Ben Silverman has held many jobs in the entertainment industry: William Morris agent, co-chairman of NBC Entertainment and Universal Studios, and founder of several companies, including Reveille, which later was sold to Shine Entertainment; Electus; and most recently, Propagate.

Through it all though, he’s mostly done the same work: developing and innovating new business models in the evolving world of TV. For example, to get The Tudors on the air, he created an Irish production company to partner with a Canadian production company, creating an international co-production that then ended up selling the show to networks in multiple territories, including to Showtime in the U.S.

Silverman has been the force behind many such deals, including bringing Colombian smash-hit telenovela to U.S. TV in the form of ABC’s Ugly Betty and convincing NBC to pick up The Office, which started its life as a dry, acerbic and hilarious British comedy created by Ricky Gervais.

Now as CEO of Propagate, Silverman is still traveling the world to find, create and sell shows to TV services, whether those services are traditional TV networks or streaming on-demand offerings.

On Wednesday, Silverman chatted with Stephanie Ruhle, MSNBC anchor and co-anchor, Weekend Today, NBC, about the rapidly changing TV industry and what he thinks program providers will have to do to stay in the game.

RUHLE: Do we really need all of these new platforms? Are traditional platforms just not the right places for all of this new content that’s coming out?

SILVERMAN: Part of it is the business model itself. Netflix doing something straight to series is far more compelling for the supplier, the artists, the writers, directors who still are driven – correctly—by their burning desire to tell a story, to write that story to direct that story. They want to be in a place where that story meets the audience. Netflix is saying, ‘we’ll go straight to series. We’re going to make all these episodes. We’re not just going to do a pilot that we put up in our own little box and decide whether it warrants going to the next level or not.’

That gives Netflix a competitive advantage to go aggressively and get your series going versus someone who’s just developing your series into a pilot and that’s a big distinction. There’s also so much money coming into the system, that economically it’s hard for a lot of the traditional players people to compete because they have to program more hours of programming.

If you are programming primetime 3 hours a night 5-6 nights a week, that’s 15 to 18 hours of original programming a week you need versus someone like Netflix – that’s still one new show a week, not 18 new hours a week.

RUHLE: But it goes beyond media. In this world of disruption – and this word, this idea is so completely overused – we discount traditional players in every industry, not just entertainment. At the end of the day those massive entertainment platforms, that’s what they will have to do. Why do we suddenly think these upstarts – and they may be upstarts loaded with cash—know how to make entertainment?

SILVERMAN: It has to play out. Some have demonstrated capacity to make high-quality content rather quickly but it’s because they’ve hired massive infrastructure from the legacy media brands. There’s no distinction between the shows that are airing on these platforms and the shows that are airing on cable and broadcast. They may be commercial free but they are still one-hour dramas or half-hour sitcoms or game shows or reality shows, but I do agree the greatest place to still create cultural impact and go down the path of value for your idea is in the broadcast platform.

That’s why I have Jane the Virgin and No Tomorrow on The CW, but also the power of your lead-in still really matters. Even in a binge-led, a la carte, on-demand, consumer-focused environment still the greatest thing you can get in television is that your show follows a show with a big audience. You still want to come on after The Voice or what was American Idol. There’s still so much power in that system.

RUHLE: Are the big platforms at a massive disadvantage? When you think about the restrictions they have on them, how they are bound, these big platforms are so much less flexible. What happens to the big platforms at a time when we are getting content elsewhere?

SILVERMAN: Obviously, you have to protect your entrenched base and have a rear-view mirror that you’ve got to look at all day long to make sure the money you were making you are continuing to make while you try new things, like Hulu which has kind of been like a Ferrari waiting for someone to press the gas pedal because they don’t want to cut off their other business. They easily could have turned that into Netflix but they didn’t want to invest against it, they wanted it to be more a place … where reruns could air. That was because they had the tech and were funded by Fox, ABC, NBC. Obviously, they are now starting to invest a little bit more in content but nothing like their competitors.

A big part of knowing where you are going is knowing how you are going to be regulated. The fact that the broadcast industry is incredibly regulated compared to the fact that the digital platforms are not regulated at all and how they work with advertising and marketing partners around their content and the limited disclosures they have as opposed to the way broadcast content has to be interrupted [and labeled] is unfair.

RUHLE: Does it bother consumers in any way to receive native advertising or content marketing? You’ve led projects by advertising—is that the way of the future?

SILVERMAN: I don’t think the audience cares as long as it’s quality. In this room of brilliant marketers, they are spending money on their Snapchat content, on their Facebook content as extensions of shows they are selling, or of the ideas that they are pushing. Facebook isn’t saying to anybody ‘we paid to have this trailer sitting in your feed because we know you lean in to Comic-Con,’ but that’s happening there too.

RUHLE: Seeing that traditional media platforms use Snapchat, use Facebook. You’ve got executives barging in and saying, “I need a campaign on Snapchat, make that happen.” Are traditional media platforms feeding what will be their biggest competition?

SILVERMAN: What’s clear is that television, specifically, but also the culture industry, movies as well, have made Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and all of these platforms more robust and more relevant and more connected because they have become about a relationship to these shows, intellectual property, actors, talent. If Snapchat is the competitor of the future, I would say make them your partner today.

I remember having these arguments when I was at NBC and wanting to do some robust partnerships with Facebook as a partner, my whole team above me felt they were going to be a competitor and didn’t want to make that relationship work. You have to figure it out though because they are an undeniable part of the culture and now they are three times the size of where they were before.

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