Before being tapped to oversee all content across Roku Media, David Eilenberg got his start in the industry as a writer and producer for reality TV and game shows.
“I spent quite some time as a writer on a game show called ‘The Weakest Link’ and that was really my entry point into working in production full time,” he told TheWrap for this week’s Office With a View.
“That was an interesting point in the evolution of broadcast because it was at the beginning of really the first reality boom,” he continued. “And so they started fishing for game show people to come into certain types of reality show producing, because at that point, in one way or another, most of the big reality shows were games and so they needed people who could think in that way.”
Eilenberg went on to work with Mark Burnett Productions, heading up development for nearly 10 years on shows including “The Apprentice” and “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” before moving to TNT and TBS, where he oversaw unscripted development, late night programming and specials.
He also served as the chief creative content officer for ITV America for six years before joining Roku as its head of original programming and being promoted to the streaming tech company’s head of content.
“I think that if you can remain open-minded about what roles may present themselves to you and try to get something out of each of them, then you give yourself more flexibility to have a varied and consistent career,” he said.
What were the challenges in making the transition from game show writing to overseeing content for Roku Media?
I think the first big transition for me was from perceiving myself primarily as a writer to perceiving myself primarily as a producer. That really forced me to become more of an extrovert, even if I were by nature an introvert.
So that was a pretty profound personality transformation just because so much of producing, especially in those early sort of Wild West days of reality, relies on improvisational thinking. It relies on building consensus among people to do things that can sometimes seem kind of crazy and all of that required a degree of extroversion that I didn’t necessarily need to have when I was a writer.
I think the transition from being a producer to being a development executive is really a transition between concentrating almost exclusively and passionately on one thing at a time to instead being able to have multitasking at the very core of what it is that you do to be successful. How do I manage 100 shows or 300 shows plus all the people who are responsible for those shows?
So I think if you’re speaking about evolution of psychology along with the evolution of the resume, those were the two big pivots that I’ve had to make.
What are some of the major lessons you’ve learned in your career?
I think one of the things about writing for game shows that’s continued to serve me is writing clearly, concisely and accurately. When I was selling TV shows for ITV and I was writing a pitch deck, all of those hours writing game show questions and before that writing screenplays really came into use in different ways.
I think a lot of salesmanship is giving people lines that they can repeat with confidence, especially at a time when it’s not always clear that you have an individual decision maker in any room. The person usually needs to go back and build consensus among his or her network. So I think clarity of expression was a real benefit of that.
The other thing about game shows, which is not true of every genre of television, is it’s pretty black and white as to whether you’re right or wrong, who wins or loses. There’s not a lot of subjectivity to it. In some ways, it functions more like sports. And so as I got into other genres of television, I had to unlearn some of that and learn to support expression that was more subjective.
What are trends that the entertainment industry should be paying more attention to?
I think that there are parts of the industry still that are not quite as aware how fast viewership is shifting to ad-supported and not quite aware how big FAST viewing on streaming has become.
I think there was a moment not very long ago where many of us in this industry, including myself, assumed that from now on all viewership would be on-demand and nobody would want to watch an ad. And in fact, what’s happening is AVOD is the fastest growing sector of streaming and FAST is the fastest growing sector of AVOD. I just don’t think many people would have guessed that.
How do you see Roku positioned in the streaming landscape? What are your thoughts on streamers’ shift in approach with regard to aggregating and licensing content?
In terms of the streaming wars as a whole and Roku’s place within them, one of the things that we often say is we’re the turf upon which the streaming wars are being fought. It’s a slightly different position in the larger ecosystem because for the majority of Americans who are accessing streaming, large proportions of them are coming through Roku software to get to their Netflix, to get to their Max, to get to their Peacock. All of those are our clients and partners and advertisers.
Just as a survival mechanism in this business, you have to be ready to consider something that you thought was completely true yesterday and not true anymore. Yesterday in TV time, everybody was moving toward a global, in-perpetuity buyout of content and now what you’re seeing are deals with co-windowing, even domestically. We’ve announced a couple with our partners at The CW, sharing internationally, going back to territory-by-territory sales. And it’s so funny because it was something everyone was doing a decade ago. We all stopped doing it and now it’s back with vengeance.
As far as the Roku Channel goes, we’re going to be majority aggregated content from outside content providers. We’re not really trying to compete with the Netflixes of the world in terms of volume of originals. Our originals serve a really important purpose which is they help us to find brand and grow reach and create great entertainment.
What are your thoughts on streaming industry consolidation?
Certainly everybody seems to feel like there’s some measure of consolidation that’s likely to come. Players like Fubo and YouTube TV are doing some interesting first attempts at bundling. Is there ever going to come a moment where you can pay for your top six SVODs on a single bill the way you used to pay for 300 cable channels? I don’t see any evidence of that in the very near term. But I understand why it could be something that would be of interest to the consumer and ultimately, if something is of interest enough to the consumer, people find a way to give it to them.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
