The media-veteran chief operating officer of virtual pay-TV provider Philo said Thursday his company's $20 bundle of 58 streamed channels of entertainment programming is averaging more than four hours per day of viewing by subscribers and seeing "accelerating" growth overall.

Mike Keyserling (pictured, right), previously of HBO and Tandberg, told moderator Tim Hanlon (left) that Philo is realizing the potential of a sports-free bundle that attracted investors including programmers such as AMC Networks, Discovery and Viacom.

He didn't disclose specific subscriber figures for the circa 2017 service. But he said, in opening the OTT & Video Distribution Summit, that privately owned Philo is "coming off by far the best month in our company’s history.” 

"There's been a lot documented recently about how the MVPDs are taking a pause or even reducing their size. We’re just not seeing that dynamic at all," he said at the Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel conference, put on by MCN parent Future plc. "We grew by 30% in the last eight weeks and we’re really at the most accelerating growth in our company’s history."

Granted, it's a short history, and Keyserling said it was energizing to be at a 65-employee size company at this dynamic time in TV. He said Philo was not obliged to tilt marketing toward its investor programmer partners but that those investors believe they will grow along with Philo. 

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Philo offers 58 live channels and a cloud-based DVR along with on-demand programming, and the lineup includes digital entities such as Cheddar, Tastemade TV and PeopleTV, Keyserling noted. "We feel a little bit akin to those [diginet] companies being a small company and a scrappy company ourselves,” he said. 

He said ad-supported VOD networks have a place in the market, but as a $20 service “we really want to make sure that we’re keeping that premium feel into all the content we offer.”

Asked how he sees the pay subscription VOD market shaking out, with launches of Disney+ and HBO Max ahead, among others, Keyserling said bundled channel packages have always made sense and if consumers weren't getting charged $150 for them there would be less cord cutting. At some point consumers will look for the least expensive way to get the content they want, he said. 

“I don’t believe the future of TV is going to be 20 apps where you have to remember 20 passwords and figure out where the content you want to watch is," he said.

Marina del Rey, Calif. — In the current content climate, companies need scale and leverage. So said Byron Allen, founder, owner, chairman and CEO of Entertainment Studios, at the OTT & Video Distribution Summit.

“Where you get in trouble is if you’re too small,” Allen said during his keynote. “You cannot be big enough. You have to get bigger, and you have to do it quickly. And the way you do it is you have to do it through acquisitions.” Allen’s ES bought The Weather Channel parent The Weather Group this year. The acquisition, he said, gives the company leverage to help its seven other networks: Cars.tv, Comedy. tv, ES.tv, MyDestination.tv, Pets.tv, Recipe.tv and JusticeCentral.tv.

“As we get greater distribution for these other seven networks, there’s about $100 million a year in advertising in each network,” he said.

This year, Entertainment Studios turned 25, but the road to that milestone was not always smooth. “I never stopped picking up the phone and dialing and selling and dialing and selling,” Allen told MCN managing director of content Mark Robichaux. The entrepreneur cited a New York Times article about Verizon’s investment in fiber and plans to launch 150 HD channels. The article inspired Allen to reach out to Verizon and, while he didn’t get the 10 HD channels he wanted, Verizon did give him six, which eventually led to a seventh with the pickup of Justice Central.

ES owns the content on its networks, something Allen said will become more and more valuable for companies as technology changes and morphs.

The Detroit-born programmer is looking to the future in other ways as well.

Sports.tv, Allen said, will “segregate, aggregate and globalize sports.”

“The true religion of the world is sports,” he said. “That’s why we’re saying Sports.tv is for us; that’s everything. And that’s the war we’re going to win.”

MARINA DEL REY, Calif. — The emergence of 5G technology will be a game-changer for both the mobile phone business and the digital video business, according to Jeff Binder, the cable-industry veteran and executive vice president of home and entertainment at T-Mobile U.S.

Binder on Aug. 2 gave the opening keynote at the OTT & Video Distribution Summit. He said T-Mobile’s recent announcement of a $3.5 billion commitment to deploy super-fast 5G technology is going to change the dynamics of how consumers interact with their phones and access content.

“I believe 5G will be a game-changer,” Binder, who joined T-Mobile after the telco acquired his former company, Layer3 TV, said. “4G changed the way people used their phone; 5G is going to change the way all of us use our home as well as our phone.”

Binder would not provide specific details of T-Mobile’s proposed OTT service, but said it will not be creating original programming for the offering.

“We’re going to meet customers where they want to be met, and we’re going to start to think of TV as part of the 21st century, but I wouldn’t characterize us as being in a bucket with OTT, pay TV or Netflix,” he said.

Binder also characterized the state of the television industry as “complicated,” with consumers gravitating toward streaming services like Netflix that offer more choices and a better customer experience than cable.

“Pay TV is dominated by non-customer-centric monopolists that have historically not cared about customers, so it’s not a surprise that people are leaving [cable],” he said. “If you have options and you get treated like crap for three decades, you’re going to go somewhere else.”

Still, he said, more people pay for TV than ever before, with 94% paying either traditional cable fees or subscriptions for OTT services in 2017, up from 86% three years prior. Also, the quality of TV is peaking.

“We’re in the golden age of television,” he said. “There’s more great TV out there than there’s ever been.”

Multichannel News managing director of content Mark Robichaux interviewed Binder at the summit, produced by MCN parent Future.