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Vice Media, a youth-oriented news and entertainment group, has launched a free-to-air online TV channel to take advantage of the streaming boom as it provides a new impetus to the profitability it has escaped.
Channel, a live stream of non-fiction sessions Needles and needles, a documentary series on tattoo culture, has been available on the US Roku TV online platform since Tuesday, as the company markets itself to potential investors ahead of the planned stock market.
As investors ’interest in digital publishing has cooled, deputy directors have relocated their company as an entertainment team and television production studio – a sector that has been swimming money for programming as a streaming service like the Netflix store.
“We’re on the laser based on growth, and as we see this ecosystem explode,” said Jesse Angelo, former vice president of New York Post who runs the vice news and entertainment business. “We’ll take advantage.”
After stating that publishing is the future of digital advertising, a generation of venture capital firms like Vice has struggled to establish a sustainable business model.
Angelo ruled out Vice being compared to bands like BuzzFeed that stood out at the same time.
“There’s a misunderstanding that takes us as a digital media company, in fact, [Vice is] a huge television production company, ”he told the Financial Times.
“Through the pandemic [in] the last 12 months. . . we’ve created 60 or 70 TV productions. ”
In 2018, Nancy Dubuc, CEO of A&E Networks, who took over as founder Shane Smith, has been reviewing her business model with the goal of maintaining a reputation for rigorous content and complementing millennials.
Dubuc has tightened costs and laid off hundreds of employees while using the $ 250 million debt it raised in 2019 to invest in promising business lines such as its home advertising agency and Vice Studios, its production branch.
Vice Studios has increased its output for a wide range of streams and broadcasters, including projects such as Netflix’s documentary Fyre Fest and recently selling programs to Discovery Plus.
Vice’s streaming channel will focus on unscripted programming on news, food and culture, said Kate Ward, former director of Elisabeth Murdoch’s Shine Group, which runs Vice Studios.
“We’re gathering where audiences are,” he said, citing “unprecedented content demand” and growth in the market for free and advertising streaming services.
Streaming video was pioneered by Netflix, which does not broadcast ads, as companies such as Fox and Viacom have experimented with free streaming channels based on ads. Fox expects the Tubi streaming service to generate $ 300 million in advertising revenue at this event.
Vice Media lost money last year, but made a profit in the fourth quarter of 2020 and the first quarter of 2021, according to people who know its finances. These people have said that Dubuc is confident that the team will be profitable by 2021.
Vice, a privately held TPG group and Disney media giant its investors, are targeting a $ 3 billion valuation, a sharp drop in recent revenue, through a merger with 7GC & Co Holdings to achieve special goals.
People familiar with the plan said this week it started the deal with institutional investors who were supposed to enter it as shareholders. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier on Vice’s Spac plans earlier this week.
He started as a vice punk magazine in Montreal and grossed $ 5.6 billion in 2017. It spread to television through agreements with HBO and international broadcasters, and launched a cable channel called Viceland, which claimed that Smith would “return millennials to television.” ”.
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