Warner Archive

Relive Hollywood’s Golden Age.

SUMMARY

Led product and customer acquisition strategy for the relaunch of Warner Archive, a classic movie & TV subscription video streaming service from Warner Bros. Launched service across 8 web, mobile and connected TV devices and multiplied subscriber base by 6x.

DIGITIZING HISTORY

Anyone who grew up in the Golden Age of Hollywood, or who simply loves the comfort of magic of black-and-white movies, knows that Warner Brothers has been a pioneer in cinema since the 1920’s, bringing talking pictures to the mainstream and launching the careers of countless stars. That’s why in 2016, when Warner Bros. established WB Digital Labs to be the company’s video streaming powerhouse, our first project was to revamp a rich but under-resourced service called Warner Archive, featuring thousands of film and TV series direct from the studio vaults, with me at the helm as Product and Marketing lead.

THE SVOD BUILDING BLOCKS

I oversaw the product development, go to market strategy and P&L for Warner Archive, working alongside my ultra-skilled colleagues at WB Digital Labs to apply the company’s streaming success to the new classic film property. Taking on end-to-end ownership of the channel threw me into the deep end fast, and showed me the ropes of what it takes to get a subscription video service off the ground.

App Development

From the get-go, we knew we wanted to support Warner Archive across web, mobile and connected TV platforms, with a particular focus on supporting tablets that were commonly used by our Baby Boomer audience. Our platforms broke down into three suites:

• iPhones, iPads & Apple TV (Swift SDK)

• Android phones and tablets, Chromecast and FireTV (Android SDK)

• Roku (Roku SDK)

Content Management

One of the great joys of building Warner Archive was bringing thousands of hours of classic video content to the digital screen, requiring careful coordination between our video team and the studio vault to ensure videos premiered at great quality and on time for press and promotions. Processes included:

• Transforming mezzanine files into 6 renditions of various bitrates (400, 800, 1200, 1800, 2400 and 3000) to account for a range of wifi strengths

• Turning MP4s into ISMV files to create keyframes in videos to allow for adaptive bitrate playback

• Providing SRT files for closed captioning

• Packaging content to comply with Digital Rights Management (DRM) across Fairplay, Widevine & Playready

• Managing the content artwork and metadata on the Django CMS

Monetization

Taking over an existing app that had active paying customers and revamping it came with technical challenges. Once users were migrated to our tech stack, we oversaw:

• Identity management for identifying, authenticating and authorizing free trial and premium subscriptions

• Payment processing across Braintree, Apple’s App Store, Google Play Store, Roku and Amazon

STREAMING WARS

Six months out from the relaunch, we’d grown Warner Archive’s subscriber base by 6x, but it was still a relatively niche streaming service in the market. Its fanbase was passionate but small, and had a lot in common with another service in the WarnerMedia family, FilmStruck. In 2018, FilmStruck added 600+ classic films from Warner Archive’s library, and Warner Bros. shuttered the Archive doors.

But six more months later, WarnerMedia once again took a cut at its streaming portfolio and closed FilmStruck down, too. The specialty video services suffered the same fate as dozens of others in the market that couldn’t compete with the giants. The Atlantic captured the phenomenon perfectly in their article, The Demise of FilmStruck is Part of a Bigger Pattern:

Like it or not, expansion is coming, on many fronts. Netflix’s bulk approach to original programming has spooked other media giants that don’t want to get left behind.

With new WarnerMedia streaming initiatives coming down the pike after an enormous acquisition by AT&T, hopefully this won’t be last we’ll see of Warner Archive’s important classic movies and TV shows.

KUDOS

Design • Jessica Moon • Liz Park • Mikhail Belstar
Engineering • Dave Levinson • Eric Sun • Andrew Hong
Marketing • Dan Acton • Mike Cucinotta • Wen Lui • Carly Hildebrand • Claire Lew
Business & Content • George Feltenstein • Jacqueline Sia • Jared Bodden