YouSaid · the spoken record

Jennifer Witz

lines on the record: 71
first: 2023-06-06
most recent: 2023-06-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Which are delivered by streaming, or 360L, right? The streaming infrastructure that supports 360L and just, again, enhancing value for our subscribers by providing easier navigation of our service and more discovery of all the great content. We have, I think it positions us really well for the future. We talked earlier, we have a really strong foundation financially, but also with a very loyal, satisfied set of subscribers that we can build off of as we launch this next experience.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, really excited about this next generation experience. It starts with a launch later this year in the fourth quarter with a set of new streaming apps, but also all of the first step in re-architecting everything, all the foundational capabilities. So really addressing every consumer touch point with better commerce, identity, martech, data capabilities. And so that foundational experience will improve relevance, ease of use, and value for our subscribers and prospective trailers, and really go towards addressing these pain points that we've talked about, whether it's flexibility on price or more control and discovery. And it's going to help enhance the streaming experience if you're a streaming only subscriber, or if you're an in-car subscriber, whether you're leveraging satellite only or 360L, it'll help with what your listening behaviors outside of the car.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thinking about it and how we're designing this platform because it comes back to again addressing these gaps we have around control and discovery, but fundamentally we are”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And even then. Where do you think the combination of podcasting and that broadcast comes together? Because what we've talked about since the start of this conversation is at the end of the day, the consumer kind of doesn't understand the difference between distribution, but your business definitely does, right? Your business definitely knows, okay, with the satellites and the cars, there's an entire well-built, lucrative business model with high margins. And then over here on podcasting, we're still inventing ad tracking tech. We're still inventing the marketing technology. And that's a wide open space. If self-driving is two decades away and you're not worried about that, the convergence of those things seems like tomorrow, right? We're actually asking people to pay a lot of money for a hardware streaming system when the cars have level two driving and you can maybe screw with your phone a little bit more. That's going to get more and more squeezed. Are you thinking about that?”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Certainly not today. And I would say it's going to be a two decades into the future. And even then, it's a small amount of cars that are coming out. And I do think it, in some level, it flies in the face of what consumers really want. There are a lot of consumers out there that want the driving experience. And again, it's been all of these years. We've all been trained as consumers on audio in the car. And it's a very special connected experience to be listening to whether it's your music, your favorite channel, or your favorite talk host, could be Howard or Andy Cohen or any number, Megan Kelly. I mean, we have such great talent on our platform that I think those connections and that habit is very well established. It's going to take a lot to disrupt that.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're certainly talking ways out into the future, right? It's really interesting because I'd say 10 years ago, everyone was talking about autonomous. And it was the biggest topic for the automotive industry. And you don't really hear as much about it anymore, right? It's all about electric. And, you know, we've got our hands full, I think, as a country and an industry and just rolling out electric vehicles. And I really, I think it's, you know, this is biased. I'm biased. I'm at an audio company. But I do believe that intimate listening experience to audio in a car, something that we do phenomenally well. People are just passionate whether it's first wave or Richard Blade or you're passionate about the hosts and the curation that exists on our service, that that audio listening, even if the steering wheel goes away, is going to continue for a long, long time.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There should certainly be continuity, but we've designed for these NCAR experiences, as you said, for a long time. And we understand the security and the safety guidelines through NITSA and otherwise for NCAR implementation. So I think it'll naturally be different in the car. We just can do a lot more in the apps in terms of allowing for control and discovery. But we want the continuity across the platform, which is what we're building will allow for that, whether you're listening through the apps or in the car or in some ways through connect devices in the home as well.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In part, it comes back to two things revenue share, which certainly motivates, and consumer demand. So one of the things that we hear quite often from consumers who have a number of these sort of startup EVs, high-end new introductions to the market on the EV side where we aren't present today. We just launched a beta version in LULUCD. One of the biggest complaints that we're hearing, and I believe they're hearing, is that SiriusXM isn't there. And it's not easy to use necessarily. So I think that works in our favor, especially because, again, we have a lot of affluent customers who just come into their new vehicle purchases and expect us to exist there. So I do believe that's going to be a force to help us navigate this with the OEMs to ensure that our presence on the screen is very obvious and that customers can get right into the service easily.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I don't even use carplay in my car. I just mount my phone on the dashboard, which my other show, Virg Castle Listeners Know they think this is the dumbest thing in the world and I should just use CarPlay. But that shift, right? I would rather have two screens with your interface on one screen and a map on the other. No card does this well. Are you like happy with how your software is being expressed in the car? And do you think the car makers are going to give you the tools to get to where you should be?”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think the automakers don't want to give up control, right? So they're trying to find the areas where the big tech companies can assist them, but ultimately they can still control the user interface and do, as you've said, try to participate more in the services business. So we have to be really flexible. And we really have been for 20 years, right? Because we've had to design for these different automotive UIs since inception. And it was more hardware and less software. And over time, it's shifted to more software. So we've already had the infrastructure, the team, the resources in place to be able to design across multiple types of implementation. I'd say probably had less control over what that looked like than we will going forward as long as the OEMs tend to coalesce around a few different solutions. But we're going to have a”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, sorry, Android Automotive operating system, which I believe it's something like 70% of OEMs have said that they are going to adopt will.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it's very hard to get consumers into content if they don't know what we have. And then providing links from that embedded radio experience in the car out to the streaming apps so that discovery can happen there, which may be a better place to facilitate it. And then those behaviors, those listening behaviors can come back into the car as consumers experience different channels or different content outside of the car. They'll bring those experiences and behaviors back into the car.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To the consumer. Yeah. So as we develop this new, our next generation series on platform, we're trying to solve for a few different key pain points, which is going to allow us to broaden the universe of our prospective subscribers. And those are price control and discovery. That's what we hear time and time again. So the experience itself is going to make sure, because it's so critical, whether you're listening to our service through the mobile app through CarPlayer Android Auto, or you're leveraging embedded streaming version or an embedded satellite plus streaming in 360L that ultimately we need to provide more control and discovery to the consumer because in the past it had been all about broadcast and just turn the dial to find new channels and that's not what many younger consumers certainly want to do. So providing these more enhanced recommendations is going to be key to that. We have so much great content.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So more expensive in the sense that we've launched satellites and we've got this infrastructure because that's already in place.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we've really been at the forefront of that, making sure that we're designing for those new infotainment systems, working closely with the OEMs, but also in some cases working closely with, say, Google, right, who's launching Android Automotive, the operating system in the cars. That's going to give us a lot more flexibility too, because we can update our service quarterly or so, just like every other media app, but also we'll be represented in multiple places in that screen as well.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it's not bringing down the margin. I mean, we want to make sure that ultimately we're agnostic about what distribution we use. So we will have always an integrated radio experience in the car with a receiver and ideally going forward, our best platform is 360L in terms of providing the best experience for the consumer because satellite delivery allows for uninterrupted delivery of our service across the US. And of course, you know, with modems, there's always going to be dropouts, whether it's urban areas or in less dense areas, but not as heavily networked areas of the country. So that is a real benefit to satellite delivery. But again, with the IP delivery, we can actually customize the service in ways that all the other media services can do. So, yeah, the infotainment systems and the car have been evolving for years.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is a lot of revenue share. So from day one, we've shared in the subscription revenue with our partners. And I think not only is that does that differentiate us between other, us and other media services, because we have the margins to be able to support that. But it also helps us engage with the OEMs to make sure that we have the same incentives, right? make sure that the service is prominently displayed on the screen, that we're getting information on the customers so we can market, sending that direct mail that you get or emailing customers, making sure that the trial is actually on and it's very easy to get into the service after you've bought the car. You have a lot of other things on your mind when you buy a new car. So we want to make sure the service is on and working when you step into that new vehicle and you get to experience all the content. So the revenue share has been key to that in terms of working closely with the OEMs on what the future is.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the car market is certainly our biggest funnel. So new in-used cars, we are in just over 80% of new car sales and just over 50% of used car sales. So every time somebody buys a new car, it's another opportunity for us to get a new subscriber, or we have existing subscribers trading their cars or adding a car to the garage. So it is really impactful on our business. And we've seen subscriber additions slow as a result of that because of the last few years. I do wonder, the automakers are starting to see supply issues alleviate some of the supply.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, all of our content is licensed through either through the USCRB on the recording side or with direct deals. We have the publishers mostly through the collectives, right? As Cap BMI, et cetera. So those musical works would be licensed through those deals that we have in place already.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, TikTok radio is really a curated experience, right? So it is, we are highlighting the content that has become popular on TikTok. And we have the opportunity to decide what is on the channel and what's not, right?”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I don't know. I mean, I guess we haven't really crossed that bridge yet, but I assume we'll be right side. I mean, we've always been alongside the artists on this. And I think we've had a really strong position in breaking new artists and building their careers and want to continue to make sure that we're doing that.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, as you said, our core music licenses on the SiriusXM side of the business are licensed through the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board. We have an established rate in place through, I believe it's the end of 2027. And we're paying on the musical works that we play, right? And we aren't really involved in the generation of music. So while I think AI will be very positive in terms of its impact on our business, there's not really the same issues that we might see in other platforms, certainly on.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I can't comment on the status of the litigation, but I will tell you Pandora's been a great platform supportive of comedians for many, many years. And the comedians that we've licensed their works from the labels, in many cases, we've always thought we've had the whole right, right? Whether it's recording or the writing of the underlying jokes. And I think as this litigation started, we did see some comedians leave kind of the group that are participating alongside the plaintiff because we had to take down the works until it's resolved. So we have had some comedians break away from that in order to get their content back up on our platform. But I really believe in comedy it's been one of the biggest drivers of listening outside of music on Pandora and is certainly Quarter or Sirius XM service as well.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I think the deals we've done in podcasting really set us up well for the future in anything, you're going to have to invest up front, right? And I'm really excited about the monetization opportunities that are starting to play out and where we're going to be in the future.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we came into this year knowing that both auto sales and ad sales were going to continue to be soft for some period of time. And again, we're delivering a public company. We're delivering value to our shareholders as well. And we're very focused on making sure that we had discipline around our spending. And we looked at every aspect of the cost structure. And we did a lot of work last year to not have to address the people side. And we came into this year with a really thoughtful”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With what content's available, maybe it's a free tier, maybe it's just a lower priced tier, and adjust the ad load, for instance, or the content that's available.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I think so. I do believe though, SiriusXM, given the premium nature of providing, we won't have a lot of ads in the service. We do have ads on our non-music content. But as we look forward to the flexibility that the new platform will provide us on, say, the commerce side, we can create a lot more packages. An ad supported package might be compelling, especially to our core segments who maybe don't want to pay $19 a month for our core service, right? So we have the opportunity to create more ad supported channels. We can put ads in the music channels. And I think we'll have an opportunity to test that when we launch what we're calling our fast service later this year. It'll start rolling out in 360L vehicles. And we can do more IP targeted ads through that as well. And that'll give us a lot of flexibility to just test out different models.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That we brought the brands together in different instances. We have Pandora Now station on SiriusXM. We have Sirius XM content on occasion pop up on Pandora. So we've been able to bring content back and forth. But really, I think the biggest benefit has been on the capabilities.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not today, and I don't think the average consumer does know that today. We've been able to bring really the capabilities that Pandora offers to seriousXM, which has been really important, whether it's algorithmic programming or performance media or more digital CRM type marketing capabilities that we just didn't have at Sirius. And part of that is because Pandora has had all this data for a long time. And Sirius, we really haven't had that much data on listening because the in-car we talked about, the satellite delivery mechanism, there's no return path of data. So I don't know what you're listening to in your 2016 car. But now with 360L and increasingly our in-car customers streaming our service outside of the car and are streaming only customers, we've got this really healthy data set. So we've been able to leverage a lot of the capabilities from Pandora to help SiriusXM. And then there's been other ways.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pandora was late to the game on interactive. And we have a nice number of subscribers. We're about 6 million in terms of different tiers. We have a radio service without ads, Pandora Plus, and then we have a small tier, which is fully interactive around demand. But I believe the future for Pandora is really in the free tier. And we still have, you know, if not the largest, one of the top two largest free music streaming services in the US. And we have a lot of strong ad technology. And again, the ad sales team selling across that platform, I think from a consumer standpoint, we have an opportunity to continue to improve the listener experience. But in our sequencing of what we're building, because we can move Pandora to this new streaming platform too, but that's probably later next year because we have a lot of exciting things coming on the Sirius XM side between now and then.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, Pandora to you represents the direct competition with the platforms of Spotify and YouTube, right? You've got first party data, you've got listeners logged in, you know who they are, you know where they are probably, and you can serve ads directly. Exactly.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and you can reach more audience, obviously, beyond podcasting, podcast distributed broadly across all other platforms besides ours, whether that's Apple or Spotify or YouTube, and we'll distribute that and represent those ads there. But also for advertisers, we can provide you with solutions on broadcast, SiriusXM. It's a relatively small portion of our ad revenue, but there are a lot of affluent customers listening on SiriusXM or Pandora, of course, which is really the largest piece of the puzzle today for us where we can serve ads across the Pandora platform with a lot more first-party data and targeted ads.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That more bespoke, right? You're going to spend more money, but you're going to get Conan O'Brien reading the ads for you. You're going to spend more money with us, and we're going to make sure our hosts read across the network. Or is it you're going to spend more money with us and we will efficiently reach more audience, which is what the platforms would say.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Journalist, they're fantastic. Me as a whole podcast on ads, right? That he's done. And, you know, he's going to do it for the brands that he really believes in. And we've had a lot of success with big brands on his podcast. So I think it really depends on what the advertiser wants. And if they want those custom integrations or they want exposure to live events, a lot of podcasters are doing more and more live events, we can bring that set of capabilities in addition to programmatics. So it's about a larger buy.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, because sure, you can find other programmatic solutions, but I think the direct sales component is really important still. And if you look at somebody like Conan, who loves doing Coast Red Ads, actually, maybe she spent some time listening to his different different”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you say programmatic there, you mentioned the Ads Wiz acquisition earlier. Platforms are standing right there to disintermediate you. Right. You can just go buy the ads programmatically on Spotify as opposed to coming to Sirius. Or you can go by the ads programmatically on YouTube or you can go to the podcast host directly. How do you sit in the middle and say, okay, you should actually buy the ads from us in podcasting?”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Many brands are still sort of sitting on the sidelines, right? I mean, it's a small portion of their budget, but we really have seen, for instance, programmatic grow pretty nicely over the last several months, especially as advertisers budgets sort of free up at the last minute. They can come in and buy across our podcast network, whether they want to buy within a specific show or they want to buy across an audience that would cover all of our podcasts.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, just if you look at our first quarter numbers podcasting, ad revenue is down about 2%, but podcasting was up 34%. So there is still a tailwind on ad sales into podcasting. So I'm really pleased, again, with the platform or with the set of content that we have on the ad representation side. And yeah, the deals, it was very competitive, definitely over the last few years. And I think the large assets, if you will, have largely traded. And I think there's an established set of distributors out there that are in the ad rep business and really, really love our content slate, right? We have five of the top 15 podcasts. We have a broad representation across comedy, true crime, news. And so we're well positioned to take advantage of what I believe are continued tailwinds in podcasting, not only from a listener growth standpoint, but from an advertiser standpoint.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we bought Conan's business. We bought Stitcher. We bought 99% Invisible. The other deals you're referencing are really ad representation deals. So we haven't purchased the underlying IP. And where we've made the investment in companies and buying the underlying IP, we believe there's real access to talent that makes sense for our platform and the economics work. And then on the ad representation side of the business, it's really traditional podcast deals are basically ad share with a form of minimum guarantee. And so we thought those were very important to our ad sales business because we are heavily invested in Pandora with an own operating platform, but we wanted to participate in the growth on the podcasting side and leverage all these capabilities that we talked about earlier.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So back in the day when Sirius signs Howard Stern, that's just a talent deal, right? You just hired a famous guy, he brought a show over, he was expensive, but that's just a talent deal. Lately, you've been buying companies, right? You spend $150 million on Conan's podcast company. You spend a bunch of money on crime junkie, and you have, I think, an ad deal with Crooked that's worth a bunch of money. You have 99% invisible earwolf. You're buying companies. Are you seeing the same return from buying those companies as from we're going to hire a splashy celebrity to host one show?”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're saying it's the market right that is providing whatever restrictions on content, right? It's what advertisers want to buy or what integrations. And that might be different on the satellite service than the digital distributed podcast service.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I actually don't think there are that many restrictions. I think it's all about the business model, right? And making sure that there's enough brand safe content that advertisers want to participate in. So I actually think there's quite a lot of freedom in podcasting that looks more similar to what we have at SiriusXM, right? Where at SiriusXM, it's really about, for us, we want a broad set of voices. We are a platform for primarily opinions, right? I mean, we have the news networks on our service and political viewpoints across the spectrum, and we're really proud of the diversity that we've been able to bring to our platform.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That we've developed in podcasting has given us exposure to a lot more talent, and that goes back to the model that we talked about previously about finding talent that we can bring behind the paywall to bring even more value to our subscribers.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, some of it's because the evolution of where we are with podcasting, that there's a lot more content out there and there's a lot more attention around podcasting. And so it's been a great funnel for new content for the business. If you go back to the early stages of our launch at Sirius, we brought Howard Stern onto the platform. And Howard had a massive platform through obviously his core base in the New York City area, but then he was syndicated more broadly. And it was time he made the decision. He wanted to come to Sirius. And that created a completely different trajectory for the business. It was really critical that Howard felt it was the right time for him and that he got the sort of freedom that he wanted to shape the show in the way that he wanted on Sirius. And so that underlies kind of a lot of the decisions we make developing the content pipeline.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the big themes with your content decisions over, I would say, the past year or so is a really heavy emphasis on celebrity, right? You're getting more famous names making podcasts. You had acquired Stitcher and Irewf. Those were a little more indie, a little more crunchy. There's pretty noticeable shift. You're saying you're in charge of content decisions. Walk me through that shift.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I doubt that. Probably in some of our content decisions because the challenge is decision rights at the end of the day, right? And if we're going to launch new content, I expect our head of content, Scott Greenstein, to come with that proposal and bring it forward as to why it would make sense. But again, there's going to be opinions because the commercial team needs to execute on it and make sure that we're getting the value from that new content. Or maybe if it's an advertising deal, we need the head of ad sales to be on board. But at the end of the day, those things may not be very clear across the team. So in content decisions, I usually take a pretty active role.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm a big believer, and because I have this team of functional experts of bringing them together and hearing their individual opinions when we're faced with a big decision. And I love the debate. We've always had a history.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We do a lot of work with F1 and the other businesses across the Liberty portfolio, but I wouldn't say there's any preferential treatment there, but we were just, we just launched the Miami Studios and we did some things together in Miami because it was right ahead of the F1 race there. And I think there'll be more ways for us to collaborate there. We work closely with Live Nation on a number of things. But no, I don't think there's any preferential treatment necessarily.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's the chairman, and we have had since they came on in 2009 a really strong relationship with Liberty Media across the board, you know, really pleased to have them involved in the business.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he stayed very close to obviously producing his very popular podcast, Conan Needs a Friend, which is broadly distributed, but we also have more exclusive content on SiriusXM. We have a linear radio channel, if you will, that has elements from the podcast, but also more broadly. And he's created new content for that channel. But the objective over time would be not only to dual objectives, continue to support the advertising side of our business and grow that. There's certainly been a lot of tailwinds in podcasting there, but also find ways to serve the core SiriusXM business by bringing more exclusive content to that platform.”
2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT