5 Questions with Skybound Entertainment’s CEO David Alpert

Matt Lopez
Jul 24, 2017 · 4 min read

David Alpert is CEO of Skybound Entertainment, the multiplatform entertainment company he founded alongside collaborator and creator of “The Walking Dead” Robert Kirkman. As CEO, Alpert oversees operations and strategic business development for the company, and has played a key role in it’s success and growth in the digital media space. He has overseen cross-platform properties at Skybound, including Samsung Milk VR’s “Gone,” the first-ever narrative virtual reality series.

In this weeks5 Questions,” Alpert discusses Skybound Entertainment’s approach to new media, quadrupling efforts in the VR space, and the difficulties of monetizing immersive entertainment.

VideoInk: How did you come to vision your approach to new media with Skybound Entertainment?

David Alpert: The mission of Skybound is really to empower creators. We’re a creator driven entertainment company. So for us, it really comes down to whatever the best platform or medium for a story that a creator creates is, that’s where we want to be. We’ll do a technical evaluation and say ‘this is why it should be a game show, this is why it should be a video game, but if the creator says, ‘no this needs to be a pinball machine’ then we’ll build a gumball machine.

How have new video platforms impacted your distribution strategy? The commoditization of distribution is exciting for creators. If you think about the way television writers or television creators were working in the past, they were very much working in a B-to-B type space, their audience and customers were the network. If you were a show creator you didn’t need to sell your show to audience, you needed to sell your show to the network. And ultimately there is a level of inefficiency that gets created by that. So if you can curate directly your audience and you can move that audience from property to property, show to show, platform to platform — which is properly the hardest — that becomes the challenge and the opportunity for the next era.

How does the nature of the renewals business, or lack of, impact Skybound? The renewals process is hard. Anytime you’re dependent on a 3rd party to continue your production you’re exposed to some degree. It’s really important to make sure you have mutual understating and agreement around not just the creative goal you’re going for, but also the metrics by which you determine success. I’ve done movies where leading up to the week of release you ask the studio, ‘what is the number we need to hit for this to be considered success?’ and the short answer is — they don’t know. They’ll have internal metrics, but they’ll be changing on a regular basis, they’ll be changing based off of tracking as they’re managing internal expectations. But the things that I have been associated with that have been the most successful have always been when weeks out, months out, long ahead of the release date we know exactly what we need to hit success.

How has the push into virtual reality been for the company? VR is exciting. For a lot of people it brings back that film school ‘lets put on a show’ type mentality where everything is new. And at the same time, there is a level of empathy and connectivity and presence that comes with VR that you can’t get in film and television that excites me as a storyteller that I really want to explore more. So for us, VR has been great, but we are going to double, triple, quadruple down on the VR side.

How long is Skybound willing to invest in VR without a monetization platform in place? For a long time, I would say. Being on the cutting edge and learning where the holes are, learning what the problems are, what the capabilities are, I think is really important. There’s a lot of people that I meet that say they are VR producers who have not produced a single thing of VR. So I think being able to say, ‘Hey we’ve produced VR and we know what’s possible, we know how to do a budget, we know that the queue list is different for VR production than a normal film production.’ Knowing those things will enable us to be on the cutting edge so that when monetization appears — even if its three, four, five years from now — we will be poised to capitalize on it.

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