Sean Riley, Barvanna

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT There are many, many stories of ad-based digital signage networks starting up in bars and restaurants, but many and perhaps most of those stories have bad endings - because of the high cost of the hardware that needed to go in and the limited ability to manage that tech. A company called Barvanna is taking a different approach - effectively operating as a free channel on satellite TV receiver boxes. So if a sports bar in the U.S., for example, uses DIRECTV to drive the screens around its seating areas, staff can switch on the Barvanna channel by grabbing the remote and just switching to it. No logins. No software to manage. No dedicated box to tie in to local WiFi. On the other hand, there's no localization on ads and no ability for local managers to do things like create and run spots for things like drinks specials. Barvanna co-founder Sean Riley comes out of the broadcast business and gets all of that, stressing his service is not intended as an alternative to what a digital signage platform might do for a bar. It's complementary. I had a good chat with Riley about his company's business model and footprint, and his team's challenge of making some 300,000 DIRECTV business customers aware that there's a new channel they can switch on to drive conversations in bars, and ideally get patrons to stay for another round or two. Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS TRANSCRIPT Sean, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what Barvanna is all about?  Sean Riley: Hey, Dave. Thank you for having me. I appreciate you taking the time to chat with me. Barvanna is an out-of-home entertainment network. So the network itself, the content is a combination of trivia questions, conversation starters, and action sports videos. So we do all short-form content.  Nothing in the network is more than three to five minutes long, for the most part, and if you are at an out-of-home location and you see Barvanna, what you're gonna see is what we call glance-digestible content, and by that I mean you can glance up at Barvanna at any time on any screen, and immediately digest what's happening on the screen. So it could be a trivia question, it could be a conversation starter would you rather, or what would you do if…  And to break up the text, we also deliver action sports videos in a way that works really well with our customers. We've got a lot of really positive feedback thus far. So what's the business model?  Sean Riley: So we are primarily an ad-driven model, right? What that means is that our primary revenue stream, of course, is gonna be in the form of advertising. So we need to find ways to measure the audience that we have in out-of-home, which we can talk about in a few minutes, and deliver a lot of value to advertisers that are interested in reaching these out-of-home consumers. You know better than I do, Dave, about the out-of-home environment. I have an entertainment background. I spent 25 years in the television business with Fox Sports, with Liberty, Latin America, in the Caribbean, and some time with the Golf Channel, and so my focus is delivering a really top-notch entertainment network that works very well in, out-of-home with or without audio and with respect to the monetization, it's all about delivering tens of millions of impressions every month and showing advertisers that we can get them results.  Because you come out of the programming side, by the sounds of it, you understand that you can't just put something and run ads and just assume people are gonna watch it? Sean Riley: Yeah, that's exactly right, and that is, one of our biggest challenges, so our distribution model is a little bit different, right? So you have other out-of-home networks out there that are delivering Android boxes or Apple TV boxes, DirecTV in locations, and delivering networks that way, and that is really easy to measure because you know exactly how many sc