Betsy Brightman

Betsy Brightman  has been in the cable affiliate sales game for years, and she has learned to fight for carriage in an environment filled with massive programming conglomerates that dwarf this indie net’s resources. Yet she continues to make inroads using her grit, determination and creativity to ensure win wins, a skill that has earned her huge respect industrywide since her days at Gemstar-TV Guide before joining RLTV in 2006. Ask anyone. Nobody has a bad word to say about Brightman. She’s known as a team player, an astute manager and a good actor in any negotiation. And while other indie nets sue for carriage or play out their battles in the media, Brightman’s quiet but effective campaigns have stressed a “true partnership,” as she calls it, rather than an adversarial battle. “We’re not part of a major network subset of channels that the distributor must find bandwidth for,” she says. “Rather, we have to sell RLTV as an individual programming option on the merits of what we can deliver to the distributor’s customer base.”

One manifestation of Brightman’s cooperative nature is RLTV’s resistance to selling direct to over-the-top Internet firms like Netflix, Amazon and others. “We  want to deepen and broaden our commitment to and partnership with our affiliates by providing as much support and content for On Demand and TVE as we can rather than seeking to play in that space,” she says, noting however that when it comes to multiplatform in general, there’s “a huge viewership opportunity with our audience, especially given the high percentage of adopters in the Boomer and Senior categories, particularly with tablets.”