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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “We think about that all the time. And I would say we have a lot of different models out there. And I'm not sure we've found the right one. There's no sort of consistent model across the board that we point to. And part of it ties back to what the creator wants, right, or the talent. And there's this balance of, I think, a lot of certainly talk content creators, if you will, or non-music want broad-based distribution, right? It ties into relevance, it ties into audience growth. And we're happy to support that. And again, we have a lot of ad representation deals with talent like Ashley Flowers at Crime Junkie and her network at Audio Chuck, where she wants broad distribution. So it makes a lot of sense. And where we have changed the model over time is something like you said with Team Coco, where we actually bought the company from Kono O'Brien.”

    2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “When you think about that structure and decision making, I'm going to ask you the decision question in a second. But when you think about all of that, is it ever occurred to you, okay, we should move this show from the podcast distribution network where the rates might be lower to the satellite distribution network where we have really, really high margins?”

    2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “All these years ago, and we have a great capable team there, a lot of ad tech with Adswiz that Pandora bought before we bought Pandora. And we've been able to leverage that expertise, whether it's the Salesforce or the technology to have a bigger stake in the podcast business as well.”

    2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Definitely. Yeah, I mean, as I talk from the start, the Sirius XM side of the business is the core part of the business. And I feel really good about where we are with that business because we have a highly profitable core business where our subscriber base is very loyal. We just had, we run an annual customer satisfaction survey. We've had the highest CSAT we've seen in really since we started running it over a decade ago and that's led to really low churn. So given that we have high variable margins, that flows through overall to higher EBITDA margins and we are one of the most profitable media companies out there that just gives us a lot of latitude to evolve the business going forward. And I like our place in the advertising side of the business as well because Pandora really started digital audio advertising.”

    2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “The best thing is if we can have the functional leaders provide their expertise across these businesses. I mean, they're not that diverse in the sense that we're delivering audio content to listeners. But at the end of the day, it's about bringing content to listeners. So I want our head of content, Scott Greenstein, to be focused on the best way to do that across all the platforms. And then our head of product and tech to be focused on the best way to deliver that content across all the platforms. So I really believe in leveraging the expertise across these functional leaders. And then we work as a team, of course, to drive decisions that are going to improve the business across these different individual brands.”

    2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “So, a functional structure here is kind of interesting, right? Because you do have these big groups that people can see consumer facing brands. Obviously, the radios and the cars, but then Pandora. You run them all centrally? You say, okay, here's the stitcher strategy, and here's the car radio strategy, and that all rolls up to me, and I'm setting a strategy across them because you would think that those would be more independent than not.”

    2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “And then, of course, our CFO, Tom Berry, our head of people in culture, Faye Tiley, and then our general counsel, of course, Pat Donnelly, and then I have a chief of staff who's fantastic in helping me coordinate the team.”

    2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “So we're functionally structured. So, my team of direct reports is made up of four individuals that I would say run the majority of the business side of the company. So we talked about Joe and Zarillo, who is our head of product and technology. I have Scott Greenstein, who's head of content. And then I have two people who are more focused on the commercial side of the organization, our chief commercial officer, Joe Verbrugie, who is responsible for really engagement and onboarding of all subscribers or listeners across our businesses. And he has all subscription revenue as well. And then John Trimble, who runs all of our ad sales. So they make up the business side of the organization. And then I have four individuals who on my team are responsible for more of the corporate functions. I have Barbara Daniel, who runs our strategy organization.”

    2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Look, we have really strong margins on the Siri 6M side of the business, and in part, that's because of our licensing structure, but given our pricing and our high variable margins, it just provides us a lot of opportunity to be able to leverage different delivery mechanisms, but still on a marginal basis, ensure that our subscriber economics are very favorable.”

    2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Broadcast, if you will, is once the satellites are in the air, obviously we have the cost to maintain them, but it's largely then a sunk cost, right? We don't have any variable cost for delivery. And on the streaming side of the business as we build that platform and it's a supplement in the card for delivery for 360L, we will have more variable costs in the cost structure. But yes, there's a set of sort of common at least underlying principles in the architecture that we'll be able to leverage as we build that.”

    2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “We do. And again, it's a really core part of our business. So making sure that we have engineers and experts on everything from the broadcast operations side through to satellite delivery, uplink, you know, designing the satellites, working with MaxARS, our third party that's constructing the satellites. And SpaceX will launch them. But we're really involved in the design of everything, the radios, the receivers, the chipsets, and working with third parties through that. And we have the same kind of challenges and opportunities everyone else has there in terms of how do we make sure that we have multiple sources and we can continue to execute on that strategy. So we do have a lot of unique talent in the company to take advantage of that, again, very proprietary pipe. And one of the great things about satellite delivery.”

    2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “So last year in January, we brought Joe and Zarillo on board as our head of product and technology. He came from Disney. He was very involved in the launch of Disney+. And as part of BAMTech, he was involved in a lot of other D2C video launches as well. So he has built out a team at the company which is focused on our launch of our next generation SiriusXM platform. It'll start later this year with new streaming apps because as we've talked about, the company started as satellite radio with no real digital connection to the consumer, right? So we've used a lot of traditional marketing methods to reach consumers. And going forward, we want to make sure that we can use all of the infrastructure that he's building across commerce and identity, Martech, and better data to provide better experiences for customers across all their”

    2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Yeah, so we have two avenues, I think, to address it. Increasingly, we are rolling out our 360L platform, and that allows for an unlimited amount of content, if you will. It's rolling out slowly, but we are at about a third of our new car trial starts that our 360 are capable today, but that's only about 8 million cars on the road. So eight of the 150 million. The other mechanism we have to address it is, of course, streaming only. And we're slowly building our streaming only subscriber base, again, the vast majority of our subscribers today are focused on listening in the car with the radio that's embedded in the car. But streaming allows us to leverage in cars that may not have a satellite radio or even in cars that do maybe as a second listening point in a vehicle, you just want to stream. So you can listen to the app through CarPlayer, Android Auto, and increasingly will.”

    2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Very popular station, especially this time of year. So I will take that back to the team and see what we can do. All right.”

    2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “It's still the core of our business. And yes, we're launching four more satellites over the next few years. And we have a constellation of satellites today that feed Sirius and XM. And actually, the satellites are designed now to address either network. And so they're interchangeable, which provides us with a lot of redundancy in orbit. But you're right, the cars are increasingly on the road for much longer periods of time. So we have an installed base of vehicles out there, 150 million or more, that many of them have only access to serious and or only access to XM to refer to as low band and high band respectively. But both of them get the same set of content today. That's one of the things that we”

    2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Two satellites, and it's this stuck in my memory. You have to launch satellites to support this business. And the satellites are not compatible with each other. The existing base of hardware in the cars, you can't upgrade. How do you think about that satellite business? How many people work on a satellite set it”

    2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “So, I want to start with the satellite business. Like I said, I'm a customer, so I have a brand new car that has 360L in it, and you can't tell the difference really between when it's using mobile broadband and when it's using the satellite service. Then I have a car from 2016, which actually only has a serious radio. It doesn't have an XM radio. And this, to me, is one of the most interesting technology dilemmas that maybe any CEO has to face, which is that Sirius NXM two companies, I think Sirius launched in 2002, XM in 2001. I remember the XM launch as like a baby and satellites were named rock and roll.”

    2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “I guess if you start at the broadest point, it's what we're doing with podcasting. And that's, we believe in podcasters and in content creators who want to distribute their content broadly across all third-party platforms. And so we have really strong business there as well. And that helps feed into SiriusXM over time.”

    2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Really starts with Sirius or Sirius and XM, which came together about 14, 15 years ago now. That is the primary source of our revenue, subscription revenue from SiriusXM represents about 70% of our overall revenue. So we're really focused on how do we continue to deliver value to our Sirius XM subscribers. And the bulk of those subscribers are listening to us over satellite in the car. So the content that we provide over satellite is really broadcast, right? One to many. The pipe is only so big. You can only put so many channels on the air. But increasingly with our new platform that's rolling out, which we call 360L, we can have a lot more interactivity in our service, whether it's just recommendations or more content in general. But as you mentioned, we have much broader distribution.”

    2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Yeah, just take lists. Let's start at the very beginning. One of the themes we talk about in Decoder all the time is that your distribution often affects what you make. And we see this over and over and over again. I've explained it a million times. YouTube, I think, is my favorite example. YouTube exists. We all know what a YouTuber looks like. Sirius is a really interesting company because it has so many different kinds of distribution, which are kind of the product, right? It started as a satellite company, actually two different satellite companies with competing ideas about distribution. You have Pandora, which is an internet radio company. You have Stitcher, which is a podcasting bet across all kinds of other people's distributions. How do you think about that?”

    2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Hello, welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Lai Patel, editor in chief of the Verge and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking to Sirius XM CEO Jennifer Wits. Now SiriusXM is a quietly fascinating company. You probably know it as the satellite radio brand that's in virtually every new car, but it also owns Pandora. It has a huge podcast network that includes 99% invisible, and it has a content operation that supports huge stars like Howard Stern and has deals with every major sports leak. What's particularly interesting about Sirius XM is that it started as a distribution play, actually two distribution plays. Sirius and XM were two different companies. They both launched competing satellite radio services in the early 2000s, basically pre-internet. They eventually merged, but they used very different parts of the radio spectrum. You'll hear Jennifer refer to this as”

    2023-06-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · SiriusXM’s 360 strategy with CEO Jennifer Witz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT