Paramount VetNet VIP Meet & Greet Web Series Season 2 | Episode 2: Ray Hopkins and Mickey Carter

Great to see everyone, welcome. My name is Ray Hopkins. I head up U.S. Networks Distribution for Paramount, and what that basically means is that we have 27 television stations. Paramount owns most of them, or CBS-affiliated television stations. We're in charge of distribution for those television stations, and I'll explain exactly what that means in a second, as well as another 27 basic cable networks we're in charge of distribution for. In addition to a premium service, we handle the distribution within our department for Showtime, and we also handle distribution of Paramount+ and some of our related digital services to our distributor community. So this distributor community being the traditional, you know, cable, Spectrum here in New York or Los Angeles, Comcast, DirecTV, FiOS, YouTube TV, Hulu Live, those are our clients. We're in charge of the distribution of our 27 television stations, 27 cable networks onto these platforms. I've been in this business for 30-plus years at this point. It's been a fascinating business because it continues to evolve. The media industry never sits still, and I've been fortunate to kind of evolve with it.

Get into the business first and foremost. I wouldn't really kind of sweat that next job as much as I would try to figure out an area where you think that you're going to enjoy and excel in. Once you do that and you let your performance speak for itself, I think that you're going to find that doors and opportunities will present themselves that you would never imagine. So I would probably not sweat the first job as much as I would try to find an area or a core competency where you think that you would enjoy and excel in. You know, in the way the business went from just at one point just being broadcast television to bringing in cable, the cable companies became really internet companies that provided video, and now streaming is taking off. I certainly have been the beneficiary, and I know that Mickey has as well, of getting involved with an industry that just has had a lot of legs, continues to evolve. And as executives, we kind of evolve with it, but in doing so, it has presented opportunities that 30 years ago I could never imagine. I mean, some of the companies that I've worked for in my career when I started my career were not even companies. So if you wind up getting involved in an industry that has growth, one of the things that I always tell people about my military experience was it helped me understand that I'm capable of doing things that I didn't necessarily think that I could do.

We need as a company to grow, expand our direct-to-consumer base. It's a difficult pivot, and it's one that we are in the middle of because that pivot is one that we are writing big content checks. And we've been public about this, we're not going to be profitable under our internal analysis on streaming for a couple of years. You're seeing that with Disney and you're seeing that with the new Warner Bros. Discovery. Streaming is not at this point, when you start it up, is not a profitable business just because there's so much spend and there's this dirty word called churn where people subscribe, they consume what they came for, and then with the flick of a finger they churn, they disconnect until they maybe go somewhere else or come back ultimately if there's something else. So it's a very expensive game to be in. It's one that everyone has to play. It's not as profitable as the business that we are pivoting from. So we're evolving from that model to a model where people are making choices on the phone of, hey, do I want this, does Paramount+ appeal to me, and if it does I'll subscribe. And now the trick there is, now that you subscribe, how do we hold on to you? And the real answer is we need to continue to produce content that's going to create a stickiness beyond that initial trial period of 30, 60, 90, 120 days. That gets into an expensive game. You got to constantly feed the monster. We have a great executive team that does content and it's doing a wonderful job at that, but it nonetheless is an expensive game. And when we are pivoting to and trying to be real leaders in the space and have had a lot of success, so when you talk about making that shift, Chris, when you talk about kind of how do you strike that balance, there's some hard choices that have to be made. It was not that long ago that we were all fighting over just this big pot of money and who's gonna grab more. But at the end of the day, whether you're the distributor or you were the television station owner or you were the network, no matter where the negotiation ended, everyone was going to be fine because it was this large pot of money that we were all enjoying and just arguing over how to split up the riches. I mean, that's really what it came down to. Now there's a real tension, and that goes tremendous way from a kind of a micro perspective in terms of the individual challenges. I think I need to point out that the leadership matters now of our staff, I think more than it has historically. I think that the last couple years during COVID have been something that we've never seen before, personally, professionally. I think when you add to it just a lot of the social unrest generally in our country, and you've seen corporations taking views of what's happening in the larger world in a way that we've never seen before. And I think that there's been an increased focus upon the employee. For CBS being, and now Paramount, I didn't know it when I joined, but I had no idea about the history that I'm sure you all have learned with a focus upon U.S. military veterans. And it's certainly testament to part of that focus and part of that emphasis and seeing kind of the value in our military veterans that draws people like Ray and lots of other people to the events that Betty organizes, who don't necessarily have military backgrounds but want to support and see the value and understand that there's a unique background that you have that you bring when you come into places like this. That's an important part of the diverse thinking that every organization needs in its staff population.