Logo

Profile: Brian Burke

Feb 26, 2001  •  Post A Comment

Title: Vice president of syndication for AtomFilms, a leading next-generation entertainment company that markets and distributes short-form entertainment to more than 100 partners around the world.
Syndication as a business model: “I think it’s a great supplemental business. Atom, and now the combined company with Shockwave [the companies officially merged in January], has always positioned itself as an entertainment company. We are a destination site that also realizes distribution is a smart play as well. We’ve sold a lot of great advertising to a lot of great advertising partners, and we’ve done a lot of great sponsorships, but in order to round out a business and bring in a lot of revenue, a syndication business is very smart. … So the idea is that we are selling this content wherever it is appropriate, wherever it can possibly be exhibited.”
Global growth: “There’s a lot of room for development of these international audiences. If you look at the States and the maturity of the online market, the bubble burst. [But] there is still a market for people with good business plans and people who want content for the right reasons. If you look at Latin America, it’s going to be growing. Europe is growing. Asia is growing. So we will continue to focus on the market that will embrace our business.”
More than a dot-com: “We recognized from Day One that we are an entertainment company. We happen to have a dot-com, which can be considered our theater, but we are not going to turn our backs to all the different windows where our content can go. If you look at an average entertainment company, would they ever take a movie and release it just to a theater? Of course not. They would release it to pay-per-view and to airlines and eventually into pay television and basic cable and free television. So we take our properties and put them through those channels, much in the way that any mature and established entertainment company would.”