In a panel at Promaxdba in New York City called “Rise of the OTT Upstarts: Lessons from Leaders in Niche Over-The-Top Video Services,” moderator Jonathan Barbato, chief revenue officer at Xposure Media and former head of marketing at MGM, offered some perspective of how rapidly change is coming to online television.

“In the late 1990s, our entire universe was 80 million households and I thought that was huge,” said Barbato. “Then, in 2005, the online world opened up. Today, there are billions of devices worldwide that can be used for viewing video and within the next five years, that number will increase dramatically. This is a huge, expanding market.”

In 2008, Barbato said, we used to say that content is king, but distribution is the queen. “Now, the new rule of the house is discovery. You must have content and you must have distribution, but you also now need discovery as well and you need an active plan for enabling it.”

Three players in the fledgling new niche-oriented OTT market addressed the audience, each with variations on how they are seeking to create and succeed with new OTT channels aimed at narrow markets.

George Blue, a former senior vp at Fox Media who is now president of advertising sales and brand partnerships at TV4 Entertainment, discussed his company’s moves to launch about 20 new OTT networks over the next year.

“The idea behind TV4 is to identify the gaps or areas where people’s passions aren’t being met in today's current programming environments and build channels to reach those passion points,” Blue said. “We talk about discovery, which is a big current issue, and distribution. We will combat this by finding areas where people are being underserved and then making the right relationships in the programming community with producers that live in those areas.”

Channels TV4 is launching include “The All Warrior” network for service members and military veterans; The Clarity Project, a network about childhood diseases; the Undisputed Champion network, a boxing channel; and Motorland, a network about cars.

Blue said TV4 only works with production partners that are genuine, authentic and already working on the subject matter. “When we launch Undisputed Champions, we will have one of the top boxing writers in the country, Steve Kim, on our staff. Between him and other folks behind the camera, we already have people with a following in the boxing world.

“On our All Warrior Network, the only people behind the camera are ex military. In front of the camera, all talent is current or veterans of the Afghanistan or Iraq wars. We are targeting those serving, those who recently served or their families.”

In doing their research, he said, TV4 tied social media to communities of passionate people on each area of interest. They learned, for example, that Latino boxing fans follow the sport closely on Twitter. TV4 joined the Twitter conversation. They also found there’s a huge community of military veterans on Facebook.

“We did a couple of live videos on Facebook over the past couple of weeks,” Blue said. “One was with a General in Iraq. Without any promotion, we got over 70,000 viewers. That’s not setting the world on fire, but coming from nowhere and starting from scratch, we were pretty pleased.”

Gem Benedict, vp of digital sales and business development at Cinedigm, a new studio that not only launches OTT channels but supplies programming to others who want to start online channels, described her company’s new CONTV channel, a network aimed at the fan base that frequents Comic Con conventions.

“When we think of the word ‘niche,’ we think of something small. But niche really is a segment of the market. For us, in the case of CONTV, Comic Con goes year round and has a huge following that is in love with many different genres of content. These niche segments are not small at all.”

In this world of Comic Con culture, Benedict said, there are celebrities that the mainstream population doesn’t know about. “But they have very active and enthusiastic fans on the Comic Con world,” she said. “They have been important in creating an identity for the channel.”

Detavio Samuels, president of Interactive One and One Solutions, is starting a new OTT network designed to “super serve” the African American community. The enterprise is backed by Radio One, Inc, an American media company with holdings in radio, cable television and digital media.

Radio One owns and operates 55 radio stations in 16 U.S. markets and is the largest African American-owned broadcasting company in the country. The company’s station offerings are primarily hip-hop, rap, R&B, talk radio and news.

Radio One owns Reach Media, the largest radio network targeting African American and urban listeners; a majority stake in TV One, a cable television network targeting African American women; and Interactive One, a digital publisher with brands and websites targeting urban users.

“We are interested in OTT for a couple of reasons,” Samuels said. “We think it’s the right culture for us. African Americans are some of the earliest adopters of technology and the biggest consumers of video online. We think it will work on our system because we are already making a lot of content. We want stories that will show how African Americans have influenced mainstream culture. While the major services are moving more toward mass market programming, we see a chance to ‘super serve’ our niche audience.”

Interestingly, all the panelists said technology is no longer a big obstacle to starting an OTT network. Many companies offer services and equipment to launch services quickly and inexpensively. In fact, some were lobbying the panelists at Promaxdba.

The biggest issue today, is apparently how to get audiences to find your programming. When Barbato asked all three panelists how they will get audiences to discover them, each said they will market to communities of passsionate fans on social media, and depending on the content of the channel, other ways.

For example, the Comic Con conventions themselves is the perfect place to market to fans of ConTV. Radio One’s extensive radio and television talent pool will market to the black community. Passionate boxing fans will hear of Undisputed Champions from well-read columns by Steve Kim, the boxing writer.

What’s most important, all agreed, is to make sure the choice of programming is on target for the niche audience. “Your content must be targeted precisely to the core of the audience you are trying to reach,” said Blue. “Otherwise, that would turn the audience off. You can acquire a lot of library stuff at a low cost. But, in our case, we’ve found about 20 percent of our original content makes up about 45 percent of our views. Success comes down to how well you program the original content.”

There was disagreement over how much original content is needed to start up a channel, since each is so different in nature. But Blue offered a ball park estimate. “We consider for one channel the sweet spot to be 200 hours with anywhere between 10 and 20 new programs each week. But that’s just a ball park.”

To monetize that content, the panelists said they look to sharing revenue with channels using their programming, some advertising and using branded media. However, all look forward to the day when they can make it on subscriptions alone. At the moment, the average price they charge is about $5 each month per channel.

But, in hearing this group as they forge ahead with their new channels, each emphasized that they are entering new territory and everything is subject to change.

“Everything we are doing is a challenge,” Blue said. “We toggle back and forth on a lot of issues. But our core mission is to program the audience’s passion with great storytelling on every screen anywhere. That’s a tall order, but we think it is the future.”