We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Tony Mugavero a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Tony, thanks for joining us today. Risk taking is something we’re really interested in and we’d love to hear the story of a risk you’ve taken.

Starting a startup means inherently taking a risk, but doing it in a new market can be particularly challenging. When creating a new market, as opposed to re-segmenting an existing market, the total number of variables and unknowns goes up significantly. It takes a special kind of curious determination to even start let alone keep going. When we started Rad TV (rebranded from Littlstar), we were the first global VR Video streaming platform. This was a bet we made to be ahead of the curve and become a leader in Virtual Reality content distribution. The run up was fast and we found ourselves global leaders in the VR space, then in 2018 VR investment and content creation fell off a cliff. Studios stopped making content, hardware manufacturers stopped building devices, and investors stopped investing in the space. Littlstar needed to make some changes or risk losing the business.

We shifted our focus to leveraging smart contracts and blockchain to handle payments, ownership, and distribution of content. We again found ourselves ahead of the curve with the right instincts (crypto is huge now), however, we had investors and legal counsel that we’re strongly against us working in the crypto space, the regulatory environment wasn’t friendly, and crypto has ups and downs that scare investors and customers right at the time they should be leaning in. We ultimately had to be patient on the blockchain front as a result, but we never stopped building and supporting web3 in the platform.

We rebranded from Littlstar to Rad TV, we introduced a subscription, and we did a bunch of agency work to keep the company pushing forward. This allowed us to grow and build into new technologies and become experts, all while adding to our tech forward streaming infrastructure. During this time, we saw VR start to take off again, we saw web3 explode and the Bitcoin ETF get approved, we saw NFTs bring new awareness and creators to the space, and the dust from the streaming wars was settling. All of our work was coalescing into the future of streaming.

It has taken longer than expected and there’s still more to do, but we are in a better spot than we’ve ever been as a company. Patience with perseverance has once again made us a leader in the media world!

Tony, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

A bit about myself: I’ve always been fascinated with technology and media. I went to Southern Methodist University (SMU) for Computer Engineering while simultaneously making electronic music and building a record label. I was making dance music on a computer in 1998, building live streaming video platforms in 2005, in crypto in 2012, VR in 2013, smart contracts in 2017, and playing with AI video in 2022. All of my experience has been at the intersection of media and technology.

As a result, the company we’ve built is driven by tech-forward media. If you look at Rad TV today, as a creator you can distribute any kind of content ranging from short form and AI generated to VR or movies, and you can use regular fiat or crypto to get paid. As a consumer, you can find content you can’t get anywhere else, and you can pay in ways you can’t anywhere else. Our apps are on smart TVs like Android TV and Apple TV, mobile devices like iOS and Android, and PlayStation, PSVR, and Meta Quest.

We built a platform for a new type of creator, a new type of consumer, and enable things never before possible. Our mission is to give new storytellers a modern platform for creation, get them paid fairly, transparently, and instantly, and give them access to the billions of potential fans globally at the same time.

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

We had a big hardware partner looking for us to build our application for their upcoming device. We were under the impression that we’d do this as a co-marketing partnership with no money changing hands. We were all out at CES in Vegas discussing the opportunity, and someone from the team misunderstood what I was saying and assumed that we were also looking for money. They said they would check internally and ultimately came back with a six figure payment to us for building on their hardware! It was an exciting partnership to begin with, but the extra cash was very helpful in accelerating development for the device.

How do you keep in touch with clients and foster brand loyalty?

We have a long list of companies we’ve worked with in the Fortune 500, as well as individual creators and studios. That requires quite a bit of follow up to stay on top of the latest projects and changing of the guard. Many of these companies have business units get reorganized, shut down, merged, and otherwise, and people change positions regularly. This means we need to continue to build and execute on initiatives with partners. We hold events occasionally and sometimes send thank you gifts where possible. It’s harder to stay in the mix now that many people have gone remote as well. We used to be able to have coffee down the street in NYC, and now it’s mostly zoom calls. We stay present on social media as well, which helps us stay connected and relevant along with press that we co-release with partners regularly.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://radtv.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/radnftv/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/radnftv
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/radtv/
• Twitter: https://x.com/RadNFTV