Jason Kilar: Why Hollywood Needs to Focus on ‘Scaled Engagement’ to Achieve Streaming Profits
Jason Kilar knows the streaming business. He ran WarnerMedia for two tumultuous years during the birth of HBO Max, and more than a decade before that, he launched Hulu.
Kilar has never been shy about speaking his mind. But the executive has largely kept a low profile since exiting WarnerMedia in April 2022 following the spinoff transaction that created Warner Bros. Discovery.
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Today, Kilar steps into the spotlight with an exclusive guest essay for Variety that includes a few bold ideas for how Hollywood can come off the ropes and find the path to profits with streaming.
Here, Kilar explains why he was motivated to outline his vision for why Hollywood’s major players should work to create an “everything” streaming platform to replicate the best parts of the traditional cable TV bundle.
You’ve spent a long time working in digital and streaming. What motivated you to write this essay?
Kilar: The short answer to it is I chose to write the essay because I care about the industry. And I want the industry to have a great future. And those are the two motivations. Of course, this past year has been challenging for the industry on a number of levels, whether it’s the current situation with cord cutting, obviously, the strikes and a host of other things.
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Balance sheets and other things that you will need to these are challenging times for the industry. And I think it’s so important in these moments, to be able to find the right way forward as an industry. And that was my motivation for writing this because of obviously a lot of years of experience that I have in the streaming side of the business in addition to the storytelling side of the business and the administrative side as well.
You’re more than a year removed from running a very big company that was trying to make a turn at a difficult time for the business and the world. Now that you’re out of that storm, are there things you can see now that you couldn’t before?
Kilar: I think that there’s a number of things that obviously have changed over the last 18 months. Probably the most important thing, which many people have written about has been the debt levels on a number of companies in Hollywood. Debt levels are very important in terms of decision making. They influence decision making. They obviously claim a certain portion of the capital that would otherwise be available for investment in the future. I believe that the current situation in part is a function of debt levels. There’s other things, of course, the secular decline of linear television, but that was kind of people have seen that coming for many, many years. And I’d say the more the more recent changes have been the elevated debt levels on a number of Hollywood companies.
What did you find was the hardest part of initiating big changes at a companies like Warner Bros., HBO and Turner?
Kilar: Even under the most ideal circumstances, change will be hard. And so I think it’s very much a human challenge more than even a business strategy challenge. Change is hard, and, and I’m incredibly proud by the way of the people at Warner and a lot of other people in the industry outside of Warner who have leaned into change and leaned into the future. It’s very difficult to kind of navigate a company that has found success for the better part of 100 years and to then have to materially adjust course to be able to find success for the next 100 years.
Now, that said, you know, if you take a look at the results that the team was able to deliver, at Warner Media, I’m very, very proud of what the team was able to deliver both creatively and from a business perspective across linear and streaming. But the change is hard for I think everyone, especially, you know, folks that have found success a certain way and obviously the world changes through time.
I don’t want to belabor every decision you made as WarnerMedia CEO but broadly, now that you’ve had time to reflect, are there things that you would do differently if you had the chance?
Kilar: Not about the “what” I did. There are certain things about the “how,” but it wasn’t about any specific decisions about what the company did in terms of its strategy. But I think anybody, you know, if you’re being self aware, always should reflect on how was that decision executed in terms of communication perhaps or something like that. So I think the learnings are always about the “how.”
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I feel very good about the decisions we made across the 30,000-person team. … I have to say that you know Warner really is one of the world’s treasures and like you, I absolutely believe that this industry, Warner included, is going to be a vital and important part of the world going forward. Storytelling is far too important for it not to be. It’d be hard to find sufficient words to describe the impact that I believe that Warners has had on the world these past 100 years. And I’m certainly hopeful about its impact over the next 100 years.
As your essay points out, the streaming marketplace is already going through its own changes. Where do you see the pay TV world heading in 2024 and 2025?
Kilar: I think the movement is going to be in one of two directions. There will be a precious few number of companies that will be able to achieve scale and engagement on their own. And those two words are so important to the future of the industry, which is scaled engagement. So you know having a large number of people pay for what’s on offer, but to not just have them pay but to have them be truly engaged on a daily basis. And so I think there’s going to be one of two outcomes for companies which is either they will be able to earn scaled engagement on their own, or they will contribute alongside others to a scaled engagement service that is not their own. I very much believe that that’s the outcome in 2024 and beyond. And there’s different ways to get there. I don’t think there’s any hiding from the fact that the industry needs to have scaled engagement and the question is, how do you get there?
Where are you putting your focus right now? Where do you see opportunity in media?
Kilar: My focus is very much on the digital side of media and, and where media is going in ways that can delight customers. I’m very heads down on that with a number of folks, ironically, from the Hulu era. I’m a very big believer in the future of the industry. And I happen to believe that digital is obviously going to be front and center that not exclusively, but very much front and center.
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