Tightrope Walker

At Discovery Communications, Rebecca Glashow Keeps Old, New Distribution Partners Happy

By Janet Stilson -- Multichannel News, 1/30/2012 9:04:39 AM

Ask Rebecca Glashow’s boss what her title should really be, and he’s likely to say, “chief tightrope walker.” To JB Perrette, Discovery Communications’ chief digital officer, that’s a far more accurate title than the one she has: senior vice president of digital-media distribution.

Perrette notes that Glashow is dancing on a fine wire, simultaneously maintaining Discovery’s strong relationships with traditional distribution partners and ensuring the network group delivers the best possible consumer experience across all platforms, including those of new distributors that are apt to compete with the established base.

“That’s a tightrope that many people are walking in the industry, but she’s leading our charge,” Perrette says.

Glashow says: “A lot of what I do is understanding the business of each partner and where their priorities are and trying to service those priorities — and to be cognizant of when you can’t give anymore because it might be detrimental to our business.”

HEALTHY CURIOSITY

Her healthy intellectual curiosity and genial personality are two key reasons why Glashow is able to handle the tug-ofwar so well, according to Perrette and the other executive to whom she reports, Bill Goodwyn, Discovery Communications’s president of global distribution and CEO of Discovery Education.

“The business has probably changed more over the last three years than it has in the last 40,” Goodwyn says. “So you’ve really got to have somebody who understands not just the technology today, but where it’s going to be in fi ve or 10 years. Rebecca’s one of the few people I’ve ever met that really understands it from all the diff erent levels and can synthesize it in a manner that’s easily understood.”

Goodwyn also notes that Glashow has “a great eye for talent. She hires talent and develops talent very, very well.”

What’s more, “she’s incredibly personable. She’s got all the attributes of someone who is fun and someone you want to spend time with, thinking about the issues that are facing the industry. She gets excited about it,” Perrette says.

Glashow says she chose to join the cable industry because she was looking for an exciting work environment where she could make a mark.

Her father had already shown her how inspiring that could be. Sheldon Glashow is a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist. He spent 35 years teaching at Harvard University. Now 79, he’s still teaching at Boston University — not because he has to, but because he loves it.

“It’s his passion,” Glashow says. “He was a key infl uence on my life, because he didn’t seem to have a job. He seemed to have something he loved to do, and he made a living doing it,” she adds, noting that her father’s professional community is also his social community.

“When I found this industry and where I was able to contribute — and found the right organization in particular, at Discovery — I felt like I’d found that same kind of balance,” Glashow says.

When she first got out of college, Glashow aimed for a career in film. But she became disenchanted with the business while working at a film production company. “Talk about an industry that doesn’t respect people,” she says.

Then she landed a job at In Demand, the pay-perview and video-on-demand service co-owned by Comcast, Cox Communications and a partnership between Time Warner Entertainment and Advance/Newhouse Communications. “It was a phenomenal place to learn the industry,” Glashow says.

She also had a stint at Comcast as a director of programming before heading to Discovery.

“Working at an operator, you just get so much insight into future technologies,” she says.

Now that she’s at Discovery, the MSO experience is “helpful on the sales side — to be a good partner, to understand their priorities and what’s important to their customers.”

NETFLIX COUP

Not that the operator experience puts her on Easy Street. Now that cable is no longer growing at a healthy clip and is competing with other means of content distribution, like Netflix and Google, “everything is a fight,” she says, referring to the difficulty of reaching détente during negotiations.

She says the biggest lesson she’s learned over the years is to “treat your employees and your colleagues with respect. It really matters how you talk to people, how you ask something of someone, and always answering people’s e-mails and being kind.”

She notes that as they move up the food chain, it’s easy for people to get isolated and not really see what’s going on around them. “I’m inspired by the people who continue to respect the people that are working for them,” she says. “There are incredibly tense moments, particularly in the distribution sales side. You’re negotiating painful deals and working more hours than you want to be working. It’s very easy to lose perspective for a minute. I always try to be kind and respectful to the people who are working so hard.”

Since joining Discovery in 2007, one of Glashow’s biggest achievements came when she struck a new deal with Netflix last September. It is much more encompassing than the previous agreement and allows Netflix customers to stream an expanded selection of shows from past seasons on Discovery, TLC, Animal Planet, Investigation Discovery, Science and Military Channel.

In Perrette’s view, all of the competing interests could leave someone in Glashow’s role a tad schizophrenic. She says her home life is her sanity check. She likes to get away with her husband, Dean Schaffer, most recently to Paris. But usually their identical twin daughters, who are just over a year old, keep them very busy.

“I spend my weekends with my family, and when I’m in my weekend time, that’s where my head is,” Glashow says. “I bake a lot of cookies and dinner for my family and try to be 100% wife, mother and friend.”

REBECCA GLASHOW

Hometown: Brookline, Mass.

Age: 36

Current job: SVP, digital media distribution, Discovery Communications

First job: Coordinator, Unapix Films

Favorite TV show: Sons of Anarchy

High praise: “She’s got all the attributes of someone who is fun and someone you want to spend time with, thinking about the issues that are facing the industry.” — JB Perrette, chief digital officer, Discovery Communications