Director of Corporate Strategy, Showtime Network

>> My name is John Rusenko, and I'm Director of Corporate Strategy and Analysis at Showtime Networks. Corporate strategy, we really -- we monitor the entire television landscape. So I kind of consider myself an expert on everything that's going on in the TV world from the business side standpoint. So what does that mean? So I monitor HBO very closely, a lot of competitors. So I'll say, all right. What did HBO spend on Game of Thrones last year? What are they spending on advertising? What should we be spending? I look at how many shows we should have, original series on our network. So we have Homeland, Dexter. We used to have Weeds, a lot of hit series. We've been investing a lot more on those shows. We used to have pretty much just strictly movies, and we kind of made the strategic decision to stop investing as much in movies and invest more in TV shows. So I kind of work with that, and I kind of try to figure out what is the -- you know, the perfect ratio there. And then I'll also do a lot of market research. So I'll say, okay. What are college-aged kids, how are they consuming their content today? So are they watching it on a tablet, on an iPhone, on their computer, on their Roku device, and then how can we be a part of that? So that's kind of generally what I do. I'm kind of an expert on everything that's going on in the TV industry. This morning HBO made a pretty big announcement that next year they're going to go what we call over the top meaning that you won't need a cable subscription to get them. Strictly over the Internet. So it's like a Netflix or Hulu model. So they announced that this morning, and my phone started ringing off the hook. I had the president of the network, the CEO, our head of research all calling me and saying, how many subscribers does HBO have? How do they -- because they kind of gave some figures in their announcement, so how did they get to these figures? What should we say publicly? How should we go about this? And part of my job historically has been looking at could we possibly do that in the future, so could we have a Netflix model where you could just subscribe to Showtime for, say, $10 a month and you don't need to go through Comcast or Time Warner cable or DirecTV. So that's been part of my job, so I'm kind of an expert on that. So when HBO made this bombshell announcement, everyone came to me to figure out, all right; how do we proceed from there? So that's my morning. And so I had to look up all these different numbers. I had all these different calls. I had to go into all these different meetings. So this has been the busiest day probably so far in a couple months.