DreamWorks Co-Founder Secures One Billion Dollars for NewTV Project

DreamWorks animation studio co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg is preparing to launch a new Pay-TV media dedicated to short video content, after securing one billion dollars from prestigious investors.

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The largest Hollywood film studios – Disney, 21st Century Fox, MGM, Sony Pictures, and Warner – are among the investors in the experimental ‘NewTV’ project, reported on Tuesday from Jeffrey Katzenberg’s company WondrCo.

DreamWorks was founded in 1994, and along with Katzenberg, the founders include Steven Spielberg and David Geffen.

Katzenberg previously helped transform Disney studio when it released hits such as ‘Beauty and the Beast’, ‘Aladdin’, and ‘The Lion King’, after which he left the studio in 1994.

Katzenberg, 67, has teamed up with former eBay and Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman, who will take over the operational duties of NewTV, while Katzenberg will be responsible for content.

The two main pillars of the new platform are mobile media, primarily smartphones, and short video content, no longer than ten minutes.

So far, no platform has thrived on short videos, except for advertising, as the market is flooded with free content coming from YouTube or Facebook.

In an interview with CNBC, Whitman stated that the studios that invested in the project want ‘content delivery on this platform’ as such content formats are ‘fertile ground’ for them.

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For Whitman, the market is enormous considering that two billion people spend an average of more than an hour watching video content on their smartphones.

To develop a mobile-friendly platform, NewTV has partnered with Chinese internet sales giant Alibaba.

Whitman added that the launch of NewTV is scheduled for Christmas 2019.