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Vice Media, the youth-focused news and entertainment group, has launched a free-to-air online TV channel to take advantage of the boom in broadcasting as it makes a new push to achieve the steady profitability that has dodged it. .
The channel, a live channel of non-fiction programs like Needles and pins, a series of documents on tattoo culture, is available on the Roku online TV platform in the US starting Tuesday, in the same way that the company is marketed to potential investors ahead of a planned stock listing.
As investors ’fondness for digital publishers has cooled, vice presidents have repositioned their company as an entertainment group and television production studio, a sector that has been swimming in money as broadcast services like the Netflix programming store.
“We’re laser-focused on growth and, as we see this ecosystem exploding,” said Jesse Angelo, the former director of the New York Post that runs Vice’s news and entertainment business. “Let’s take advantage of it.”
Once heralded as the future of publishing during a digital advertising boom, a generation of venture capital firms like Vice have struggled to establish a sustainable business model.
Angelo rejected Vice’s comparison with groups like BuzzFeed that came to stand out at the same time.
“There is a misunderstanding in which we find ourselves as a digital media company, when in reality, [Vice is] a giant television producer, ”he told the Financial Times.
“Through the pandemic [in] the last 12 months. . . we have created 60 or 70 television productions “.
Under CEO Nancy Dubuc, the former CEO of A&E Networks who took over from founder Shane Smith in 2018, Vice has revised its business model while aiming to maintain its reputation for edgy content and influence millennials. .
Dubuc has cut costs and laid off hundreds of staff, while using $ 250 million raised in 2019 to invest in promising business lines, such as its own advertising agency and Vice Studios, its production group.
He has expanded Vice Studios production for a number of streamers and broadcasters, co-producing projects such as Netflix’s Fyre Fest documentary and, more recently, selling programming to Discovery Plus.
Vice’s broadcast channel will focus on script-free programming of news, food and culture, said Kate Ward, a former executive in Elisabeth Murdoch’s Shine group who runs Vice Studios.
“We meet with the audience where it stands,” he said, citing “unprecedented content demand” and the growth of the free streaming and advertising market.
Although Netflix started streaming video, which does not broadcast ads, companies like Fox and Viacom have experimented with free streaming channels that rely on advertising. Fox expects its Tubi broadcast service to generate $ 300 million in advertising revenue this fiscal year.
Vice Media lost money last year, but made a profit in the fourth quarter of 2020 and the first quarter of 2021, according to people familiar with its finances. Dubuc is confident the group will be profitable by 2021, these people said.
Vice, whose investors include private equity group TPG and media giant Disney, points to a $ 3 billion valuation, a sharp drop from its most recent fundraiser, through a merger with the acquisition vehicle for special uses 7GC & Co Holdings.
People familiar with the plan said this week it had begun offering the deal to the institutional investors they needed to access it as shareholders. The Wall Street Journal reported on Vice’s Spac plans earlier this week.
Vice began as a punk magazine in Montreal and rose to a valuation of $ 5.6 billion in 2017. It expanded into television through agreements with HBO and international broadcasters and launched a cable channel, called Viceland, that Smith had declared that “he would return to millennials on television.”
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