With a mobile device of some sort never far out reach for many people these days, Thomas Ellsworth considers it is his job to make that device more relevant for the user. Ellsworth, chief executive at GoTV Networks, guides a company he sees as being a mobile marketing partner for content creators, including the NFL, Oprah Winfrey’s OWN, ESPN and Univision. With a GoTV-created app, a football fan can now get information on every game for every week of the season. Sprint customers can get original lifestyle programming of news, games and entertainment made by the Sherman Oaks-based GoTV. “It’s about bringing content to mobile in such a way it enhances the consumer experience,” Ellsworth said. In the five years since Ellsworth arrived at GoTV, the company has shifted in its business model of making its own original short-form humor, entertainment and music programming to providing its expertise in the mobile market to media companies. GoTV follows a proven three-part strategy when working with its clients and isn’t an app developer out to make a quick buck. “There is a place for that but it’s not us,” Ellsworth said. A San Fernando Valley native, Ellsworth is a graduate of California State University, Northridge and Pepperdine University. His entry into the mobile market came when working for Sprint and he later had a position with Jamdat, a mobile games developer later acquired by Electronic Arts. Question: Now that technology has finally caught up with what GoTV does how has that contributed to the company’s growth? Answer: The great thing the technology has caught up to the consumer. The consumer can get a wonderful Smartphone now that is very affordable. Like most things in life, the price has come down on monthly service. So you have a Smartphone and a rate plan you can afford, guess what, you’ve got a bunch of people who are able to do things. Technology and rate plans catching up to the consumer so it enables millions and millions of people to be able to enjoy this, that has been key for us. Q: Was it planned to do less original content and distribute outside content or was it just how things evolved. A: It was how things evolved. Making our own content you have to accept the fact that you are putting yourself in a hit driven business and you have to invest a lot of money to test a lot of concepts. You are going to have a lot that are canceled, just like Hollywood and television. We thought we were a little small to be in the hit driven business. But we had a really well accepted library of the music channels, Hip Hop Official, True Country, and one called Revolver that we do in partnership with the UK brand and magazine. Those were doing well so we thought let’s keep running those. Things like “Why Today Sucked” and stuff, those things came and went. The concept didn’t catch on. We said let’s keep doing the music stuff but we’ve got people knocking on our door saying, ‘Hey, I don’t need you to make content for me, what I would really love is a mobile partner to help me get to Spring, to get to Verizon, to get to AT&T. There are all these different standards, you figure it out for me and I’ll be the programmer. You help me with your expertise, what you learned.’ Those were the two natural evolutions. It’s going to take a lot of money to be in a hit-driven business, maybe we’ll just stick with what we’ve done that’s up and selling and people like, and then let’s use the rest of our time to help tier-one media companies get to mobile using our expertise. More and more that has evolved into building really exception applications because in the last couple of years, applications have just exploded. Q: How do you go about building those applications? A: We’re not a flash and dance mobile developer. You can find three guys in a garage that can build you an iPhone app in a couple of weeks. The question is what do you want that app to do? We start with a simple three step process. The first is strategy; what does your consumer want, what are they going to get out of this. Then we go into architecting what the solution will be; taking advantage of the special things iPhones can do, things the iPad can do, things Android can do and build that and then we bring it to life. Then when we are done with that we’ve got relationships in the mobile industry so that we can make sure that content can be available to Sprint consumers, Verizon consumers, regardless of the phone they use. We see it as it’s not your fault you bought this phone or that phone, you just want to be able to take advantage of content like the next person. We are very disciplined about that strategy. Q: Who is the audience for the content you distribute? Is it broader than the high school and college students the company was targeting, say, four years ago? A: The audience has expanded. Initially it was affluent young people who had the means to get these nicer phones that played video. Now it has moved to a really broad audience. My 73-year old mom is still not in the demographic but she sends me text message and sends me pictures from a phone because she has one that makes it easy for her to do that. As things like that keeps broadening then the audience broadens. If you take a look at Oprah, her demographic is 35 to 55; the American woman, all races, all lifestyles, who are coming to Oprah because they trust her for style, health, beauty and relationship information. That is a broad demographic, starting at 35 and extending to 55. If you look at that and it’s pretty compelling. You look at NASCAR and the NFL, they certainly skew male but there is a lot of female audience on both of those now. The business activity we see from both of those brands suggests it really is reaching out to the breadth of the audience. Q: Do you foresee the company returning to more original content or will you stay with what you have? A: I think we are going to stick with what we have. We have original contracts with Sprint and Verizon and they come to us and say, ‘Hey we want to put some special segments on our phones and we want to reach this demographic and that demographic.’ They conceive the concept and then we bring it together and make the content. In working with Verizon and Sprint and other mobile carriers, we do original content for them but it is very much on a contract basis. We are no longer thinking of 10 new shows and do our own hit-driven, episodic work. But we do custom work that is original programming that is specifically for Sprint and Verizon. Q: As someone working in the mobile space, do you think that type of short-form episodic programming will eventually work. A: I take a close look at Verizon and Comcast. Verizon has wireless, they also have Verizon Surround, the Internet, and then they have FiOS. With a FiOS set top box it allows you to get pay-per view and short content from your cable company. I think that it being available there and available for mobile, there’s really a market for that. Likewise, AT&T U-verse is doing the same thing…with a set top box that contains short-form programming literally between pay-per view specials. In a way the cable operators have become their own programmers. I think there is a lot of bleed-through between the three screens, your computer, your phone and your home TV. I think that content lends itself very well to mobile. Q: Where do you see GoTV in the next three to five years? A: In three to five years I think we are going to be purchased by somebody and be inside a larger company doing what we do for larger media company or perhaps a large ad agency. I think that is the inevitable. The investors, the venture capitalists who have put money in here they look for an exit. The natural exit is that GoTV ends up inside a media company or large ad agency, doing what we do for all their content and all of their accounts. Right now we go out on the street, do our own sales and business development. At some point in time what I think happens is we get acquired, the venture capitalists get a return on their investment and then we’re doing what we are do now inside a larger enterprise.
Going Mobile
