It’s probably a good thing that Discovery Channel president Rich Ross didn’t attend the Guardian Edinburgh International TV Festival last year.
Ross, back at the festival for the first time in about a decade, is distinctly unimpressed with the gist of Channel 4 chief executive David Abraham’s 2014 MacTaggart speech that I give him.
Abraham issued a warning about the risks associated with US giants snapping up prime UK media assets – Discovery/Liberty Global’s takeover of Midsomer Murders maker All3Media being one – risks such as sacrificing creativity for profits.
“As an American who has worked in global television for my whole career, I don’t really want to be tarred with that brush, frankly,” he says. “I come from a world where ideas come from many different places and it is easy to blame the boogeyman as America. People are buying things because they think they are smart investments. But people who do make smart investments allow companies to do what they do well. I believe that the English TV system continues to yield big shows and why should that really change?”
Refreshingly, Ross, unlike many senior TV executives, is quite happy to say what he really thinks about what many media observers believe is the real American boogeyman, Netflix.
At one point in the interview he makes a reference to Discovery being in “hand to hand combat” with the online TV streaming service.
The spectre of so-called “cord-cutting”, consumers ditching traditional TV for online services such as Netflix and Amazon or moving to budget TV bundles, has hammered US media giants this summer. Rattled investors have dumped traditional media stocks with Discovery’s share price down 40% compared to a year ago.
In light of this business model battle I have to ask what he makes of Kevin Spacey’s MacTaggart speech two years ago when, while at the height of the success of his $100m House of Cards remake, the star criticised US TV networks and championed the creative and financial freedom of working with Netflix.
“I think it is very easy to say that someone who writes the cheque is just giving the car keys to the driver and saying ‘just get it back to me when you are ready to come home’,” he says. “It seems to be a theme of every new [TV] player is that ‘you just let people tell their stories’. I am a creative partner. I want a show to be as great as possible and partnerships yield them. The old isn’t dead by any means.”
And when it comes to good TV content – and mostly, but not always, films – Ross knows what he is talking about.
He spent 16 years working at Disney, firstly with the Disney Channel where his credits included mega-franchises Hannah Montana and High School Musical.
In 2009, he was made chairman of Walt Disney Studios for a three-year stint that included film blockbusters the Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and Toy Story 3 as well as The Muppets and The Help.
He left after a couple of flops, most notably John Carter which made one of the largest losses in movie history, popping up as chief executive of MasterChef maker Shine America in 2013.
The 53-year-old turned up at Discovery at the beginning of the year, after Shine was absorbed into a mega-production group with Big Brother-maker Endemol and the maker of American Idol in a joint venture between Rupert Murdoch’s Fox and Apollo Global.
He got off to an inauspicious start, having to handle an ill-judged programme stunt called Eaten Alive - the wheeze was that a man in a special snake-proof suit would get eaten by a giant anaconda on live TV, which back-fired on the PR front spectacularly. “It had nothing to do with me,” he says. “I came after. It won’t be replicated on my watch.”
Two record-setting quarters of TV viewing for the flagship Discovery channel and the highest-ever ratings for its well-publicised Shark Week saw Ross rewarded with an expanded role earlier this month; he now also runs Animal Planet and the Science Channel.
Back in full Midas-touch mode, Ross has strong views about how viewers consume content, readily weighing in on the debate between the Netflix-championed “binge viewing” model and traditional scheduled TV.
“I don’t look at my creative partners and say you have all the answers and nor should they look at me and say I have all the answers,” he says. “Why [binge viewing] has been less of a conversation [lately] is humanity like to talk about things, at the watercooler, on social media, they like to be somewhere talking about the same thing. What binge viewing was saying is ‘I am not relevant because I don’t even know who is talking about what’.” Ross also says that the initial tidal wave of content unleashed by allowing viewers to watch entire seasons in one go means that many viewers are starting to run out of the shows they value most highly.
“There has been an explosion of available product,” he says. “Like anything I think the slack has now been let up. I’ve seen The Wire, Breaking Bad, all of that. Next thing I’m watching Better Call Saul because I loved Breaking Bad. That is the one thing I have left on my iPad mini on a trip I’m taking. It was very different a year ago. I was catching up on a lot of things. Now I’ve caught up.”
He also argues that from a financial point of view there are risks in making huge investments in shows only to then have them “binged away” rapidly.
Netflix is throwing a lot of money at content with financial filings for 2014 showing that it has almost $10bn in “streaming content obligations”, effectively payments to rights owners for shows, due in the next five years.
“That’s a lot of money,” he says. “The theory is you unleash the power of the viewer. While I am contending it may be true, or possible, that is a type of viewer. I think there are many viewers, not just older viewers, who want to have a conversation that [traditional] TV and content represent.”
While Ross may be anti-Netflix, or perhaps more fairly just pro the prospects for Discovery and its ilk, he nevertheless is branching out into very non-traditional TV models.
He says he is most proud of the upcoming Racing Extinction, a film drawing attention to mankind’s role in the potential loss of at least half the world’s species.
Discovery has chosen to air it in 220 countries and territories around the world in prime time in one day, which means breaking with convention and starting with New Zealand to follow the time zones in order.
“That’s another thing Netflix can’t do,” he says, although the roughly simultaneous release globally over a day sounds a bit Netflix-like. “HBO can’t do it. No one can. Some may have the ambition, but they haven’t done it. The US normally says we go first, you go second and then whoever else. The team wanted it in prime time everywhere, which is essentially launching in NZ and Australia first. So the US is last. A clock is a clock, why should it go in the other direction?”
Talking of the global dimension, Discovery Communications has been a major player in the race for media and content assets: in the past 18 months, as well as All3Media, the company took control of Eurosport, snapped up the future European TV rights to the Olympic Games and came within a whisker of winning the auction for Channel 5.
But I can’t elicit a response from Ross on any of that, it’s out of his remit as US boss. “I’d get in trouble doing that,” he says.
However, with Ross’s global experience, he surely has a view on how TV companies can successfully make the transition in the age of the increasingly digital consumer?
“What I do believe is must-have programming is what fuels a brand,” he says. “I hear loud and clear from my boss and our board to do exactly what my boss said at Disney, and my boss said at Fox, and my boss said at Nickelodeon, and my boss said at FX. They say: ‘Make what people want to watch and the rest goes with it’. I don’t think that has changed at all. My job every day is to make what people want to watch.”
Curriculum vitae
Age 53
Education Eastchester high school, New York, University of Pennsylvania, Fordham University (law)
Career 1993 joins FX Networks 1996 senior vice president, programming and production, Disney Channel 1999 general manager and executive vice president 2002 president of entertainment 2004 president of Disney Channels Worldwide 2009 chair, Disney Studios 2013 chief executive officer, Shine America 2015 president, Discovery Channel