Katherine Pond, Group VP of Platform Content & Partnerships, Vizio
Katherine Pond — Making Connections
March 4, 2025
Connected TV, or CTV, is one of the hot buzz terms in today’s streaming world.
Officially it’s simply a television set that’s connected to the Internet, either through a streaming device or because it’s a smart TV with the device built in.
But in reality, CTV means so much more than that. It’s a gateway to a world of entertainment options, connecting the consumer to a far-reaching menu of FAST channels, customized streaming portals, and even proprietary content.
Indeed, connected-TV systems, with their customized, personalized home pages, are in many ways the new home entertainment retailers, merchandising streaming apps in much the same way brick-and-mortar retailers in the not-too-distant past merchandised DVDs and Blu-ray Discs.
And that brings us to Katherine Pond, our 2025 Fast Forward honoree. As I’m sure many of you know, the Fast Forward Award is presented each year by Media Play News to people, technologies, or organizations that move the home entertainment industry forward.
Read Our Profile on Katherine Pond, Our 2025 Fast Forward Honoree
Pond, Group VP of platform content and partnerships at Vizio, is both a key driver and pioneer in the CTV realm. She heads distribution, content acquisition, programming, platform partnerships and marketing at Vizio, a top smart-TV maker and a leader in the consumer electronics industry’s embrace of streaming. She leads content acquisition for Vizio’s AVOD and FAST businesses. She oversees digital distribution for Vizio’s third-party content and app partners. And she plays a key role in getting Vizio to leverage opted-in platform data to gain insight into what consumers want to watch and then use that data to make content choices for Vizio’s WatchFree+, a free service that offers live-TV, news, sports, music and upwards of 25,000 on-demand movies and shows from all the top studios.
WatchFree+ is available not just on Vizio TVs, but also on the Vizio app for iOS and Android devices. It has more than 300 live channels and 50 local channels, as well as seven owned-and-operated channels under Pond and her programming team’s watch.
TVs don’t get much more “connected” than that.
But Pond isn’t just about connecting consumers with entertainment through Vizio TVs and the WatchFree+ service.
She also excels at making connections within the industry. She’s a regular presence at industry events, including the annual CES in Las Vegas, the Stream TV Show in Denver, and the various conferences and other events staged by home entertainment’s two trade associations, DEG: The Digital Entertainment Group and OTT.X. She’s also on the advisory board of NATPE Global, the big annual conference in Miami for TV programming executives.
In the more than 12 years she’s been at Vizio, Pond also has been great at making connections inside the Vizio organization. When she refers to her colleagues as “my team,” you get the sense that she really means it, and observing her interactions with her staff members at industry events you can tell there’s far more mutual respect and genuine affection than there normally is in business relationships.
Credit her Midwestern upbringing, her devotion to her family, or her incredible luck in having a series of wise, smart and savvy mentors throughout her career. Or maybe it’s her tendency to say “yes” to whatever is asked of her at work, regardless of how difficult it might be.
More than likely, it’s a combination of all these factors that make Katherine Pond the real deal, a true leader in an ever-changing, always-evolving industry.