What Filmmakers Need to Know About Modern Distribution with Bonnie Bruderer

ON PRODUCTION with Bonnie Bruderer 

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Cameron (00:01.858)

Welcome to another episode of On Production, where we explore the art, craft, and business of creating film and television in a rapidly changing media landscape. I'm your host, Cameron Woodward, and today I have the pleasure of speaking with a really amazing innovator in the streaming and production space, Bonnie Brudeter. Bonnie is the founder and CEO of Binge Networks. It's a pioneering OTT platform that's distributing and monetizing content for independent creators across more than a hundred channels worldwide.

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Bonnie's path to media entrepreneurship has been anything but ordinary. She got her start in corporate marketing during the.com boom, spent years touring the globe as a motivational coach alongside Tony Robbins and, Harvey McKay and eventually created and produced her own talk show, the Ask Bon Bon show, which ran for hundreds of episodes. That experience led her to identify the biggest pain point for content creators, distribution and led her to build Binge Networks, which has become an award-winning streaming platform, helping countless filmmakers and producers reach new audiences. Let's jump right in. Bonnie, welcome to On Production.

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Bonnie Bruderer (01:12.61)

Thank you for having me.

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Cameron (01:14.995)

well, that's, wonderful to have you, you know, I was doing a lot of research before chatting with you and it's so awesome. You know, you have such a varied background, you know, from marketing in the.com days, traveling with Tony Robbins, writing books, then landing in TV production. Can you talk about your earliest experiences that first sparked your interest in media and storytelling specifically?

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Bonnie Bruderer (01:40.64)

Yeah, so if I'm honest, I think it was when I was a little kid. I remember I had a neighbor and her dad was a builder and we would go on to this job site with him and I would always want to play. It was like a two level and I would always want to play news broadcaster. So I'd make her go downstairs and then I would broadcast the news. And so I always just had this like natural innate desire to produce content that was way back before YouTube or anything like that. It then evolved into, you know, as you

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Instead, I worked for very famous motivational speakers. So I worked for Tony Robbins for about 10 years, for Harvey McKay and many others. And then went into television, started my own TV show in New York City back in, gosh, end of 2014. And really got bit by the TV bug and just loved producing, loved hearing people's story and telling people's story. And so that's really where our whole network was started back then.

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Cameron (02:37.769)

So, you know, you just mentioned you've had your own TV shows and then you also delivered them via OTT. Can you explain to our listeners what OTT is?

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Bonnie Bruderer (02:46.446)

Sure. So OTT is streaming. It's really, it stands for over the top, meaning you're getting your internet from Wi-Fi or internet instead of cable. And so, you know, any site that you're watching, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, those are all streaming sites or OTT platforms. And we really fell into it in that we were doing traditional cable back in 2014, 2015, and quickly realized cable was

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dying at least back then in that this streaming world was really becoming the next big thing or this OTT industry was becoming the next big thing. And so we were able to quickly secure a number of different distribution deals within that industry and then have been on the forefront of that, you know, over the last decade as that's evolved and changed and grown into a multi-billion dollar industry where it is today.

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Cameron (03:37.363)

I mean, it's pretty amazing. In many ways, it still seems like we're still very early in OTT. You know, like some of the largest media personalities are bringing their shows online, whether that's on YouTube or X or other medias. It's pretty interesting. I have some questions around this, but before we get to it, I'm really curious. You you mentioned your coaching background, you know, your background in working with these like extremely fascinating, motivational, you know,

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professionals, how did your coaching experience shape the way you really eventually approached content creation and producing for television?

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Bonnie Bruderer (04:16.418)

Gosh, so many ways. So the funny part of it is that during the period of time when I started the TV show, I actually was working on Wall Street in-house as a coach. I was coaching brokers in the financial world. And I thought, hey, I'm going to start this TV show and use it as a vehicle to represent my coaching business and gain new clients. And then what happened instead was I just got bit by TV.

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found so much joy in creating TV shows and interviewing people that it really expanded beyond that. I never went back to coaching, but it really is a big part of the fabric of who I am. I remember back in those early days, would enroll a team of people to work. They were never paid in the early days. They would just volunteer, do production, and you know, it's long hours, it's grueling work. Or if they were paid, it was very little or we would get...

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these amazing producers that worked for CBS and CNN that would work for us on their off days for a few thousand dollars. And it really, back in those days, I would always talk about this network I was gonna build. And there was always that story and like coaching our team and our vision and our goals to the next level always. And I think that it's kind of just who I am. It's ingrained in me. And then also of course, 10 years of training, hundreds of thousands of hours spent coaching people. It just becomes quite natural.

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And a big part of that, mean, coaching is really just hearing people's story and then helping guide them in a different path. And that's really what a lot of TV is and a lot of production, films, TV shows, everything is just telling people's story in a way that it connects with other audiences.

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Cameron (05:53.599)

That's awesome. So in your transition from producing your own talk show to then founding Binge Networks, in my research, it was in part because you were seeing a sort of a gap in distribution opportunities, both for your own show and for others. Can you walk me through that sort of aha moment? How did your frustrations as a content creator inform Binge's core mission?

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Bonnie Bruderer (06:07.256)

Yeah.

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Bonnie Bruderer (06:19.32)

So yeah, mean, super transparently, it was more of like a doubled over moment than an aha. I remember one day I was running, I lived in Manhattan and I was running along the water on the Hudson and I was just so stressed out because production is so expensive. It's so time sensitive. Like everything is urgent. We were always over leveraged because if a snowstorm came and the producer couldn't get in from Connecticut, like it was just always so much stress, I remember.

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And then I also found so much joy in the distribution side of things. And I realized like you can't really have one without the other. You can pay all this money and produce these great shows and films, but if you don't have the right people to watch them and then fund them and ads that come with that, it doesn't really matter. And so I really, at an early, like early days in the OTT industry was great at getting these distribution deals. And I thought, you know what? I think I would be so much happier if we just were allowed

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you know, the ability to give these to other people and allow this, you know, people that are producing great content to get it out there. And so that's really where the switch happened for me is deciding like, I'm ready to let go of this one piece that, you know, is so much fun and it's exciting. And when you're on set and producing something, it is really great. And all that stress comes with it too. And so we just sort of transitioned very naturally into launching our own streaming network and then stopped the production side of things.

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At that same time, I had produced a documentary film called Influencer on the social media generation and the advertising industry. And I went the traditional path of finding an agent and just went into every pitfall imaginable from, you know, things falling through and deals not materializing. then, you know, years going by and not seeing a penny because the marketing budget was getting eaten up by the agents. And so I just really wanted to make production, you know, producers a different path.

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And that's really what went into creating Binge is that we are able to help people get their content distributed to monetize it in a very fast and efficient way without, you know, the way that the industry has operated for decades.

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Cameron (08:27.975)

Yeah, let's talk about that. think our listeners will really care about this, especially our indie audience and folks that are producing all different types of content. know, so Binge is now on Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire, and many other OTT channels. Can you sort of tell us the founding story and just give us an understanding of Binge?

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Bonnie Bruderer (08:42.317)

Yeah.

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Bonnie Bruderer (08:48.234)

Yeah, so our streaming network, as you said, we are very heavily focused on the indie creator. So we have about 2,500 titles, films, shows that we represent. Our app is called Binge Movies and TV. So if you have an iPhone, you can download it there. Or you can watch it on Apple and Roku. And we really strive to find content creators that have great shows, whether it's a series with a couple of seasons or an independent film. We work with a lot of small catalogs.

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a lot of medium-sized catalogs, children's programming, really people that don't really know too much about the distribution industry or have an idea. They created a passion project or a show or a film and they just don't know what to do next. And we were very early into that market. I really saw, going back to my internet days, I really saw the parallel between what I feel. I feel that the streaming world is just the next internet, the next sort of evolution.

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And it had a lot of similarities and I helped grow a lot of companies from early days back then. And I thought, you know what, there's really something to this. And so it was interesting. We got in on the first couple of years when people didn't even really know what the industry was. And then now we're sort of a household name in the industry because we've been around for a long time. But we really made a different way. And it was very, it was a very much an uphill battle and some days still is because we broke the model.

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You know, people typically they made something, they were paid for it. They went on, they did their next project. Well, the industry stopped working that way. When the evolution of streaming came in, lot of, you know, projects weren't getting minimum guarantees so much or bought by a network. And so we actually charged for distribution and people was like, how can you do that? don't, know, I only get paid for my project. We're like, that's great. But how's that working? Or, you know, we talked to film producers that would spend thousands and thousands of dollars entering into these festivals.

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which can be great and they'd win an award, then no, nothing came after that. There was no distribution deal. There was no like, let's get into theaters, let's get it into streaming. So we really changed that market and changed that model. And that's our core focus today is that we, know, simultaneously run our streaming network, but then we take all of that content and we relicense it to the Amazon primes or Tubi's, all of the other platforms that are out there and help that content creator monetize their project.

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Cameron (11:12.255)

That's super interesting, Bonnie. So in your experience distributing indie films, web series, lifestyle content through Binge, what are some common misconceptions producers have about monetizing their work? I think you were touching on it a little bit. Is there a surprising insight you've gained that most filmmakers overlook?

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Bonnie Bruderer (11:25.762)

Yeah.

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Bonnie Bruderer (11:32.174)

So I mean, the first thing, especially with the current state of the streaming industry is that there's just sort of a unrealistic expectation. People come to us and they're like, I want to sell this to Netflix for $10 million. I'm like, as does everybody I've ever talked to. And really, a win for somebody might be, let's get it on Amazon Prime. Let's get some publicity going towards it. You might make a few hundred or a few thousand dollars in the beginning months, but that's really a win in today's current market.

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Our strategy is a bit different in that we try to place things as many places as possible so that you're not dependent on one thing. People always want the top three or four names. That's great, but there's also a lot of niche streaming platforms that we can help you monetize. also do obscure deals. We still do cable deals. We do DVD production. Believe it or not, that's still a thing and it can be quite lucrative in the educational space and some other markets.

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So we really take a look at the individual project and figure out, okay, what's the best path for this particular project? And then we also have clients that come to us are like, I don't know, we'll give it a try. And then we've licensed like one of our documentaries, Dogsbell. We got it on Apple TV, the subscription part of Apple TV, like their Apple TV Plus right away. And then we got it on about 15 other channels and it did very, very well straight out of the gate. We have another.

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documentary called Oceans right now, which is making quite a bit of money on Tubi and a few other platforms. And so that's really exciting to be able to provide that opportunity for producers because otherwise, you know, again, unless you have connections or you have a plan or a strategy or someone that wants to buy your film, so many films, don't know the actual percentage, but they never see the live day. So it's a really cool market.

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Cameron (13:23.721)

Bonnie, it's very interesting. Yes, you're right. That sort of classic workflow of like, we made a film, we brought it to a festival, someone wants to buy it. That's the dream. Doesn't always happen, but it's not the end of the road. There's a lot of other paths. Can you describe for our listeners if they have a piece of content and they wanted to engage with Binge? What is the...

What's the workflow? How does an engagement work if I'm the owner of like a nice piece of content that, you know, I just want it to get distributed. I want to see what the market thinks of it rather than what like a buyer thinks of it.

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Bonnie Bruderer (14:06.134)

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the first thing is just talk to us. We have an amazing team, myself, and then there's Alison Jernigan, who came from Cinemark. So she knows the cinema world. She was a VP at Cinemark for over 20 years. And then with the downturn with COVID, she ended up coming over to work for us.

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So we do consultations. If you go to bingeprograms.com, you can get a free consultation. And we'll tell you honestly, like, hey, I think we can place this for you. Or maybe it's not our thing. But 95 % of people that reach out to us, we end up being able to place their work for them. And basically, we just take a look at what you have. We figure out what your goals are. And then we have an active team that knows all of the open opportunities.

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regularly feed content to Amazon, to Tubi, to all of the big platforms. We have a certain number of submissions we do each month. We also have one person, our director of licensing, who strictly reaches out and manages all the relationships with the other types of opportunities. Right before this call, I just glanced at email real quick and there was one for an exclusive deal for like Macedonia, Spain, places that you're never gonna take your phone, more than likely.

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dubbed into those languages, but we get those coming to us on a daily basis. So, Daniella, that's her role. She, you know, parcels out our catalog all day long and pitches. One of my big roles is I go to all the open markets. So, from NAPI to MIB TV in France to all of the different, you know, open marketplaces and just talk to all of the distributors, talk to all of the filmmakers, figure out what opportunities are, you know, coming along.

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you know, exploring things that we haven't necessarily done yet. So, so yeah, that's really our process. We're very, we have our hands. I always say it's an octopus. We have our hands in all of the buckets. New people always come to us and they're like, are you like a film hub? We're like a little bit, you know, we do that. are you an agent? Yeah, a little bit. Are you a buyer? Yeah, a little bit, you know, so we do all these things and we operate our own streaming company. So we are able to really open doors that, you know, aren't necessarily like one path or

one distribution opportunity.

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Cameron (16:19.987)

That's super fascinating. You know, for me, my background was as a filmmaker, a commercial filmmaker, and then I'm obviously as a technologist really on the production side of things with like entertainment payroll. Like, I don't know really a bunch about distribution. My intuition though is like, that it's a crowded streaming market, you know, like the streaming wars, you'd hear about this in the media. Do you see the industry consolidating further?

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Cameron (16:49.023)

or will we see more niche players like Binge carve out strong communities? Where do you think OTT is headed in the next five years and how are you positioning Binge for those changes?

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Bonnie Bruderer (17:00.174)

So that is such a great question. It was so interesting because in the early days, like I took a look, I remember I did this consulting job in the OTT industry before it was like Roku had just come out and they were one of the first. Apple TV had like flopped already but then they relaunched and so forth. I was, wait a minute, isn't this just like regular TV? I remember going to my grandma's house and I would watch the TV Guide channel, know? I'm like, isn't this just regular TV but we're calling it different.

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And I honestly feel like it took almost a decade for everybody else to catch up to that. And so I do see a lot of changes. Like before it used to be like, it's all streaming. People just want to binge watch, which is great. And I'm a big binger. Like, I love that. But also then there's been sort of a swing back to like, well, we do kind of want to watch Grey's Anatomy Thursday at nine. You know? And so they had to really find their footing of like what works for people. I'm a mom of young kids. So I am like,

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Yes, like anytime they offer me $20 to watch a new Disney movie instead of going to the theater and paying like $80 for popcorn and two, three tickets, you know, it's like, absolutely. So it's like all these things had to sort of like play out. And then you saw everybody get in, right? So it's like Hulu is owned by a number of big networks. They're, know, Paramount, everybody bought everybody else for a while the last few years. And that's been great on one front.

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Unfortunately for content creators, that has really hurt the payouts because these big independents like Tubi and some others that were acquired by, not Tubi per se, but like Pluto, others that were partnered with bigger companies, we saw the revenues drop. And then to answer your question, where we fit in is we've always quickly, we're always scrambling. I always say we're like doing fast feed.

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because we'll see trends like this and we're small and nimble enough to be able to switch, but we've switched our model probably four times. To be honest, the licensing came out of COVID. We were heading into COVID. Obviously nobody knew that was coming. We were the rights holders for Big Cat, which was Tiger King, essentially, but we had about 5,000 hours of their Tiger Cams.

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Bonnie Bruderer (19:07.468)

on our platform and I had a newborn. I remember I had my daughter home for one day and my ops director is texting me in all caps, Tiger King is Carol, Tiger King is Carol. And I'm like, what? And we have this sort of like nutty client and I'm like, wait, you're kidding. And then the calls just started coming. I was supposed to be on maternity leave. I'm like, strapped her into the little pouch, like started doing Zoom and that was it. That became our licensing department. And that's really the crux of our business now is we license out to 150 different other platforms. But if I didn't have the ability to pivot very quickly at that point, thinking like, I think this virus is here to stay, like we might wanna look into this instead of just saying, no, watch on our platform, thanks for subscribing. And that became the biggest business change that we've had. So.

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I think that if you're able to do that, there'll always be a place for you. And we do play on both sides of the field as well. So we have great relationships with a lot of these bigger streamers and companies and agencies, and then simultaneously own and operate our own platform. So yeah, so hopefully both will still exist, but I do see some more changes coming. I think there'll be more consolidations as well.

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Cameron (20:20.719)

When you look back at the many pivots in your career, you were just talking about even the pivots even in your role now at Binge, but from corporate marketing, coaching, publishing, production, now the CEO and leader of a streaming platform, what do you wish you had known when you started out in the entertainment industry?

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I guess to just say like it's all gonna work out because I remember in those early days, it's like pushing a boulder uphill when you start your own company and you have your own vision and you're enrolling other people, especially in New York, know, it's like glitz and glamour and so much fast, fast, fast. And it seemed very, very hard and still does a lot of times.

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And then, but I always kept talking about like where we are today. And that's what's so funny to me because everyone thought they didn't think I was crazy. Everyone believed in it and wanted part of the vision, but it sounded so net balls. Like here we are just on a set. I'm like, one day we're going to have a network and we're, you know, and then now we do. And so I think like really believing, believing in cheer vision. Like I wish I could have told myself like, yep, just keep believing. It's all going to be fine. It's all going to work out.

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But you don't, you know, as an entrepreneur it's a lot of this and a lot of ups and downs and you know, you have one bad month, you're like, that's it, it's crumbling and that's just all part of it, that's all part of the journey.

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Cameron (21:44.991)

You know, you also have this interesting view into oftentimes filmmakers who are looking for a home for their content. They might be new filmmakers, they might be seasoned filmmakers, whatever the situation is. What's one piece of practical advice you really have from your ledge as a distributor that you'd give to filmmakers right now? Perhaps there's something that they can do today to set themselves up for long-term success in this very competitive industry. I mean, you mentioned you go to film markets. You know what's sort of hot, what people are buying.

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What do you think if you were sort of coaching a filmmaker trying to think through an edge for their content?

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Bonnie Bruderer (22:22.51)

So the first thing I would say is number one, be realistic. Don't think that you're gonna sell your film. I hate to say this, because then somebody will go and do it. And I'm like, oh my God, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to crush your dreams. But don't think that you're gonna sell your film for $10 million. Be realistic of what is possible. But then to sort of contradict that, know what you want and go get it. Do not sign away your rights. Do not let someone promise you the world and then tell you, oh, we're gonna do this, this, and this with it.

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if you give them a certain amount. We never take rights into our producers. only do a certain term deal and then we always give them an out if they need it. And we have actually had only two or three of the 10,000 deals that we've done, but we're a bigger network wanted to buy the show and we're like, you should do this. Obviously we're not gonna be able to work with you anymore, but this is a good deal for you. So I think no...

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know your worth and go out and get it because everything exists. We've all seen shows like one of my favorite shows right now to watch is Abed Elementary on Hulu and she was a YouTuber you know and now she's on season four of this incredibly like dynamic amazing show that's super popular so whatever you want really exists out there you just have to go and find it and don't let people I just remember how scared I was like the first time I went with my film to

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meet with all the producers and buyers and all of that. And I just felt like such a small fry. But now it's like, I have those meetings all day long. I honestly don't feel different as a person. I feel like I'm the same Bonnie that came to those meetings, but I just have so much more knowledge, you know? And so, so just understanding what's available, what's out there and that there's really a path to everything. You just have to be clear on what that is and don't.

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Don't get caught up in, like I wasted two years with our agents of them telling me, we're going to markets, we're pitching, they give feedback, can make course corrections, spend more money. And it was all for nothing. And then when I took back over, we got in on every platform known to man. So hold to that and know that it is possible.

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Cameron (24:24.895)

That's awesome. Finally, Bonnie, what's on the horizon for you and Binge Networks? Any upcoming projects or expansions our audience should watch out for?

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Bonnie Bruderer (24:33.262)

Yeah, so we're our new kind of markets that we're exploring right now are cable and going back into TV. That's like a new thing that we've added in for 2025. But the biggest, most exciting part is our subscription. So we are very actively growing our subscriber base. If you go to try binge dot TV, you can get a seven day free trial. You can watch all of our films. And we're very excited to do that, because as I said, we pay back a percentage of each

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subscription to our creators and that's really unheard of and so we want to become the biggest source for people to know like if you have a film come to us and within a month you're making really good money out of it. So yeah, that's what we're most excited about and we're doing a lot of affiliate promotions. We're doing a lot of different marketing, just testing pretty much everything from TV commercials to billboards to like everything to see how we can drive that subscriber base, but that's what I'm most excited about right now.

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Cameron (25:32.605)

Bonnie, thank you for sort of taking me behind the scenes of your journey and sharing such practical insights about production distribution. It's moving fast and it's really awesome to have your perspective.

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Bonnie Bruderer (25:36.556)

Yeah.

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Bonnie Bruderer (25:45.56)

Thank you so much for having me, it's been a pleasure.