Doubling down at Dplay and wrangling the beast

With the traditional linear television business in decline and audiences consuming an increasing amount of content via catch-up and on-demand services, Discovery created online video-on-demand service Dplay as a companion to its free-to-air television channels.

“For a media company we have a different mentality than trying to preserve our branding position which is typically a channel brand,” Winradit Kolasastraseni says: “So it did require a lot of very transformative thinking and debating and plain old negotiating with the incumbents.”

He joined Discovery in June 2016 as senior vice president of innovation to spearhead the evolution of Discovery’s product and business portfolio in the digital world.

While Discovery’s head of international JB Perrette who joined the company in 2011 was in the midst of changing the paradigm to expand the Discovery portfolio; he approached Kolasastraseni to relocate to London where he would head up a small OTT service called Dplay.

• Read more: New voyage for Discovery

At the time Dplay was only…