Ira Rubenstein serves as the Chief Digital and Marketing Officer at PBS.

Since his appointment in 2014, he has spearheaded the network's strategic expansion of general audience and children’s programming across mobile devices, over-the-top (OTT) services, and various digital platforms. Prior to his tenure at PBS, Rubenstein spent over twelve years at Sony, most recently as Executive Vice President of Content Strategy and Acquisitions. His contributions there included the establishment of Movielink—a pioneering online video-on-demand service—and the digital management of prominent media franchises such as Seinfeld, Jeopardy!, and Wheel of Fortune.

Following his career at Sony, Rubenstein occupied the role of Executive Vice President of Marvel Entertainment’s Global Digital Media Group. In this capacity, he directed international digital initiatives encompassing web development, digital comics, and gaming, notably overseeing the launch of the award-winning Marvel Digital Comics application for iPad. Subsequently, as Executive Vice President of Digital Marketing for 20th Century Fox, he founded the organization’s digital marketing division and managed innovative social and mobile media campaigns for several major feature films, including Prometheus and X-Men: First Class.

Given his extensive expertise in the digital media landscape, I wanted to talk with him and get his perspective on the evolution of streaming ecosystems and talk about the strategy that PBS employs within the contemporary multi-platform environment.

We recently had the opportunity to speak at the StreamTV Show in Denver and the conversation was wide-ranging, from the challenges of managing relationships with 140 member stations, to staying on top of the industry’s latest trends.

The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity (mostly mine).

When I was speaking with Andrea Dowling earlier today, she was talking about the fact that one of the biggest challenges of working at PBS is that when you go in to negotiate with someone, you’ve got 140 people on your shoulder that you need to keep happy. Can you talk a bit about the challenge of that process?

Ira Rubenstein: I see it as my superpower. I have 140 friends on my shoulder and I come into a discussion with any partner and I represent the whole country.

And so when people are looking for content that matters in local communities, which, let’s face it, is becoming scarcer and scarcer, And that means that content is becoming more and more valuable. So, I see it as a benefit, I don’t see it as a challenge.

You don’t have 140 voices saying, “Ira, why don’t you do this? Look, I know you don’t want to complain about your member stations, but it seems that if nothing else, it can present a logistical challenge.

Ira Rubenstein: Honestly, our general managers and people at stations are incredibly supportive. I worked in Hollywood for many years, and I never got a single thank you ever. Now, we'll do a deal and whether it's YouTube TV or Hulu Live and my inbox blows up with dozens and dozens of emails from general managers thanking me and the team, Or I'll see them in person, at a conference or the annual meeting and they'll be thanking us and a lot of times I'll record it and I'll play it back. But you don't get that elsewhere. And they are really grateful.

I think they understand the challenges and what we're trying to do. But at the same time, I think we've been really successful in getting local station feeds up on major platforms and they're seeing the views and they're seeing the audience grow.

From the outside, it seemed like that live TV business was hard for PBS to break into. I know when the YouTube deal deal happened, that was a really big deal. It was good for the stations, but viewers were also happy. And on a related note, I was a subscriber of Hulu Live TV when they added my local PBS station and I was really happy about that.

In theory, adding PBS would seem like an easy decision, but it sounds as it’s much more of a challenge than viewers might think.

Ira Rubenstein: Part of the challenge is that when I come to table, I have to be fair. In some markets, it more than one station, It could be three. So from an interface standpoint, how does YouTube TV or Hulu Live TV show more than one?

And especially if the two of them are showing the exact same show. So there were some technology hurdles that they had to overcome. There were also some localization hurdles they had to overcome.

And I'm also coming in as a non-commercial partner. There's no inventory for them to monetize.

So a lot of it is relationships over the years. We have a very strong partner with Kelly Merriman at YouTube TV. I worked with her at Sony Pictures.

And then from there as a Hulu live subscriber, I'm sure you were complaining. We understand it was the number one complaint. And so competitively they had to add us as well.

I live in Minnesota, so I received the TPT signal, as well as the Wisconsin signal (note: DirecTV here also carries the Northland PBS signal from Northern Minnesota). But I don’t receive the full breadth of the TPT signals. If you’re watching over-the-air, you get the multicast signals as well.

Ira Rubenstein: Yeah, they aren’t willing to do that. They’ll take one, but they’re not willing to take four or five that don’t have ad inventory.

So a station can stream all of their multicast on the PBS app, all free, of course, and so they can get it out that way. I would love for the day to come where I can offer all of them, but I think what you're starting to see in the industry is that they're making the bundles even smaller. YouTube TV is now focusing on selling bundles that are smaller.

And then the challenge for you is making sure when they sell those bundles, those mini-bundles, that somehow you get into that mix.

Ira Rubenstein: That's correct.

Which is an entirely new battle for you. Congratulations.

One of the things I found interesting about having the Wisconsin feed as well, is that I was reminded for all of the national programming, station to station, it's a very different experience. And I was sort of bummed when I left Hulu Live TV because I didn’t have access to that Wisconsin PBS feed and I really enjoyed some of the local programming.

And it reminded me that for all of the sort of consolidation on a national level, there really isn’t a way where someone could see every local program, no matter where they are. Because it’s just too complicated.

Ira Rubenstein: Well, on the PBS app, you can search for Wisconsin shows, even if you're localized to TPT. If Wisconsin has set the rights to be seen outside of their DMA, then in theory, yes, you can watch it, but it would take some effort.

And you would have to know it exists.

Ira Rubenstein: Yes, you would have to know it exists.

I mean, you have to know it exists. Look, it's really challenging having so many partners and figuring out an interface that works to surface all that, because you want to primary focus on the local station. And not a station outside of the market.

But you know, we're investing a lot in improving our recommendation engine. I'm sure you read about our work with AWS and our Gen AI metadata project. So as stations upload those local shows, the Gen AI can tag it and put that into our recommendation agent.

The hope is that if you start going down that path, we're going to be able to surface more of those types of shows, whether they're in market or out of market, again, subject to rights. It's a very complex app.

When I talked to you about a year and a half ago, you were in the process of working with local stations to standardize their approach to integrating Passport into their branding. And how goes that battle?

Ira Rubenstein: It's getting better. I mean, it is the biggest source of friction for Passport signups that if you have a local station activation page that you're bouncing to and bouncing back to the app, you, you have a broken experience. We can't track you all the way through.

We don't know where it broke, but if you're using our federated form, which stations can customize, it's like a 98% successful activation rate. What we've done in the last year is that the form now is more customizable. So stations can add gift bags and tote bags and whatever they want and change the look and the feel. And so we're getting more stations signing up. We're also working closely with a company called CBP and I wish I remember what it stood for, but they do a lot of membership work across the system for stations and they run donation forms. We're trying to work with them so that their donation form and ours is the same. That would help a bunch of stations because again, they want to track the data across for their membership. I don't need it.

The local station needs that, but that is the, the hardest thing we have to do. We have VPPA laws that we have to follow and enabling it so that a single app can support data down to an individual station across a hundred, it's no small feat.

Everyone I’ve talked to this week, that’s the biggest challenge for them. Collecting data, tracking viewers, tracking what people are or aren’t watching and for how long.

You don’t have to worry about the ad component of that, which makes your job easier in some ways. But what is the data you would like to have that you don’t have yet?

Ira Rubenstein: I mean, it's probably a long list. But look, I want to help stations maintain membership and drive support. And so it'd be great if we could figure out how to tie their membership data even tighter with viewing data. So that if someone is known as a news junkie, et cetera, the station could email them a message, thanking them for support about news, maybe highlight the next Frontline and ask for more support. But tailor that message around news versus saying someone that's a drama junkie or something else.

And today that's really hard to do. And I want to do it at scale. So the smallest station, and I always pick on Cookeville, but Cookeville, Tennessee, have it so nine people could do the same as the largest station.

And so how do you automate all that for them? There's a lot of things that pop up that you don't think about until the problem shows up. And on a personal level, I'm a long time member of TPT. And at some point, the credit card that TPT was using expired.

It took TPT six months to realize that had happened. And only reason I noticed was at some point Passport no longer working for me. And I went in and realized, “Oh, they haven't gotten money in like five or six months and they just figured that out.”

It's one of those things that reminds me that I can't imagine how challenging is to try and figure out how all these things should work in a perfect world.

Ira Rubenstein: You know, I support multiple stations. TPT is one of them and I had a similar situation. Not with TPT, but another station. The same thing happened, the credit card expired.

And it’s like, “I want to support you.” Once I couldn’t log in, I paid the same day. And that’s a problem.

How have the federal recisssion cuts affected what you are trying to accomplish? I get the sense that everyone at PBS is feeling it at some level.

Ira Rubenstein: So on a local station level, obviously the smaller stations are hurting.

University licensees are hurting because they are getting it from both sides. Because they are losing foreign students, they’re losing federal grants and they’ve just lost their CPB funding. So they’re in a really challenging situation.

For us at PBS, we’ve had reductions. We’ve had reductions in staff, we’ve had reductions in budget. So we’re trying to do the same with less and it’s definitely challenging.

But at the same time, you gotta be optimistic.

We had Ken Burns and American Revolution in the fall. We broke through Nielsen's top 10 streaming titles for the first time ever, which to me means all the work we've done in digital distribution is paying off, that we have enough distribution on enough platforms. I've always want more, but there is a significant enough digital profile that you can break through into Top 10 when you have the content and we had some marketing dollars, but more, more importantly, Ken worked tirelessly.

He was on everything. I joked because I saw him on my weather Instagram feed talking about how the weather impacted some battle in Washington.

It was like brilliant, but it's like, it was everywhere and it was early at the beginning of America’s 250th. So I think that also helped.

But we're also leaning in more and more into social media, vertical video, and just trying to stay within the conversation and highlighting content. So we're working closely with our producers, capturing content to use in these social media campaigns. We're leaning in a lot with that.

But I think for most people, it's the algorithm and it's what your friends say. And so that's why going back to the AWS and our gen AI and making sure that our metadata is correct and we can tie into the different recommendation engines and all different platforms is just more and more important. And I personally believe that the AI interfaces that you're starting to see on the home screen of television will have a huge impact.

“I just watched that. What should I watch next?”

Well, how do we make sure that PBS is in that conversation?

And the only way to do that is through the metadata tag and understanding how that content is getting surfaced in that. But I think that's going to become more and more important and you're going to see less and less of people going app by app by app on their TV and instead asking their TV to check all the apps they have and tell them what they should watch.

How important are the partnerships? Yesterday I sat in a session where a guy from TiVo -they're a software company now - said that an increasing number of people when it comes to FAST channels, when it comes to digital, they don't go searching for it. Whatever pops up on their home screen, well that sounds good. They’re going to click it.

So how do you make sure that you're in that conversation? Because it's not like you're NBC Universal. You can't say to somebody, “Put our tile on there because we'll give you this.”

Ira Rubenstein: They're buying those tiles.

Or, they're buying the remote button or offering an ad rev share or something else. You don't have those options that a more commercial place does.

Ira Rubenstein: What I'm counting on is it's more and more of these platforms want to be consumer friendly. And that's the balance and by consumer friendly, it's got to be find the right content for the person at the right time.

That's where I expect to see more AI discovery work coming on that home screen. And so I think it was Roku who just announced the new home screen interface change last month. And I believe that's all customized, recommended to you.

It’s a terrible experience, terrible. But the concept is there. Where it was used to be manually programmed, it's getting more and more customized. And so I think that's where we're going.

But I just got to make sure that our content is being adjusted so that those engines can recognize it. And then from a consumer standpoint, making sure people know that we're there and, and know that this is content that is of interest to them. And more and more of that's coming through, whether it's social marketing, email marketing, et cetera.

Because you don't have these like reach plays. It's not like in the old days, 10 years ago, I could buy 60 Minutes on CBS to advertise a Ken Burns film or a drama, and there was a lot of overlap with those audiences. That's shrunk, right?

So now you start talking about, okay, I can get into these video platforms, target ads, is that really worth my conversion? Is that really giving me the eyeballs or am I better off taking my limited funds and leaning harder into social media where I can get thousands of millions actually of video views of whether it's promotional or content to get people remembering that we're there. We shifted several years ago to what we call “Always On Marketing” for our dramas.

We used to push big at certain times and it started way back on Downton Abbey.

Here we go, Downton Abbey, we're going to market Downton Abbey. And what we shifted to is just this steady drumbeat of always reminding people of different British dramas that are here and we just swap out the other ones and then buying proper digital platforms to promote that. And it's worked, it's definitely worked.

The technological possibilities are interesting. I recently talked with someone who helps YouTube creators expand their audience. Their pitch is that if you have 5 million followers, they can look at your followers and look at the other things they watch on YouTube and, if they like Ken Burns, they can just target people who also like Ken Burns.

And I suspect that the industry might not be just yet for PBS, but that is going to be an interesting time when at some point you are going to have an easier time of targeting the people who are your digital audience.

Ira Rubenstein: It's interesting technology. You’ve got a couple of things going on there.

You're talking about influencers and influencers in general are getting more and more important for traditional marketers.

I don't know if I should speak for my friend. So I teach at American University and I have people come and teach. My friend Sondra Culpepper does Porsche marketing and she was talking about how important influencers are for her campaign. I was just thinking Porsche, but she wanted to reach the soccer mom and that was influencers, so it was just interesting to me that like a company like that leans into that.

So now transfer that to media. How are influencers influencing media? I'm wearing my old movie hat for movie marketing.

I did some of the earliest influencer stuff on Planet Of The Apes. And it was interesting. I think it got people aware of our content.

Did it convince them to buy a ticket? I don't know.

I mean, to a certain extent, people still don't know that.

Ira Rubenstein: That’s always the question - what actually got them to buy a ticket? But going back to YouTube, we are pulling together all public media content on a common multi-channel network (MCN) on YouTube, we have about 45 stations now up, we have a few of our producers, we're adding the others as well, and Ken's channel is up on that now, Ken Burns. And what we're seeing is when a local station's channel comes onto the MCN, we're getting a 20 to 30% lift because that YouTube algorithm drives 70% of the discovery of content. And that has an impact, because it's massive, it’s billions of hours of viewing.

And this is where the public media ecosystem helps us. And back to your first point about Wisconsin, if Wisconsin's local shows are getting audience attention, and you're watching TPT, the algorithm of YouTube should be able to pull that in for you.

The last time I talked to you, you were talking about your history on the digital side of PBS. It was very different when you started.

Just how do you decide what to pursue and not to pursue? Because there's a million different things out there, and figuring out the platforms and approaches that will move an audience is not easy - no matter who you are.

And you don’t want to chase fads that don’t work for PBS. You’re not going to go to Ken Burns and say “Look, can you create some vertical docs that we can use?”

How do you decide something is not necessarily a fad, but something that wouldn’t work for you, even if people are talking about it?

Ira Rubenstein: So I don't really focus on the content side of things. But from the strategy side, I'm really looking at the ones that give us the biggest bang for the buck, biggest audience. Because it is a lift to get 150 stations onto a platform. Each one, we do a master agreement, but each one has its own individual needs. And that's a lot of work.

And then we got to get the stream. And so you don't want to work with a partner that isn't going to pay off, or I don't believe has a strong growth future. And so that's how we prioritize the distribution partners.

In terms of product and other areas, what we're constantly balancing is the needs of the station and the needs of the consumer. And so a station needs the ability to bring in other partners, needs the ability to highlight a local event or a local community event and how to do that and put money and resources on that programming versus improving the recommendation engine for example, or improving the Passport flow. So those are a kind tensions that we constantly are working through, but I have some North Star board metrics.

We're constantly focused on audience. We're constantly focused on our Passport engagement numbers.

How many streams, how many individuals? We're looking at our YouTube performance, looking at these other platforms and trying to decide where are the best places to put our efforts in order to drive the audience.