MIPJunior Keynote “The future is everything” FREDERATOR Studios is 2 US animation studio focusing primarily on artists whowrite their own shorts, series and movies. Founded in 1997 by former Hanna-Barbera president Fred Seibert, the company launched its first series, Oh Yeah! Cartoons, in 1998, Lastyear, having produced thousands f shorts and series for other networks and its own nu- ‘merous digital channels, Frederator merged with Canadian animation studio Rainmaker Entertainment and Ezrin Hirsh, Ine. —whose partners are Bob Ezrin and Michael Hirsh — to form Wow! Unlimited Media In his MIPIunior Keynote, delegates will hear how Seibert has applied his experience asa network e \d a previous life in the music industry ~to working in today’s multichannel industry. n the business that almost all of us have grown up in as producers, the system has been more or less the same for decades,” ibert told the MIPJunior Preview, But today, where there “are a million channels available to the billions of people around the world”, he believes that controlling your own, data is the key to success. “And it’s one of the reasons that we start- ed our own media channels 12 or 13 years ago now. We ran our first media channel on. tive Apple iTunes and we did it because we want- eda direct relationship with the audience so that we literally could talk to the audience th ‘ourselves; and so that we could start to g cer data based on information that was avai able 10 us from our own channels, in order to make our own choices. “A couple of years ago we changed the demo- aphics of our CartoonHangover YouTube channel from 70% men to 50-50% men and women, based on reaction to a short film we did called Bee And PuppyCat. And yet when we brought the Bee And PuppyCat around to networks and to movie studios they told us, you know, that young women aren't interest- ed in original animation. So in order to fund the original mini-series around Bee And PuppyCat we went to Kickstarter to raise the money. We raised almost a million dollars from almost 20,000 people.” Seibert’s music-business experience also ‘comes in handy when considering new ides and how to get them off the ground, dedi aniiniaas Gepheumiied Wa “A band with a computer in the rehearsal room can create a demo that sounds amaz- ing, and that low cost of try-fail in the music iness is what is going on now in the video ness,” he said. “We can make 25 videos a week for the cost of less than one episode of a traditional cartoon. It the television equiv- alent of releasing a single to sell an alburn However, Seibert believes that “no medium dies — except maybe Vaudeville”. And to prove it, his parent company Wow! Unlimited Media recently bought a linear-T'V channel in Canada, in partnership with Bell Media. "A lot of my young online friends think we're crazy that we are launching a brand-new lin- car television channel into an on-demand, online market,” he said. “But we believe that there is alot of energy in linear television in addition to all of these new platforms that are coming up. We are players in all of those platforms, and we know that when we launch thislinear channel using all of our traditional experience and all of our digital experience, we are going to be able to use that channel for partnerships across the world in coun tries that are looking for the future, We be- lieve the future is everything, not something — it’s every medium, not just the new on-de- ‘mand media that are out there.” + Fred Seibert’s MIPJunior Keynote is ‘on Saturday, October 14 at 17.00, in the Conference Room - G JW Marriott a