. We are also available internationally. A part of what is really changing in this market is the platforms that we are available on smart TVs. Three years ago, we were not that big of a platform. Over the last few years, they have grown hugely in some of the other platforms and have declined a little bit. So, we need to be everywhere
Chris: It is similar to podcasting. It used to be just one channel. Now it's iHeart radio, it’s Spotify, It’s Stitcher, it's Apple and I'm on all those too.
Sean: Yeah. I think it's a good plug for yourself. And because we don't know where the technology is going next, we don't know where our audience is going to go next, you need to be everywhere. Because they all take investment in time and effort are key. But you need to be in as many places as you can because if your audience watches TV on LG Smart TV, you have to be there and watching or listening to it.
Chris: It is an ever- evolving process with this type of industry and this type of media. You don't know what's going to be big tomorrow.
Sean: No, no, sir.
Chris: So how do you stay ahead of the curve?
Sean: You got to be mapping the terrain in every single part of the ecosystem. So, you've got to be looking at smart TVs, looking at tech devices, looking at all the big digital players, because they're doing different things. You cannot know what's going to happen. So, our philosophy is to be in as many places as we can, because then we're going to be in a place that takes off.
Chris: How do you pick your program? How do you say, “Okay, this show is doing okay but this was better. How do you process your data?”
Sean: So, in advance of getting content up on the platform, we would use ratings on linear TV. That would be one place to start. But we also know that it's not up to us to make a determination what the audience likes, we want to put some content up that maybe there's no data on. And we'll pretty quickly have data on and so we put content out there, this is brand new, some are doing well, some aren't. So, where there is data we use it, but some shows perform differently on your television than they do on the streaming channels. So, crappie fishing is a great example. Not a huge category on linear television philosophies. But does quite well on streaming. So, if we look just at linear television, we wouldn't spend much time on it. But because it's a different market, people can go in and find what they want easily. We need to have content to serve all these niches and we don't have data for all so where we don't have data we test.
Chris: Okay, so let's say, I want to start a TV show. How would I get on MOTV? Is there a vetting process?
Sean: Yeah, I'd say to stand out you need to show us that you've got some traction and so on. It could be on YouTube; it could be on Instagram. And what we need to know is that, we need to look at it and still say, “That looks good.” And there needs to be some verification of that from an audience. So again, it could be developed X number of subscribers on YouTube or it could be something we want to test. Like if someone came and said, “Look, I've got …like the adventure category is really interesting to us and some of our audiences really like that. This guy, he's hunting or fishing in it. But if you came to me and said, “I have this brand-new series, we're getting lots of interaction on Facebook and Instagram, and it's got hunting and fishing adventures.” We might want to take a flier on that and test.
Chris: So, what can we expect this year?
Sean: More live TV scheduled channels, content in different formats and lengths and types. So, we know that the concept from linear does very well. So, what other contents are going to do well? Is it short? How short? This is content that's going to do well. How many scheduled TV channels do we have and still keep building the audience and keep people coming back? That's we're going to find out in 2023 and then we got all these brand-new platforms Vizio, YouTube content channels, so each of those platforms is different. The audiences are different, the kind of content they want is different and so we're going to be learning what they want and giving them some more of that.
Chris: What about reality TV?
Sean: There's a place for that. Again, if it's adventure and ties and hunting or fishing, then we're interested. It's not our bread and butter now. Anybody who's watched Alone, great, great series.
Chris: It’s ever evolving. You've come a long way in those three years.
Sean: We have. Thank you for noticing.
Chris: It's my job. But I appreciate you taking the time to speak to us today. And we look forward to what you have coming up and just tune in.
Sean: Thank you