Danny Fisher
Ingenuity, Perseverance and Redemption
March 3, 2024
One of my most enjoyable moments during the recent holiday season was sitting down with Danny Fisher for a nearly two-hour interview at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.
His life and times would make a great movie, or maybe even a limited series on one of the big streaming platforms.
Fisher is the CEO of FilmRise, said to be the largest provider of AVOD content, and syndicator of FAST channels, in the world.
Knowing what he’s done prompted us to honor Fisher with this year’s Media Play News Fast Forward Award, presented to people, technologies, or organizations that move the home entertainment industry forward.
Hearing about how he did it was one of the most fascinating tales of ingenuity, perseverance and redemption I’ve ever heard.
Read the story and I think you’ll agree.
I was so impressed with my conversation with Fisher that bits and pieces keep popping up in my interactions with others.
One of Fisher’s lines I’ve adopted as my own is that the content people really want to see, and the content our industry thinks they want to see, aren’t always the same. How else can you explain the fact that about half of all movies released theatrically lose money, or that just 5% of original streaming shows could be considered hits, as Bloomberg reported last November?
Fisher, a teenage math whiz, came up with a formula to predict consumer demand, based on social media metrics and other research. He put the formula to work when he launched FilmRise a little more than a decade ago and, using old TV series as a seed, has been growing the company into an increasingly successful AVOD/FAST powerhouse ever since.
On the redemption front, it should be noted that part of FilmRise’s success comes from lessons Fisher learned from his previous enterprise, City Lights Media, which flourished for years until it went bankrupt during the Great Recession, a victim of both the economic crash and corporate bloat. As Fisher told me, “I should have done a better job managing the overhead.” FilmRise, he says, “has much greater revenue and a quarter of the staff.”
As for perseverance, well, that should be Fisher’s middle name. During a recent guest lecture in a media management class at California State University at Northridge taught by former Warner Bros. executive Jeff Brown, I related a story Fisher told me that I hoped would prove an inspiration to the nearly 40 students.
I gave the students a brief summary of who he is and what he’s done, and then I told them that when Fisher was just beginning his career, in New York City, he really wanted to get into the film editors union. He made the rounds of the various production shops and asked for help, but in each case he was told it was virtually impossible to get into the union. Instead of giving up, he found out where the union was headquartered, showed up early in the morning and asked to speak to the president. He wound up waiting there all day, and finally managed to catch the president as he was leaving. The president was impressed that he had waited there all day to speak directly to him, and promptly welcomed him into the union.
The class erupted into applause. And while I like to think it was for me, I have a hunch it was for Danny Fisher.