Thomas K. Arnold

March 3, 2025

Vizio’s campus is located in a business park in Irvine, a master planned community in Southern California’s Orange County that is also home to such technology giants as Amazon Web Services, Blizzard Entertainment and Rivian.

The consumer electronics giant, a pioneer in smart-TV development and currently poised to become the nation’s No. 1 TV brand, occupies two gleaming white buildings on a broad, tree-lined street simply called “Tesla.” A cheerful receptionist greets a visitor from behind a desk with a jar of candy and a sign that offers employees — and, presumably, guests — free agave plants, although she warns, “I think they’re all gone now.”
Moments later, Katherine Pond bounds into the lobby, tall and blond, with welcoming blue eyes and the aura of someone who genuinely enjoys her job, her industry, her life.

I polish off my third mini-pack of Whoppers and follow her up the stairs and past a cluster of cubicles into a conference room.

Ready, set, go.

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Katherine Pond, Vizio’s Group VP of Platform Content & Partnerships, is the 2025 recipient of Media Play News’ seventh Fast Forward Award, presented each year to people, technologies, organizations, products or services that move the home entertainment industry forward.

Pond was selected for her role as a key driver in the connected-TV (CTV) realm. She heads distribution, content acquisition, programming, platform partnerships and marketing at Vizio, and has played a key role in getting Vizio to leverage opted-in platform data to gain insight into what consumers want to watch and make the right content choices for Vizio’s WatchFree+ FAST service.

“I genuinely believe I have the best job in the world,” she says. “I say that all the time. And what I like the most about my job is the diversity and complexity of the things that I work on. I’m fortunate to work across a variety of verticals spanning business development, content acquisition, consumer marketing, programming, and technical account management. It keeps my mind sharp. I am constantly learning something new. I’m constantly trying to solve new problems.”

Vizio, founded in 2002 and acquired by Walmart last year, is a pioneer in the development and growth of smart TVs and a leader in bringing content to its customers through its SmartCast operating system, a proprietary smart-TV platform that allows users to access various streaming apps, FAST channels, and other features on their televisions, including built-in Chromecast and Apple AirPlay functionality.

“The SmartCast operating system is truly user friendly,” she says. “You turn your TV on, you know what to do, you know how to use it, you can find what you’re looking for. We have hundreds of apps for users to choose from. And Vizio hand-curates the best apps that are available in the market, and those are available right on your device when you turn it on. We have all the apps that matter, plus all of your favorites, plus new things for you to find and discover.”

Curation, she maintains, is important: “You can’t overwhelm.”

Pond is also proud of Vizio’s work on 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. The live channels are available not just on Vizio TVs, but also on the Vizio app for iOS and Android devices.

“WatchFree+ has been a huge part of our strategy and it’s definitely part of what makes Vizio unique and different,” she says. “WatchFree+ now has over 300 live channels, plus 50 local channels. This is one of the projects we worked on last year that I really, really loved because we know that local matters. It’s part of what makes people tune in to live. And so we executed a project to ensure that whatever local DMA you’re in, that’s the local channel that shows up in your WatchFree+ app.

“We also did an OTA integration. So if you’re someone that still has an antenna, that OTA information is pulled directly into your WatchFree+ EPG. And you’re looking at those OTA channels side by side with your streaming channels — which is a great, seamless experience.”

On top of that, Pond says, “we have exclusive channels, we have custom channels, and then we also have our owned-and-operated channels. So our programming team is responsible for managing seven different owned-and-operated channels. We have a food and travel channel, a romance channel, a movie channel, a Western channel. And what’s really cool about those channels is they perform so well with our customers because we know our customers best and we can program the content that we know that they love.”

Pond says Vizio is about to launch an eighth proprietary FAST channel. “I can’t tell you what it is yet because we just greenlit the channel at the end of last year,” she says. “The team came and presented to me, telling me, ‘Here is an unmet need from our audience. There isn’t a channel like this among all our 300-plus channels. In fact, there isn’t something like this that exists today. Here is the audience we’re going to serve, here’s what viewership we can generate and here’s the content offering that we could put into it.’ And after the presentation and looking at all of the different data points, I thought to myself, ‘This is a no-brainer.’”

Just last month, in January, Vizio launched its first app bundle, giving subscribers access to both AMC+ and Starz for $13.99 a month, seven dollars less than what subscriptions to the two services would cost separately.

“Bundles are not new to the market — I’m not going to pretend that they are,” Pond says. “But what we have done is unique because you see a content bundle, who’s managing the bundle? The content partners. On the Vizio platform, Vizio is managing the bundle. We take care of the customer, so they have a single subscription and are using a single Vizio account to log in and access their content. It makes it so seamless and so easy.”
Vizio’s SmartCast platform also has all sorts of other useful and innovative technologies built into it.

“I don’t know if you and I have ever talked about this one: Content Connections,” she says. “So imagine if you’re AMC and you have a FAST channel in WatchFree+’s ecosystem. A viewer is watching a show, and a little notification comes up at the bottom of your screen that asks, ‘Do you want to watch more of this show?’ And if you click on it, it deep-links you from the FAST channel out into the AMC standalone app so the viewer can watch more of that same content. It’s a really great way to help keep users engaged for longer.”

Content Connections, Pond says, “are available to all of our content partners on the platform — and the partners that have used it have seen tremendous results. We’ve done content sampling with Peacock with it. We’ve done it with Paramount+ most recently. And it’s those types of things that set Vizio apart. They’re unique, they’re different. We’re constantly looking for new ways to innovate. It’s always, always, a case of, what can we do? How can we make it better?”

What’s next for Katherine Pond, and for Vizio?

“You’re always going to see Vizio pushing to be at the forefront where there’s new opportunity,” she says. “We’re always exploring new technologies. We’re always looking at new opportunities, new content partnerships, new ways of bringing content to the market. And the other thing is you’re going to see more of the same, which is to say that same philosophy and principle that we’ve been following for years: delivering an affordable entertainment experience for our customers that is of the highest quality.”

And Pond says that Vizio is able to do that together with their content partners because “You can do better business if you have a good relationship. It’s all about relationships.”

Pond says one of her key tenets is to never walk away from a deal.

“If I walk away from a deal, we both lose,” she says. “If you don’t like the deal and I don’t like the deal, then it’s not going to be a good partnership. We can’t both lose in the deal. That’s not a good deal. The foundation of a good deal comes by forming a relationship where you can have an open conversation and communicate about what makes it a good deal for both sides. I’ve been fortunate to work for Mike O’Donnell, who runs our platform business, for five years now. He’s taught me so much about leadership, and one of the things I love about him is that he continually encourages me to go out and do those things for the company. He empowers me to do what needs to be done for the business.”

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Katherine Pond was born in Kansas City, Kan., the youngest (by four years) of two daughters born to Dennis and Lisa Reed.

“My dad was a civil structural engineer who built and designed power plants, and my mom was a stay-at-home mom,” Pond says. “This is actually a really sweet story. They grew up in this little tiny town in Colorado called Greeley, met when my mom was 14 and got married the day after my mom turned 19. My dad was the first in his family to go to college. He spent some of his growing up years in a trailer and never would have been able to go to college had it not been for a heart defect that made him eligible for a scholarship.”

The family moved around a lot, following her father’s jobs. “Everyone always asks if I’m a military kid because I lived in Australia for 11 months and then in Bangkok, Thailand, for two and a half years,” she says.
Katherine and her family moved back to Kansas City in time for her to attend first grade and stayed there until she left town at the age of 18 to attend Concordia University in Irvine, Calif.

“My older sister, Jennifer, is a teacher with a master’s degree,” Pond says. “I’ve always looked up to her. Concordia is a network of private liberal arts Christian universities, and they have locations all over the United States. My sister went to Concordia University in Mequon, Wis., but before that she toured Concordia University in Irvine. When I decided to go to school, I asked her, ‘How did you decide on Wisconsin?’ I mean, Wisconsin, snow, Irvine, beach. She said, ‘I really felt like the Lord was calling me to Wisconsin. And I looked her dead in the eye and said, ‘The Lord is not calling me to snow. He is calling me to the beach.’”

Katherine applied for admission and was accepted on a full academic scholarship. She was still 18 when she met and fell in love with a fellow student named Chris Pond; they were engaged a year later and married when she was 21.

Katherine foresaw children in her future, but it was not to be — at least, not for a while. “I actually don’t talk about this much, but I was told we could never have children,” she says. “And so we had been married 13 years when we got pregnant for the first time. It was a complete surprise, a complete blessing, and something that completely changed our lives.”

Without children, Katherine and her husband focused on their careers. After graduating from Concordia University in 2005 with a bachelor’s degree in liberal studies, she took a job with a computer memory company called Smart Modular Technologies.

“And that was where I started learning technology, being able to speak the lingo, how to hang in those conversations,” Pond says. “I worked in the operations team. I worked in program management, and I worked in asset management — and then I got laid off.”

Unemployment didn’t last long.

“There was this guy who I didn’t even work for, and I remember him being so upset that I was part of this reduction, in which they laid off 10% of my office,” Pond says. “And he called me the day I was laid off and asked, ‘Do you want me to make some calls? I have some friends who are looking for good people.’

“Of course, that didn’t stop me from crying every single night, feeling really overwhelmed. But I very quickly landed at a teeny-tiny startup company — and when I say teeny-tiny, there were four of us.”

The startup was a manufacturer of promotional USB drives.

“And what they saw in my skill set was program management,” Pond says.

“When I got there, this was the first time I felt like I was able to see that if I can take on a lot of work and do a lot of different things and just say ‘yes,’ that they’ll give you more work and you get more opportunities and more exposure.”

Saying “yes,” Pond says, is an important life lesson.

“I think it’s core to who I am as a person, even though it’s not what the world tells you to do,” she says. “The world tells you to say ‘no.’ The world says, ‘You’re too busy. Say no to that.’

“So I said ‘yes’ a lot. And I was at this small company and things got hard, things got tough. At one point, I worked in a closet — a six-by-six inventory closet with no windows.”

As fate would have it, the company, small as it might have been, snagged a huge contract for 10,000 custom USB drives.

“Now, keep in mind we have four people, and we don’t have a manufacturing line,” Pond recalls with a laugh. “So here I am, seeing up folding tables in an alley and running a line of workers that I hired to make these promotional USB drives. It was a complicated process that involved shaving the drives into the shape we wanted and then sticking the USB component into the shaped drives and adding color to the outside. I mean, this was a full manufacturing line!”

Still, Pond says, she has fond memories of the nine months she spent at Direct Technologies.

“It was one of the times in my career where I learned the most because at some point I was also responsible for negotiating with vendors as well as doing some invoicing and some bookkeeping,” she says. “And I was also the shipping department.”

In July 2009, Pond landed at Acer, the big computer maker.

“And that’s where I really broke into what I’m doing now,” she says. “My boss at the time was definitely one of those people who took a chance on me. I didn’t have the experience he was looking for, but, he later told me, he felt I had transferable skills because of my experience negotiating with vendors.”

At Acer, Pond was part of the Global Strategic Alliances team. And during her more-than-three-year run there, she says, she helped manage relationships between Acer and such technology heavyweights as Microsoft, Google, Skye, Spotify and Netflix.

“My boss and the company’s contracts admin deserve a lot of credit because they taught me so much,” Pond says. “They spent time in the conference rooms, teaching me now to do a job and training me and investing in me.”
But even while she was at Acer, Pond had been applying for various positions at Vizio. Pond says, “I had always wanted to work here, and was determined to get in.”

And in December 2012, Pond officially joined Vizio as senior manager of business development, responsible for negotiating pricing, licensing terms and conditions for new solutions to be included in Vizio products. She also provided support to the product management teams through the management of partnerships and regular reviews of product roadmaps and corporate strategies.

At the time of her hire, Pond recalls, there were all of two people in business development — and the concept of a connected, or smart, TV was still in its infancy.

“Vizio had just started shipping the first generation of the Yahoo Connected TV platform in smart TVs,” Pond says. “We were just leveraging Yahoo’s platform, but we wanted to start building our own platform, and doing deals for content directly.”

Pond says that on her 10th anniversary at Vizio, “I went back and looked at my thank you email for my interview, and my thank you email said, ‘I’m so excited to hear that Vizio believes content is the future of TVs, because I believe it too. And I want to be a part of what you are building.’”

Under the direction of Vizio co-founder and CEO William Wang, who Pond describes as a “true visionary,” the company very quickly pivoted to a second version of the Yahoo platform that supported HTML5 applications.
“And that was really when the door opened for us,” Pond says. “William has always believed that the smart TV was going to become the center of the home. And it has, largely because everything is connected to it. It’s the one connected device in your home that doesn’t move. And so he was always very, very bullish on Vizio being involved in the content space — and not just for the sake of doing deals, but because he has always believed in creating great entertainment and making it affordable and accessible to everyone.

“Once we started adding HTML5 applications to the platform, versus developers creating custom, proprietary Yahoo apps for the platform, that’s when the business really started accelerating. And then from there, in 2016, we launched our SmartCast operating system. And our SmartCast operating system is built, designed, and created in these walls. And that’s when we had just this amazing opportunity to go out and build what we believe is the ideal customer experience.”

Pond has had her hand in pretty much every aspect of Vizio’s business. “I ran our programmatic advertising business when we first started it,” she says. “I used to license our Inscape data when we first started doing that line of business, I helped launched WatchFree+, I helped launch our AVOD business. And I don’t say that as a matter of pride. It’s an explanation for why I’m here. If someone gives you the opportunity to solve new problems, you say yes and you go do it.”

In 2018, Vizio launched the original WatchFree, which the company in a press release described as “an all-new streaming service designed with cord-cutters in mind.” Content came from Pluto TV.

That was also the year in which Katherine, who had given up on having children, got pregnant. She and Chris celebrated the birth of their first son, Nathaniel, in December 2018. His arrival was followed in April 2021 by the birth of a second son, Paxton.

Becoming a mom, Pond says, “was probably one of the biggest transformations I went through in my career in understanding how to manage a team. For the first time, I cared so deeply about someone that wasn’t myself and wasn’t my husband. And I realized if I could apply that to my child, if I could care that deeply, I could carry some of that over to my team.

“It changed my entire perspective of managing people. Now, I want to see someone else succeed just as much as I want to succeed — and I truly believe that has made me a much better manager. When I told my boss at the time, Bill Baxter, that I was pregnant, he said, ‘You are going to be the best manager you’ve ever been.’ I looked at him and I felt as though he was telling me, before, you couldn’t have been a good manager because you didn’t have children — which isn’t what he was saying. But I didn’t understand that until I had kids. What he was really saying is, it’s going to change the way that you manage people. And he was right. He was absolutely right.”

One of the key lessons having a child taught Pond was the importance of accepting responsibility.

“I was in a meeting last week, and a mistake was made within my organization,” Pond says. “And I looked straight into the camera at the team, and I said, ‘I will take full responsibility for it, and I will take care of it.’ It was under my watch, so I’m responsible.

“I’m the first to acknowledge I’m not perfect. I’m not perfect — not as a wife, not as a mother, not as a leader. But I do know every day I’m striving to be excellent and to get better at anything it is that I’m doing.”

Pond says she learned a lot from her father, who passed away about 10 years ago. “I was so excited the day I had my first direct report that I called him up and told him,” she says. “And I remember him telling me, praise in public, correct in private. And to this day, that’s still what I try to do.”

Q&A

MPN: What drives you to succeed?
Pond: I’m driven by a desire for excellence — whether that’s personally or professional. I’m passionate about trying new things and solving new problems, and I find that I’m most invigorated when I’m tasked with doing something that hasn’t been done before. I’m fortunate to have what I believe to be one of the best teams in the business, and I greatly desire each of them to be fulfilled in their careers as well, and this desire is a driving force for me as well.

MPN: What is your leadership philosophy?
Pond: The guiding principles for me are related to open and honest communication, integrity, innovation, kindness and ownership. My responsibility is to create an environment where team members can do work that they’re passionate about that they are also best at, where they have a sense of ownership and responsibility for what they create, and where they know that they are seen and valued as individuals.

MPN: If you weren’t at Vizio, what else would you be doing?
Pond: If I wasn’t at Vizio, I like to think that I’d still be here in this industry, doing something similar.

MPN: Do you have any hobbies?
Pond: I love to take HIIT and spin classes at local gyms, have karaoke sing-alongs and dance parties with my family, participate in the Missions Team at my church, and I spend any time left over reading and writing.

MPN: Any favorite books?
Pond: In no particular order: Radical Candor by Kim Scott, Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers, and anything by Vince Flynn from the “Mitch Rapp” series.

MPN: Favorite music?
Pond: Rap and indie. I also love a good remix to get the energy flowing or classical piano when I’m trying to focus.

MPN: Favorite movies?
Pond: Gladiator (2000), The Fast and the Furious (2001) and Top Gun: Maverick (2022). Though, if you looked at our recent family movie nights, Transformers One (2024) is winning by a landslide.

MPN: If you could do one thing over again …
Pond: I would marry my husband, Chris, all over again. After 20 years together (this June), he’s still my rock, my biggest supporter, and the best decision I have ever made.