Blue Ant Media’s Carlyn Staudt and Jon Penn Break Down the Asia TV Scene, Business Opportunities in an Industry Slowdown and Life Without Beach House Pictures (EXCLUSIVE)

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Carlyn Staudt, who has previously overseen the growth of Blue Ant Media’s Love Nature channel, travels to the APOS conference for the first time in her new role as the company’s EVP of global channels and streaming. Together with Jon Penn, the group’s MD for Asia Pacific, she takes stock of the corporate restructurings that include the disposal of Beach House Pictures and the establishment of a sales hub in Asia, as well as analyzing the business opportunities at a moment of industry turmoil. Staudt: I joined Blue Ant seven years ago to expand its channel offering around the globe, and launched love nature, which was at the time, a fledgling natural history service, for SVOD only.

We’ve expanded it around the globe to over 100 countries and had success on multiple different platforms, pay-TV, VOD, FAST. That helped feel that we need to be a global media company, more internationally than just in Canada.
We started on the Americas and EMEA, but had largely relied on agents in Asia. About two years ago decided that boots on the ground and expanding Blue Ant into Asia was the right thing to do.

That led to Jon’s hiring. And we were excited to ask what Blue Ant could do, not only in channels, but in content sales. The integrated sales hub meets the platform needs where they were in the market.

Penn: As everyone knows we’re in a highly disrupted marketplace, and that’s no different in Asia Pacific. That disruption causes two things. One is that it puts pressure on incumbent businesses, some of whom are our clients.

But it also gives rise to a whole new class of potential customers.
In China, for example, the VOD platforms like Bytedance, Bilibili, iQiyi, Tencent and Youku have turned the market on its head. There’s huge opportunities there for factual program makers, like us.
In Australia, my home country, the market is also transforming. Our two big partners, Foxtel and Fetch, are having to change to be able to meet the challenge of disruption that comes with almost unlimited choice posed by the internet.