The Product Podcast
Hosted by Product School Founder & CEO Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia, The Product Podcast features candid conversations with product management executives from the world's best tech companies like Google, Meta, Netflix, Airbnb, and Amazon.
New episodes release weekly, unveiling actionable frameworks, unconventional best practices, and real-world examples you can implement immediately.
Perfect for senior product managers, directors, and VPs hungry to build better products, stronger teams, and drive innovation at scale.
The Product Podcast
Vix, the Netflix of Latin America with over 50 Million Users | TelevisaUnivision CPTO, Michael Cerda | E250
In this episode, Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia interviews Michael Cerda, Chief Product and Technology Officer at TelevisaUnivision, the world's leading Spanish-language media company reaching 125 million Spanish speakers daily across the US and Latin America.
TelevisaUnivision launched ViX, a consumer streaming platform, two years ago to compete with US-based giants like Netflix and Disney+. ViX has already surpassed 50 million global monthly active users, driven by the world's largest library of Spanish-language content, including major soccer rights like the World Cup, European Championship, and Champions League.
Michael's impressive career includes launching Disney+ as VP of Product at Disney, leading Apple's first Credit Card as CPO at Goldman Sachs, and working directly with Mark Zuckerberg at Meta. At ViX, he leads product management, design, and engineering, leveraging AI to enrich metadata, improve content recommendations, and solve the 'cold start' problem—all while steering ViX toward profitability by late 2024.
We explore ViX's journey from launch to a major player in the Spanish-language streaming market, the integration of AI in content recommendations, and the balance between traditional TV viewing habits and modern streaming interfaces. We also discuss how TelevisaUnivision leverages cultural insights to drive engagement and the challenges of personalizing content for a diverse Hispanic audience across 19 countries.
What you'll learn:
- Michael's approach to scaling ViX from launch to over 50 million users in two years.
- How AI and large language models are used to enrich metadata and improve user experience.
- Strategies for personalizing content recommendations across 19 countries.
- The development of specific user personas to target diverse audiences.
- How TelevisaUnivision balances free and premium tiers in their streaming service.
Key Takeaways:
- AI-Powered Recommendations: Michael highlights the use of AI to solve the 'cold start' problem in content recommendations.
- Cultural Sensitivity: He emphasizes the importance of understanding cultural nuances in creating engaging content for Hispanic audiences.
- Rapid Scaling: Michael discusses the challenges and strategies involved in building and launching a streaming service in just 9 months.
- User-Centric Design: He explains how ViX tailors its interface and content to cater to both traditional TV viewers and modern streaming users.
- Product Management in Media: Michael shares insights on adapting product management principles from tech to the media industry, drawing parallels between building products and his passions for music, yoga, and cooking.
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Credits:
Host: Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia
Guest: Michael Cerda
One of your hot takes here. You said product managers are too utopian.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, to be clear, I don't think every product manager is too utopian, but it's a tendency. That's a very different dynamic than what you're going to be as a product manager at Meta. People ask me what's the number one thing you look for? And it is actually curiosity. A million percent. It's a big accomplishment to build and launch this streaming service in the timeframe that we did. We basically did it in nine months, which I think is a record. Hey, this content asset really has 30 pieces of metadata. Now we apply that through the whole catalog and now we can better cross pollinate with vectors that one piece of content is similar to another piece of content. Rfu, recency, frequency and engagement. Recency is how recent that person has been here. Frequency, how often do they come, and engagement that's how much they watch, how much time they spend.
Speaker 3:Hey, this is Carlos's AI voice clone. He's the CEO of Product School and the host on the Product Podcast. Let me introduce today's guest first. Michael Kurda is the Chief Product and Technology Officer at Televisa Univision, the world's leading Spanish-language media company, reaching 125 million Spanish speakers daily across the US and Latin America. Two years ago, they launched VX, a consumer streaming platform competing with US-based giants like Netflix and Disney+. Vix has already surpassed 50 million global monthly active users, driven by the world's largest library of Spanish language content, including major soccer rights like the World Cup, european Championship and Champions League.
Speaker 3:Michael's career is equally impressive. He launched Disney Plus as VP of Product at Disney, led Apple's first credit card as CPO at Goldman Sachs and worked directly with Mark Zuckerberg at Meta. At VIX, michael leads product management, design and engineering. He leverages AI to enrich metadata, improve content recommendations and solve the cold start problem, all while steering VIX toward profitability by late 2024. In this episode, we cover personalizing content for millions across 19 countries, using AI and large language models for metadata and UX, balancing traditional TV habits with modern streaming. Scaling a streaming service in just nine months, targeting personas with cultural insights. What stood out to me was Michael's approach to product management. He draws parallels between building products and his passions for music, yoga and cooking. His emphasis on curiosity as the top trait for product managers brings a fresh perspective to talent acquisition in tech. Let's dive in.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show, michael. Thank you, carlos. It's great to be here, michael, let's jump into it. I see that you were a yoga teacher and opened up a yoga school around 20 years ago.
Speaker 2:Yeah, wow, it's been 20 years, but that is true. I opened up a yoga school called the Yoga Company and it was interesting because in those days yoga and business weren't cool to mix those two things. The idea behind the company was to make it about company as in people that was what they call a double entendre, the use of the word company, right, people that was what they call a double entendre, the use of the word company, right. But I tried to make it like any product person doing a yoga thing would do. I tried to make it accessible to the audience.
Speaker 2:In those days in the East San Francisco Bay, yoga just wasn't accessible. It was always you either got it in a gym, which usually wasn't great yoga or authentic, got it in a gym, which usually wasn't great yoga or authentic. Or you got it in a yoga studio that was in the back behind a building up some stairs, in a very quiet, dark space where everybody was not saying hello, you're welcome, right, and everybody was meditating when you walk in. So nothing was inviting. So I tried to create something. I put a yoga school like in a shopping center. It was next to like an Albertson shopping center, across from a McDonald's, next to the CVS, right, you couldn't miss it and you know, we brought yoga to about 5,000 new yoga students and exposed it to them and I had a really good time doing that.
Speaker 2:I could only do it for a few years because I did it at the time that we referred to for those of us that were around back then as the nuclear winter in Silicon Valley. This was just after the dot-com bubble burst and sort of right after 9-11. In that time period, a passion project and trying to do something that felt good and was good for health and good for people and wellness. And I've been a practitioner ever since, although I don't have the school anymore. But yes, that was a wonderful, wonderful experience and I see the background.
Speaker 1:You have plenty of instruments there, so I'm very curious to know how you were able to connect your practices, your passions outside of work, also to the work that you do.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So music I've been playing all my life and I've only been a product guy for whatever 25 years. But I realized that they're both one in the same. Being a yoga teacher was similar. Being I love to cook that is very similar.
Speaker 2:It's all about what to build for who over what period of time, and you could map that across all of those areas, right? If you're a songwriter, it's like what song are you writing, who are you writing it for and when do you want to release it? What does it mean to release it and give it a life of its own? It's just like a product release, right? You're very deterministic, you're very methodical. It's just like a product release right, you're very deterministic, you're very methodical, right? All of these things lend to each other, and so over the years I've managed to do both and weave them in and out. And you know I have a Latin jazz group called the Yellow House Orchestra. You know we've put many records out. You can see them out there on Spotify and over YouTube and things. We've put many records out. You can see them out there on Spotify and over YouTube and things. But I also have a pop project called the Sunday Review, which is this is interesting as a product guy and any of the product people listening, this is a total product guy's move on a band, right.
Speaker 2:So during the pandemic, the guy who's my designer right now and he worked with me before designer, his name is Chris Phillips, he's in New York, I'm just outside of San Francisco. So during the pandemic we thought, hey, let's write some songs together and we started writing them and this was the constraint we created, as if it was 1988 still. But we're the same people. But we knew now what we would know then, right. So we have the same level of music theory and understanding. In 88, when we're at high school, at least he and I were. What would we have written together if we were in the band?
Speaker 2:And that's the whole project. So we're writing these songs and they're deliberately, with guilty pleasure, right, they're deliberately from those times and what we get is something that's that's very much, uh, you know, steely dan, ish, hollow notes, ish and everything in that ilk, um. But it's super fun because we can get away with it, because it's deliberate, once again, very deterministic, right, about the craft, um, and we just we just have a ball with it. That band's based in new york city. So whenever I go to new york city I play with it. And that band's based in New York City, so whenever I go to New York City I play with that band.
Speaker 1:There's something about successful professionals and their level of curiosity, all these incredible product leaders that I know. They all have passions and they find ways to find time for those passions because that's also part of their life, and then you end up ways to connect in those passions in unexpected ways. But ultimately, I think, having that inherent curiosity, it's very important.
Speaker 2:You know, when I look and evaluate product managers, whether I'm hiring some or whether I'm looking at my own team, people ask me what's the number one thing you look for? And it is actually curiosity, a million percent. Because if you're not curious, you're not necessarily realizing that you don't know what you don't know. And if you can accept that you don't know what you don't know, you can go hunting, you can go on a journey and you could find things you could pour through your data right. You could pour through your audience right. Um, we were just doing that very recently. We're just coming up with a project, um, with where I work right now at televisa univision, where we're looking at our audience and we're like trying to determine, with the data we have, who are the personas in that audience with. If you know what a persona is among your audience, you can start to double down on their like behaviors, their needs, their mindsets and therefore you can build for them. And in our case we're in 19 different countries. So it's a little wild because it's not all created equal. Our US market, because we do Spanish language video streaming right. So in the US there's a very different Hispanic audience than there is in, say, colombia or in Mexico. Those are distinct audiences, so we have to be mindful of the regions and mindful of our content catalog as it relates to those regions. You know, in the US we have, for example, one of the personas that's very highly engaged.
Speaker 2:We call this person and this is just working names, right, so don't take it too seriously but straightforward, sophia. And Sophia is someone that she's a single mom and she wants things to just work. She doesn't want to spend time getting her TV dialed into the right input right, it's just got to turn on and work. She doesn't have time to search for something In her journey. She's got to find something quickly to put it on and have that entertainment start. And this is somebody that binges on our originals we have a whole bunch of originals but generally busy with work and family and really needs technology and any kind of subscription plans to be straightforward, right, that stuff just has to work. So when you think about and, by the way, straightforward, sophia, as we call her, is bilingual. She's in the US, she just as well watches things on other streaming services. It's just that she comes to us for specific things that resonate from the country that she comes from, right, or the heritage that she has that resonate from the country that she comes from right, or the heritage that she has.
Speaker 2:So, anyway, what I'm getting to is personas, and being persona aware is one of the critical aspects of the product journey, because you're digging into your audience, you're understanding, again, behaviors, needs and mindsets, and only then can you know what to build for who, over what period. I might say in this next three months I'm going to roll out a dozen features that are geared toward this persona, knowing very well that I'm going to leave another persona let's call him Game Day Gary who comes just to watch soccer. So, a bunch of soccer, and Gary just comes to watch soccer. Then he leaves, comes back and guess what? Gary doesn't even speak Spanish properly. That's, that's what we're learning, because we know that his keyboard is, is, is in, is in English. So we got to.
Speaker 2:We have to think again very deterministically about what we built for a straightforward Sophia versus a game day Gary. A game day Gary. You know you might think as a product person, you might think, oh, sophia versus a game day Gary. A game day Gary. You might think as a product person, you might think, oh, gee, you might come up with a product SKU that's just sports-based or that's just seasonal, or you might go out on a limb and say let's target game day, gary, with an annual plan, that way he doesn't churn out in the off seasons. You see what I'm saying.
Speaker 1:Totally Well, let's start with just giving us an overview of your company, Televisa Univision I know it's huge and specifically what you do as a chief product and technology officer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so this company has been around for decades as two different companies, so Televisa in Mexico and Univision in the United States. So when I was like a little kid, right, I lived with my grandparents and they were. They had come from Mexico, from a place called Morelia in Michoacan, which I'm sure Laura knows, and my father was born in the United States, in California, and then I came along in the 70s and you know when my dad's era were born. What's interesting is they were trying to become more American right, so there was going English first, they were leaning more into English and so by the time I came around, everybody's speaking English. But my grandparents are still speaking Spanish, right, and so, and everything they had on TV at the time was Spanish television and Spanish language television, and it was called. It was a network called SIN Canal 34, los Angeles, and I'll never forget that, and it was all the novellas, it was all the lucha libre, the wrestling. You know the early days of wrestling. I think I first saw like Andre the Giant there before I saw him on USA or whoever acquired it later, before the Ed McMahon era, I think, and I saw all this stuff and it was a memory and of course, my grandparents passed away and so forth and I had been working on Disney Plus.
Speaker 2:I was the head of product for Disney Plus for a few years and I was recruited into Univision just before they merged with Televisa. So Televisa a bunch of big TV stations and studios in Mexico. Univision a bunch of studios and TV stations in the US, one of them being SAE Enit. That became Univision part. That became, that became Univision. And so now the company's merged after it, just after I joined, and merged to combine content, catalogs and assets and audiences and markets and form a bigger company and build a streaming service. You know, knowing, knowing that streaming is sort of the next inflection in consumer entertainment and consumption, we knew we needed to build something very compelling and very, very deliberate, targeted toward our market. And as people were cutting cords and linear right, we're there with streaming.
Speaker 2:So my area is an area we call VIX, v-i-x that's the name of the streaming service and it's a free, ad supported service with a premium tier right. So on the free service, which in the business, we call AVOD, which is, you know, advertising video on demand, although we have some live as well. So it's not really AVOD, it's AVOD plus. So on the VOD side, video on demand, we have 53,000 hours of content ranging from like novellas, original series and a whole bunch of movies. We have some channels and this is interesting from a product perspective too, because a lot of us as consumers tend to consume, I think, video on demand. That's what Netflix gives us, right, a video on demand interface. In the markets we're in, there's a lot of people that are cutting the cable cord and going right online and going to streaming. So we've built the interfaces that they're used to seeing in TV, which in the business, we call the EPG electronic programming grid. It's an old school term, but think about the last time you turned on the TV guide right and you saw the grid of channels. You saw channel two, three, four and you saw the shows right across the rows. So we have a channels interface, an EPG interface, where we have 84 in the US and 71, I think, now in Mexico. And again it's all the same content, just the discovery mechanism is different. And then the interface is like you're flipping through the channels and just putting on what you put on, versus in the VOD environment you're like, oh, I want to go to this series and this episode, right, those are two different journeys and we get two different value propositions out there and we can let our audience decide. We do have 24-7 news. We do have a whole bunch of sports, a bunch of soccer primarily Liga MX in Mexico, champions League, uefa a whole bunch of soccer. So we end up in the US getting a lot of soccer fans, agnostic of the language, which is interesting, but of course in Mexico we're kind of the home of soccer. That's the AVOD side. We also have a premium service, which in the US is $6.99 per month, and in the premium service it's a whole bunch of originals. It's new, you know. Think about the idea. We've all become accustomed to the Netflix service. It's a whole bunch of originals. It's new, you know. Think about the idea We've all become accustomed to the Netflix original right, or even the Apple TV Plus original, et cetera.
Speaker 2:When I was at Disney, we had originals. We also have originals, and when we started VIX, we actually hired a lot of people that had been working on the Netflix originals for Spanish language. They were the first sort of content team here, and so there's a whole bunch of series that we've got that, if you're the Netflix type of viewer, these would resonate with you. We launched some of these. Some of them resonated, some of them didn't, right, this is how you find, like in any product, product market fit, and ours is not only with the interfaces like I was getting at, with VOD versus channels-based, but also with the content, and what we're, I think, realizing is that a lot of the content that resonates most is the content that's closest to home. Right, it's the content that you're not finding elsewhere.
Speaker 2:In our case, you know we have some originals around. You know Maria Felix, we have El Mujer del Diablo, we have El Show, which is all about the show that was on in the 80s called Paco Stanley. It was a variety show and we have a whole docu-series around how that happened and how he was assassinated and all this crazy stuff, right? So all that stuff resonates and, of course, the novellas is the lion's share, that's the highest watched type of content. So what we're doing is we're bringing this value proposition uniquely, I think to our audience, and this is content that they're not necessarily finding in other places, and it's very intentional and it's very, very close to home to the audience.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think for some of the people who might be listening, they don't speak Spanish they might not have an idea of how big of a deal this is Like. The last statistic that I saw from your product was that there are over 125 million Spanish speakers connecting to your product every day from the US and Latin America.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's big. It's big. And, of course, when I was at Disney, when I left, we were at about 100 million paying subscribers. That was ginormous. Again, as a product person because I know this is a product-based podcast you like to think of what you do as impactful, right, that's how I make my sort of career choices. I think about what is my impact ability over time with a given opportunity At Disney, we got to 100 million paying subscribers.
Speaker 2:I thought, okay, that was phenomenal. What's next? And I just happened to be recruited into this opportunity here and I thought, wow, to bring this to the audience in my heritage. If my grandparents were still alive and still watching this stuff, they would get a kick out of this. I got to believe somewhere in heaven, they're proud, right. So I have some purpose here and I think that we have that many people viewing on a regular basis.
Speaker 2:We've hit the note right. We've hit the high notes that matter and we've even, by the way, we brought some older stuff back into the catalog, like Chavo del Ocho, his big popular series. A whole bunch of stuff has come through that is for the older generations it's nostalgia. For the not so older it's seeing something new but familiar For families. It's something that an extended family can watch together. As we look at our personas that I mentioned earlier, we start looking about what's the journey like in the day in the life of a given persona. Sometimes those are extended households, right, and you've got the whole house gathering to watch something on Sunday night, and that's the way I remembered it as a kid too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I want to dig deeper into that. You talked about two different personas the mom that has no time to do other than work, and you have the soccer fan. But if you are talking about a big audience of hundreds of millions of users, how do you go about segmenting it, even at a one-on-one level, so when they log in into your platform, they can find content that they are going to resonate with?
Speaker 2:It's an excellent question, and the way we're looking at it is the way we've gotten to our personas, by the way, to begin with and we're still pressure testing this it's still new. We're inferring this through data, through their viewing history. We have a thing called in the US, on the US audience. We have a household graph where we know a lot about a household based on a whole bunch of data points that we've built out, and we're inferring a lot of this and we're clustering and we're combining and we're making some assumptions as well, by the way. So, anytime you do personas, you usually start with the data and then you go to qualitative research after that to really validate. We're kind of in that phase. Now To your question, though how do you target these personas as they come into the platform? And that's one place that's probably our biggest lever of opportunity as I look at 2025, is personalizing this. We all know, as consumers that use services like Netflix, that it's ultra personalized. Right, your interface is going to be different than mine, different than Laura's, et cetera, and that's great because it's very targeted. The service has gotten to know us. They've gone through at great lengths to get that really tuned. If you think about the last time you were looking for something to watch on a service like Netflix and you think about the time it took you to find something to watch. It probably isn't that much time, and we think about those things because the problem is, if people take up too much time looking for something to watch, they don't make any choice and they move on. It's sort of that plethora of choice problem. When you give people too many options, they don't make any and they bounce right. So in our case, we do. One of our challenges is the cold start challenge Right now. Up until now, keep in mind, we've only been up and running for just over two years, so we're still a pretty nascent service, even though there's a lot of impact in the audience already. It's still early days and Netflix has been around a long time. Their algorithms, they were working on all of that stuff well before the Gen AI chapter started. But, given all of that, what we're doing is we're trying to sort of get there faster and sort of accelerate our steps toward that vision of giving people even the best cold start experience. For example, if you saw an ad on Facebook for a certain original that we had out there, that should tell us something that you're coming from, that ad and we should deliver on that. Once you get into this, there should be sort of a deferred deep link experience that gets you there, deep link experience that gets you there. And I think, as we look at 25 in personal, in trying to really super personalize the experience, we have to build those experiences out. So what we're doing I mentioned the channel grid earlier, right, the old TV guide.
Speaker 2:So a lot of the content when it was originally made for TV. Think about a piece of, think about a novella. Okay, in a novella, it has, you know, a synopsis. What's it about? It's got the actors, it's got the year. Maybe there's a rating for TV.
Speaker 2:Now, right, it's got various pieces of what we'll call metadata. The truth is, that's all you needed for TV, but for streaming you need much more nuanced and broad metadata. So what we've done recently is we've taken all of our content, run it through the large language models to enrich in the metadata. So we've taken that metadata specifically. So not only in the streaming version of this metadata that we're enriching, not only are we getting more of it, we're getting more refined. So, for example, instead of just the title, the synopsis, the actors, et cetera.
Speaker 2:You're getting other things like warm summer day Oops, I didn't mean to put the thumb up there Warm summer day. We're talking things like is it action? Is there violence? Is there gunshots? Is there romance? Is there a fast car chase? Right, were there sharks in the ocean? Right? I'm making all this up. If you can aggregate all of this and sort of extrapolate to hey, this content asset really has 30 pieces of metadata. Now we apply that through the whole catalog and now we can better cross-pollinate with vectors that one piece of content is similar to another piece of content. Therefore, we get much, much better about what we can recommend for you. So what we have right now in our system is a recommended for you row Netflix today, the entire experience is kind of recommended for you. We have a row, but our next step in 2025 is to personalize the entire experience so that it's you know, we know where you came from, why you're here. If we know you're part of your game day, gary, and you're just for the soccer, we should give you just a straight up soccer interface, right? We shouldn't get in the way of that, and that's what we're striving to do as we go forward to 2025. I give you all this because I think you know, from a product perspective, it's so interesting and I was talking to my team recently about this. It's look, it's.
Speaker 2:It's a big accomplishment, I think, to build and launch this streaming service in the timeframe that we did. We basically did it in nine months, which I think is a record. I think it might be a record. We did it in nine months to launch the AVOD service. Three months later we launched the SVOD service. So there was a certain amount of muscle memory we had to build up to do that quickly and, by the way, all these people didn't work here yet.
Speaker 2:This is another interesting part of the journey was there was some Univision people, some Televisa people. Another interesting part of the journey was there was some Univision people, some Televisa people. There was the original VIX, which was an older video, smaller video service. There was a handful of people from there that I hired. The rest I hired like 300 people like in the course of 90 days. I just called everybody I knew that knew something about video and brought them here, whether it was friends from Disney, friends I worked with on video at Facebook. I built out Vivo years ago, the music video service. So people from there came and joined and we all joined forces and we marched at this.
Speaker 2:My point about saying all that isn't to brag that you know we did it in such a short amount of time. Although I think that's pretty cool, it's that our job as product people is even more challenged and more refined as we go into this next chapter. Because, before you're building, all the basic things, the feature sets that you know every video streaming service has, right, when you build a new streaming service, you don't want to build it too dissimilar than anything else because there's conventions people are used to as consumers. They know what interfaces look like. You know, when you launch the streaming service, there's that thing at the very top that rotates. It's the hero where people put the most important stuff of the day. Then there's like all these rows that are sorted in some way, right. You know that there's search. You know that there's identity. You know that there's recommendations. You know that there's profiles. You know that there's recommendations. You know that there's profiles. You know that there's mobile downloads on the mobile side. You know that there's all these features, right?
Speaker 2:We've been swinging at this parody stuff and I'll give you another example Like you got to build features so that when people feel like they want to cancel, you got to make it so that they can cancel without too difficult a time, but you want to be able to remind them on the way. Are you sure you want to cancel? So you start building cancel-save tactics. Like you start showing images of the things that they watched and that you know that they liked. Like, are you sure you want to leave this? But you don't want to get in the way with it, obviously, but you want to be conscious about those things. So we built a lot of those things.
Speaker 2:We launched a lot of partnerships. You know whereby, for example, easy in Mexico. It's a big cable company. If you're an Easy subscriber, you have access to VIX for a period of time complimentary Right and I think that's that's great, because it helps people live in both sides of the world the cable world and the streaming world at the same time, wherever they'd like to live. But anyway, coming back to my primary point, here, though, our job as product people actually gets harder. That was just execution. That was raw, grinded out execution that we just did the last few years. Now we're turning the page into a new inflection of being much more heady, much more data-driven, much more refined, much smarter about what we build, for who over what period of time.
Speaker 1:So, as you try to refine your product, what are some of those living indicators that you are using to measure success? An example you gave before is maybe the time that it takes for a user to find something that they want to watch. What else is there that leads to success for you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we look at. One of our North Star KPIs is what we call total streaming hours. So internally we refer to that as TSH for short. And the TSH is a primary KPI because it stretches over both parts of our business, our AVOD and our S-Mod subscription side as well. So total streaming hours is one For the ad business. That's important because the more hours streamed, the more ad inventory there is right and the more your ad sales force can go out and sell, sell ads, the on the SVOD side we look at, you know, new subscriber growth. We look at churn Right.
Speaker 2:So when a given product manager, you know, puts a feature on the table for us to consider doing, what happens is it goes through that scrutiny. Their job is to write a product brief and in that product brief they have to be very, very clear, upfront about what it is they're trying to build again, for which audience and to what end. What is the outcome? So I design my teams to build toward the outcome. So I split my product management team, for example, between growth and engagement. So on the growth side it's all about getting subscribers in or just going all out and driving total streaming hours. The engagement side is more about like, okay, now that we've got this subscriber or this viewer, how do we keep them? So this person starts to think about and this is as we go into 2025. Now it's not just about building a better search feature, it's about building features that get people. For example, there's a framework we use and I call this I'm sure other product people have similar frameworks RFE, recency, frequency and engagement. Recency is how recent that person has been here. Frequency, how often do they come, and engagement, that's how much they watch, how much time they spend, and what you find is you end up with levers that you can pull as you think about the world that way.
Speaker 2:Right, and, for example, if you wanted to drive frequency, getting people to come back more often, you start to think about strategies to do that. In our case, we're building things like the follow model so that you can follow teams, actors, shows. Certainly, we infer that, but when people make those deterministic decisions, that's even stronger signal and we can, in those flows, encourage them to opt in for push notifications. Right, a lot of times people don't want to have be pushed notified because it's too noisy, but if we could tighten the signal right and give you the notifications on just the soccer that you care about, or just the season two of that original series that you fell in love with right this past year. That's more signal and we're going to bring you back in. So you start to think about strategies around that.
Speaker 2:You know we we're starting to look at, you know, the notion of short form like what does short form mean? What, if you know what? What can we do if we had a great soccer tournament? There's a lot of great assets like highlights, right, we all. If you're a sports fan, you love highlights. You watch them almost every day probably. Why not have a surface for that? So we're contemplating in the mobile and the mobile interface, at least to the mobile surface, having those kinds of interfaces. So we think a lot about interfaces. We think about this is where all of the personalization comes into play. Right, if we know we want to drive more engagement with you in the RFE framework.
Speaker 2:We're thinking about the E here. We might try freshening up our interface, because you might be tired of coming and seeing the same old thing. We might try and you've seen Netflix be masterful with this by using alternative key art on the content tiles right. Sometimes you'll see the same thing as you've seen before, but with a different piece of art that might be more enticing to you. We want to get smarter about all those things. So subscription growth, total streaming hours, churn mitigation, all those things the levers being the RFE levers, those are very, very smart places for us to play.
Speaker 1:I want to talk more about pricing, because you mentioned that your ad tier is free, which is relatively unique compared to the ad-supported tiers with Netflix or Disney+. They still charge less than an ad-free tier, but they still charge. So what's your rationale behind offering a fully free tier?
Speaker 2:What we've come to know about our audience is there's a cohort, there's a segment that probably will never buy. They will never subscribe, right. There's a sort of a. There's an economic you know impact here, and if you spend time in, you know parts of like Mexico or Latin America and I always pressure test this when I go to Mexico, you know, and I talk to people about it just to see have they heard of VIX? And sometimes what I find out is you know, there's people that share their internet service with other people on the block or they kind of go in on one account, right. And so you know there's audience. We just have to be mindful that there's audiences that may never pay because it may never make sense, right, that's just not clearly an option. There's other audiences that actually will pay but they won't pay with a credit card because most of their bills they pay for with that week's cash, right. So there's a convenience store in Mexico called OXO. It's sort of like analogous in the US to like a 7-Eleven sort of store. You know people go in there, maybe pay their cell phone bill, you know, buy some stuff for the weekend and you know they can buy VIX now and they go home and activate it on their device and it runs out, and then they go back to top up later whenever they're ready to do that right. So we have to be much more mindful about our addressable market, and as we've come to know our market, we've come to know that there's a certain segment that will likely never upgrade and we're cool with that. That is why we have a pure Avon service is to cater to that, and so that doesn't mean that we'll never have one of those combined services that's premium with ads. We're contemplating that, just like everybody else. It's becoming a normal thing. But you have to be mindful as well not to confuse the marketplace. So I'll give you a good example of this.
Speaker 2:When we we first launched VIX um and gosh, it was in March of 22, the AVOD service. We launched it. It was off to the races. A bunch of people jumped on, started watching, and then three months later, we launched a subscription tier. At the time we called it VIX Plus. So we had VIX and VIX Plus and we kind of had two different marketing campaigns. You had the one campaigns going out to acquire AVOD viewers and you had another campaign going out acquiring SVOD viewers with the more premium content and the premium soccer games and blah, blah blah.
Speaker 2:And what we learned the hard way a few months in is we confused that AVOD audience. A lot of them assumed that thing they started falling in love with just a few months ago oh, they're charging for that now. So we created for ourselves a bunch of confusion in the marketplace. So that led us down a road of saying, okay, let's take a step back. We're trying to be all things to all audiences, to find our market fit and see what our opportunity is here. We think we know what it looks like, but we're learning nuanced aspects of it. So let's take a step back.
Speaker 2:And what we decided to do and this is our head of marketing, also from Spain, roger Soleil. He came up with this thing that he called the one brand strategy that we put in play, which is the one brand strategy which is okay, we're just going to market as VIX now. That's all we're going to talk about. We're not going to do the VIX and VIX plus. We're going to be very straightforward. We're going to acquire people into the AVOD tier. There'll be some campaigns on the SVOD tier, but the difference is we're thinking about it as a tier rather than a different thing. So with this mindset you go and you use, you create this funnel, you bring people into the Avod service. Some percentage of them you're going to convert into SVOD subscriber, right, and that helps your cost of customer acquisition because you're mining among your own audience and if they do churn, they're only going back to the Avod service, right, so you're not losing them forever. So that's kind of some of the maybe some of the madness, the rhyme to the reason here, and I think you know that has served us well. So at this point in time, we have VIX and we have VIX premium inside. But see, here's the thing inside. But see, here's the thing Now that we're getting smarter about our personas and we're starting to know and recognize the patterns and the propensities of the people that are not likely to subscribe, what we can do is we can ratchet down all the lifecycle comms that we head their way with right we could give them.
Speaker 2:We could do more to drive them back into the service from a frequency standpoint, right, rather than trying to upgrade them all the time, because I'm sure their experience is coming into the service, we're going to use a tool like Braze to do an in-app alert and block them, right. They're trying to watch something we got, this thing they got to cancel out of. We're trying to pitch them on this upgrade to this VIX premium. Let's stop doing that, right. Let's not do that to them. Let's make them happier. Let's increase the LTV for them as AVOD viewers and be happy with that, and let them be happy with that and focus on other personas with the heavy lifecycle upgrade mechanism. See what I mean.
Speaker 1:Totally. It sounds like the Spotify or YouTube pricing model, where they still offer a forever free tier, where they monetize through ads, while offering some premium tiers for people that do not want to have ads right. Which?
Speaker 1:is different than maybe how Netflix or Disney Plus or the streaming service are monetizing today, and I want to ask you about the competitive landscape, because it seems like you are competing for attention, and some of that attention can be spent on media and entertainment streaming services, but it can also be spent on social media, music platforms. How are you thinking about the competitive landscape and how you're trying to get a bigger share of that?
Speaker 2:It's really YouTube more than anything for us is what we see, as our you know, and even back when I was at Facebook, I was thinking in time spent terms, right, and so I've been doing that for a while and thinking about what does it mean and what does it look like to drive time spent and what kinds of things do you do to enrich in that, to make it worth somebody spending more time? And I apply some of the frameworks that I used way back when when I was putting the news in the newsfeed at Facebook and that's a for better or worse thing, because there was draft on impact from that. But I try to think about what are the things that are going to bring people uniquely here, and what happens is we all know in YouTube it's the wide world of everything. Everything is there.
Speaker 2:But what you don't have there is a 27 minute novella per se. In some cases you do, but not not, not commonly, and some. Well, what we'll do is we'll leverage those channels to drop shorter clips and highlights and drive people into the platform. Before, before VIX was here, we had a bunch of websites and apps. Basically every TV company has digital right. They have apps and websites. We have those too. And so there's, there's, there are whole teams that build these websites and apps and nurture them and bring people in with for page views and sampling.
Speaker 2:So it's it's it's the old, it's the old adage of like get people into the sampling process easily and let them, let them find their way into the longer form edition of that. So VIX is really today the longer form edition of that. Time will tell if we can crack some code on maybe some shorter form like content. It's tricky, because what you don't want to do is duplicate what you're doing on a YouTube right, because otherwise what's the point? You want to be where people are and you want people to come somewhere else if it makes sense. So in this case, we've been laser focused on longer form content.
Speaker 2:I think our thoughts around shorter form is we're trying to balance the discipline of doing bringing people here for the reason we know they want to come here with creating new habits and new engagement models, right Like if, if I, if I knew, if I knew that VIX had something I can consume at a glance while I'm waiting in line at the grocery store, I might go there and I might spend that, so we might be able to buy some time spent in that way, in that dimension of short-form consumption, if we can deliver on the unique value, the unique content that we have. So we're thinking a lot about that, but by and large, we're thinking it's more about YouTube as our competitor, more than any other streamer per se.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and as you talk more about expansion, I think about companies like the New York Times and how they were able to expand now into cooking recipes or video games. Netflix is also toying with video games or even fitness programming. So I think different platforms are mastering one format and trying to get into other formats. So curious to know how you go about preventing your core and keeping that identity that makes you unique, while also testing the ground, knowing that your stakes are very high, right, like when you run an experiment. It's not about getting a few more users. We're talking about the next hundred million users.
Speaker 2:That's right, and I think we're still in that kind of table stakes mode. So, while it's very tempting to think about things like in-stream shopping, betting, watch parties, you know, all of those kinds of things, you know because we do this reality show, sort of a Big Brother-like thing called La Casa de los Famosos, and it runs for like several weeks at a time, 24-7. You put a bunch of you know celebrities into a house and what happens? And people come in at all hours of the day and night to watch this thing and you can't help but wonder would some people want to watch that together? Right? And is there some co-consumption? Is there some Twitch-like model there? Right, that might make sense, makes sense.
Speaker 2:And so we have to balance. You know, do we spend this quarter leading up to the next La Casa de los Famosos on hardening the platform so that we can handle the volume and the quality of experience is good, or do we start dabbling into the Twitch-like watch party? You know segments, it's tempting, but I try to prioritize. Every quarter we sort of reprioritize and reorder what we're prioritizing, but what tends to happen is performance. Platform performance always remains number one, because you don't have anything else. Without that, right, people don't have any patience.
Speaker 2:So we've been performing through things like La Casa, through things like we did the World Cup, and at the time we had just launched. Six months later we had done the World Cup, we had like 3 million concurrent viewers, and so what's different here is I'm in charge of product but I'm also in charge of engineering, which is kind of a pattern you see at media companies. They used to have them as separate roles and I think with just the changes and the way things are, they sort of started. They combine them when they can, and so in my case, when I took the job, I took both of those responsibilities, as well as design and operations, so it's all one. The beauty of that is I can harmonize those functions and they're less of a matrix because everybody's kind of one family and they all take care of each other, so we can rally behind things like that, and performance and scale is kind of one of those paramount things that we can never take our eye off of and take for granted.
Speaker 1:That's such a good reminder that sometimes the next big thing is doing what you do, but better.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely A hundred percent, and the dividends that you can see by doing that.
Speaker 2:And we just are in the process of updating all of our video players because, especially on mobile, we're about to launch mobile downloads for the first time in the next month and we needed some, some enhancements to our player. Um, in the quality improvements we're able to make with our player, guess what? We're starting to see the total streaming hours go up and to the right right and it's like what's different. Oh, we put a new player in that's more performant. It's very basic, but it turns out when it works people use it Totally.
Speaker 1:Less flashy maybe than launching a new category or app, but ultimately it's driving the success that you're looking for. And just to wrap up this conversation, michael, I want to repeat one of your hot takes here. You said product managers are too utopian. Can you elaborate more on that please?
Speaker 2:Okay, well, to be clear, I don't think every product manager is too utopian, but it's a tendency. It's a tendency of a lot of product managers and I've seen it over and over again and it kind of goes like this you know, in the pure form of product management, in the discipline, in the craft of it, right, we all have these first principles, right, we all have these rules that we've accumulated, from whether it's over time in the years, on things you've built. Or, if you're newer into the craft, maybe you've seen, you've gone to one of your classes, your courses right, all of these things are happening. And maybe you're newer into the craft, maybe you've seen, you've gone to one of your classes, your courses, right, all of these things are happening. And maybe you're newer to it. But you start to acquire this knowledge base of what it means to do this the right way and in its purest form, you say, okay, what's the outcome we're looking for? Okay, what are the three things we might do to get to that outcome? Okay, now it's time to write a product brief. What am I going to build over what period of time? It's aligned with that strategy and drives that outcome.
Speaker 2:Well, given, I've done product in different companies now in tech companies, in my own startups that I've started, in big media companies, in big banks. I've seen it all these different ways right, and what happens is if you're doing product in a pure tech company, you got a better shot of living that utopian dream right. You're going to get more of that there than anywhere else, because guess what those pure play tech companies else. Because guess what those pure play tech companies they're not thinking of draft on impacts across ecosystems and audiences so much because they're technology companies. And you saw that with social media. You're seeing it again with Gen AI. By the way, it's another inflection of that challenge.
Speaker 2:If you go to a media company, you don't have the luxury of thinking about it all that way, because what happens is there's a lot of stakeholders, there's a lot of people you got to get buy-in from. You got to bring people along, you got to go along with them. You got to find some places in the middle. You got budgets that are going to be tighter than they are in tech companies. Oftentimes, especially now, there's different constraints. So earlier I talked about the band and the constraints about being in 1988. It's very similar to that. It's like, okay, you only have so much to spend. Whereas in Disney+, I think when I was there probably had thousands of engineers, I have 250 engineers. Can't think about the world the same way I did then, right, it's a very different set of constraints. So you're not going to have personalization overnight, for example.
Speaker 2:So if I would have opened up and said I wanted to launch it personalized and nail that cold start problem at the jump, no way was that going to be possible. I would have been too utopian. I wouldn't have had time to launch all the different distribution partnerships that we had to launch or launch on all the different tvs that we had to launch, right, I wouldn't have had time to do all those things. So I think I've learned the hard way that wherever I go, I can bring the stuff, the, the grit, the product.
Speaker 2:But I got to apply it differently depending on what the company is, who's there, what their background and experience is. You know, a lot of times I know my boss here a lot of times. He came from Viacom so he was used to. You know, product and tech being like this, this service center, where he was the client. That's a very different dynamic than what you're going to be as a product manager at Meta.
Speaker 2:If you're the product manager at Meta and you're launching a feature and you need the distribution team to launch some partnerships, you enlist them. They're working for you on this thing. Or if you need some product marketing, they're coming to work for you. So the tables kind of turn and you have to be willing to play it with those dynamics. Which is why I say a lot of times, people that worked with me in tech companies, they both wouldn't have the patience, the nerve or the interest to do it at a media company. The nerve or the interest to do it at a media company, right, it's a different set of things and I see it's funny I tell different product managers that work for me now I'm like, look, the good news is, yes, you got those constraints, but the trade-off is you get to work in this with some of the best content that so many people in the world want to see every day. Right, you don't get that every day in a tech company.
Speaker 1:Michael, thank you so much for your time. It's been wonderful to do a real deep dive into how you're building product for a media company. Thank you, thank you.
Speaker 2:Carlos, it's great to see you.