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. Explain the thinking behind the Asian hub 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 tw.