WE OWN THE NIGHT TV
utch events company We Are The Night specialises in event “after movies”, documenting peak moments, particularly at electronic music festivals
and creating livestreams from global festivals. For some time, We Are The Night CEO and founder Wilco Jung had been feeling the need to level up. “That whole market was saturated,” says Jung. “I was constructing in my head a whole new business model, but it just wasn’t the right time.” Then, at the end of March 2020, business stopped. “In January and February, I was urging my clients to sign up quickly – there wasn’t going to be any equipment or crew available to book. Then, in a time frame of two weeks, my whole calendar emptied out,” he shares. “Simultaneously, an idea formed. We had our own studio in the Netherlands and all the equipment to do a stream. Why not host a TV show with dance and electronic music?”
IN EVENTS, WE’RE USED TO EVERYTHING BEING AVAILABLE – NOWOR VERY SOON
Its first show, We Own The Night TV (WOTNTV), aired a week later, featuring DJs performing to an international audience. Within a few weeks, Dutch cable provider Ziggo came on board, opening up WOTNTV to five million Dutch households in a weekly, free-to- air broadcast. The broadcast was able to attract top Dutch DJs looking to take advantage of the show’s wide reach. Zoom was incorporated into the show, with rooms projected on walls alongside the DJ, allowing the artists to interact with fans. While Ziggo offered great exposure that would have been hard to pull off independently, even with a big marketing budget, Jung was careful not to sign any binding contract with the cable provider. The next piece of the puzzle was about to fall into place: a fully owned platform that incorporated a pay-per-view offering of past shows. “The heart of the ecosystem is the on demand platform,” says Jung. The platforms offer a basic DJ set for €2.99, with a plan to launch its own original series soon. It is also gaining licences from major record companies that have legacy content needing a home. Potential sponsorship partners include a major US beer brand. The VOD platform was built using a managed white label OTT service from Red Bee Media. A long-time infrastructure provider for major broadcasters, Red Bee has reimagined itself in recent years to help big companies launch their OTT and VOD offerings. The pandemic pushed more businesses, across all sectors, to look
for video as a way to communicate. In turn, Red Bee looked at how it could offer companies an easy way to launch high-quality streaming services. WOTNTV was one of the first to take up the new self-service model. The platform offers tools for streaming and on-demand delivery, payment, analytics and a whole cluster of professional grade services. This collaboration with a new raft of customers also allows Red Bee to improve its services. “The interesting thing is how much we’ve learned from We Own The Night,” says Steve Russell, Red Bee’s head of media management and OTT portfolio. Red Bee’s readiness to collaborate and implement feedback was one of the reasons Jung chose the company. Additions like support for payment systems unique to the Netherlands and creating Netflix-like pre-play rollovers emerged from Slack conversations during the channel’s launch. “Traditionally, a broadcaster would send a change request and it would take months to implement,” says Russell. “But with our agile development model, our smart guys simply take a call on the phone, write some code and it just works.” “We’re in the event industry,” says Jung. “We’re used to everything being available – and if not now, very soon.” Russell adds: “It goes completely against traditional broadcast work. Where nothing changes, or everything has to be triple-checked. This isn’t broadcast. It’s streaming, and the rules are slightly different.”
FUEL YOUR HOME PARTY While Covid-19 restrictions have cancelled parties, WOTNTV offers a party on demand
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