The Fierce Video editorial team is proud to present its third annual Emerging Leaders Awards, recognizing the brightest young professionals rising up the ranks of the streaming TV industry. Throughout the month of May we’ll be featuring these profiles with each of our finalists. We will announce the winners during our StreamTV Show with a live awards ceremony in Denver on June 6 at 7:30 p.m. MT. Not yet registered for the StreamTV Show, running June 6-8? Be sure to register now!
Taylor Sibbern/Tubi:
As vice president of business development, Taylor Sibbern has signed and launched major U.S. studio deals and is instrumental in building the largest library in free streaming. Sibbern is a founding team member of Tubi and is the fourth longest-tenured employee at the company, alongside its CEO and chief product officer. She joined Tubi immediately following college graduation when it was an extremely early-stage startup named adRise - the first RTB engine on connected TV devices - with less than 10 employees. She led the content and video operations team for seven years, expanding the team to over 40 people.
Central to building Tubi from the ground up, Sibbern launched the first major U.S. studio AVOD revenue share deals, disrupting the industry and setting what would become a new industry-standard in streaming. She worked closely on Tubi's first studio partnership with Paramount Pictures in March 2015, preceding Tubi's acquisition by Fox Corporation and AVOD's surge in viewership. She also launched subsequent studio partnerships with Lionsgate, MGM and Miramax and grew each studio partnership by approximately 700% - 1,000%. She has also signed and managed Tubi's device distribution deals and strategic distribution partnerships, further validating the importance of AVOD. And she steered the launch of Tubi in Mexico - its first fully-localized Spanish-language offering in Mexico in partnership with TV Azteca, a major Mexican media conglomerate.
What her colleagues are saying:
"Taylor is an enigma in the evolution of Tubi. She started at Tubi in her early 20s and became a great leader and innovator of one of the largest teams in the Tubi organization. She is loved and respected by all and the sky is the limit for Taylor moving forward." -Tyler Fitch, SVP of advanced TV and partnerships at Tubi
"The number one thing that has always stood out about Taylor is that when faced with a business challenge, she digs in to thoroughly understand the requirements and costs, and most importantly she GETS IT on all levels: business, financial, engineering, data. More than once I have seen her solve a problem with innovation, ingenuity and plain hard work that at first glance seemed undoable. I want her on my team every time." - John Trenkle, principal machine learning engineer at Tubi
Streaming Industry Q&A:
What streaming services do you subscribe to?
My household subscribes to Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime. Outside of that, my SVOD loyalty is non-existent: I rotate subscriptions based on what series I want to watch. I subscribed to Apple TV briefly to watch The Undoing and again to watch Severance, and then I subscribe to HBO Max exclusively when Euphoria is on.
Describe your biggest career highlight so far.
Launching Tubi's first AVOD studio partnerships in 2015 when AVOD was largely unheard of. Not only did it validate the company's vision, it also made every subsequent content-related conversation significantly easier. That allowed for focus to shift to creating the best possible experience for every user with the vast array of content at hand, all while maximizing revenue for every content partner. Second is building a technical team of people who write frontend and backend code, despite having no engineering experience prior to joining Tubi.
What has been your biggest career learning experience?
The reality of the 80/20 rule: 80% of the value can generally be extracted from 20% of the effort, and when you're building a disruptive company on a bootstrapped budget, you need to keep the results as high as possible while keeping the efforts as limited as possible so each individual can cover more ground. Also, hiring for potential as opposed to just past can create some of the best team dynamics.
What's next for you in terms of new challenges in streaming TV?
Further growing the streaming media landscape, both in terms of product quality and team dynamics. My biggest passion is building collaborative teams and creating opportunities for people at every stage. No matter what stage in my career, that will continue to be what I strive for. Media allows me to focus on my four favorite areas: building processes, people, products and content.