The StreamTV Show 2026 takes place this week June 16-19 in Denver. StreamTV Insider is excited to bring you StreamTV Show Spotlights, giving readers a taste of key topics and takeaways from the show as participating speakers from leading players share insights in a Q&A.
This StreamTV Show Spotlight features Erick Opeka, President and Chief Strategy Officer at Cineverse.
In the Q&A below, Opeka discusses AI-powered revenue strategies and tech that can make an impact not five years from now, but today.
Q&A
- StreamTV Insider Q: You’ll be speaking at the StreamTV Show this Thursday about AI-powered revenue strategies that target fandoms. Cineverse has already leaned into leveraging AI and other technologies for various aspects of your business, such as cineSearch for content discovery, for example. While AI is still evolving, which entertainment business applications or use cases have you seen or believe can benefit most from use of the technology and what it’s actually capable of today or in the near-term future?
Erick Opeka: The honest answer is that the most valuable applications of AI in entertainment right now are the least glamorous ones. Everyone wants to talk about generative video, but the real money today is in the connective tissue of this business: metadata, supply chain, ad decisioning, and discovery.
Think about the core problem of streaming. We have effectively infinite content and finite attention. The companies that win are the ones that can match the right title to the right viewer to the right advertiser, at scale, without an army of people doing it manually. That's a data and inference problem, and it's one AI is genuinely good at solving today. Not in five years, today.
That's where we've focused. cineSearch came out of the recognition that search and discovery was stuck in a keyword-and-genre paradigm built twenty years ago. People don't think in genres. Nobody sits down and says "I'd like a 97-minute crime drama." They say "I want something that feels like a rainy Sunday." Teaching machines to understand content the way audiences actually experience it, emotionally rather than categorically, is the unlock. Everything we've built since, including Hex, flows from that insight.
Near-term, I'd watch three areas: emotionally aware contextual advertising, AI-driven channel programming, and agentic workflows that automate the supply chain end to end. All three are operational for us right now, and all three show up directly in revenue, not just in cost savings.
- Q: Some of the focus around AI so far has been on cost-savings and efficiencies.Can you share an example of how Cineverse specifically is using new technology to help support or shape strategies that drive growth and revenue for your business?
Opeka: Cost savings are table stakes. If AI only makes you cheaper, you've built a more efficient version of a business that's still losing. We built our entire operating model around using technology to make a small company punch like a big one on the revenue side.
The clearest example is our theatrical strategy. When we released Terrifier 3 and again with The Toxic Avenger, we reached awareness levels comparable to major studio releases while spending less than 10% of what a comparable studio campaign costs. We could do that because we control the pipes: our streaming channels, our podcast network, Bloody Disgusting, our ad platform. AI sits underneath all of it, telling us exactly where the fandom lives, what they respond to, and when to reach them. Terrifier 3 did over $54 million domestically off that playbook.
And the flywheel keeps spinning after the theatrical window. Screambox viewership climbed more than 25 percent after Terrifier 3 hit the service. Total minutes streamed across our portfolio grew 33 percent year over year to more than 3.4 billion in our most recent quarter. That's not a cost story. That's technology converting fan attention into box office, subscriptions, and ad revenue across every window we operate.
The second example is our pivot into infrastructure. With the IndiCue and Giant acquisitions, technology platforms will represent more than half of our projected $115 to $120 million in revenue next fiscal year. We're now selling the same AI-powered machinery we built for ourselves to studios, distributors, and platforms. That's the ultimate proof point: the technology became the product.
- Q: As your session title hints, Cineverse has been targeting fandoms around series and genres, from your single IP FAST channels like Ceasar Milan, to horror fans with Screambox, Anime with Retro Crush, Documentaries and Crime and so on. How does AI play a role for Cineverse and help improve results or drive revenue (for yourself and/or partners) when it comes to targeting the right audiences on the right platforms with content aimed at fandoms?
Opeka: Fandoms are the most valuable audiences in media and the most poorly served by traditional ad tech. A horror fan watching Screambox at midnight on a Friday is in a completely different mindset than someone half-watching cable news, but legacy targeting treats them identically: age, gender, ZIP code. That's a massive amount of value left on the table.
Our advantage is that we're not guessing who these audiences are. We operate the channels. We see what dedicated fans of horror, anime, true crime, and dozens of other passions actually watch, how long they watch, what they binge, what they abandon. AI lets us turn that first-party behavioral signal into action at three levels.
First, programming: we can model what a fandom wants next and schedule channels dynamically rather than relying on a programmer's gut. Second, distribution: we know which platforms over-index for which fandoms, so we put RetroCrush where anime fans actually are rather than carpet-bombing every storefront. Third, monetization: through C360 and now IndiCue, we can offer brands contextual alignment with the emotional state of the content itself, not just demographic proxies. A brand can show up inside the moments where a passionate audience is most engaged.
For partners, the pitch is simple: we've already mapped these fandoms. When a studio or platform plugs into our infrastructure, they inherit that intelligence. They don't have to spend a decade building it the way we did.
- Q: In addition to free streaming, Cineverse also recently added low-cost paid SVOD offerings available via Roku Channel premium subscriptions. What signals or other aspects helped inform and gave you confidence in the decision to launch paid on-demand offerings alongside a free streaming presence on linear FAST. Are these distinct strategic efforts, or how/do they work together in Cinverse’s larger vision for streaming?
Opeka: They're absolutely one strategy. We think of FAST and SVOD as a funnel, not as competing business models. Free, ad-supported linear is where fans discover us. It's the top of the funnel, and with roughly 150 million streaming viewers and more than 3 billion FAST minutes in our most recent quarter alone, it's a very wide top. SVOD is where the most passionate slice of that audience deepens the relationship: more content, no ads, on-demand control. Our subscriber base grew 15 percent year over year to more than 1.5 million, and what's notable is that growth accelerates when our FAST presence expands, not despite it.
The signal that gave us confidence was behavioral, not anecdotal. Across our portfolio, we've watched fan audiences build on free linear channels for years before we ever asked anyone to pay. When you see sustained engagement, meaning repeat viewing, long sessions, and fans seeking a channel out by name, you know there's a segment willing to pay $4.99 a month for the full experience. We also saw a meaningful uptick in free trial starts converting to paid across our portfolio, which told us the appetite was there.
Roku's Premium Subscriptions made the economics work because the friction is nearly zero. The viewer who found us for free on The Roku Channel can upgrade without ever leaving the environment, without a new app, without a new login. The lesson for the industry is that free and paid aren't a fork in the road. Done right, free streaming is the most efficient subscriber acquisition engine ever built.
- Q: Going back to tech for minute, you also recently announced a new intelligence layer called Hex to power your Matchpoint Technology platform. This, in part, goes beyond traditional metadata that underpins content discovery and other streaming features to organize the “full spectrum of the human experience” found in content into a structured taxonomy of emotions, feelings, moods and vibes. Why is this such a critical launch for your company and streaming broadly and what are some of the primary benefits you expect the latest Matchpoint tech to drive, not only for Cineverse but the entertainment industry at large?
Opeka: For decades, this industry has described content with metadata built for a video store: genre, cast, plot keywords, runtime. That tells you what a film is about. It tells you nothing about what it feels like, and feeling is the entire reason anyone watches anything.
Hex closes that gap. Using our Human Experience Classification System, we've organized emotions, moods, and vibes into a structured, machine-readable taxonomy, trained against our proprietary Hex Origin dataset spanning more than two million titles. For the first time, a machine can understand that two films from completely different genres deliver the same emotional payload, and it can act on it.
Why is that critical? Because we're entering the agentic AI era, where software agents will increasingly handle discovery, programming, and ad placement on our behalf. Those agents are only as smart as the language they speak about content. Genre tags are a vocabulary of a few hundred words. Hex gives machines a vocabulary for the full human experience. It's the foundational layer everything else gets built on.
For Cineverse, Hex now sits above the entire Matchpoint platform, including supply chain, cineSearch, C360, and IndiCue, letting all of it communicate through a common emotional intelligence layer. And every title processed makes the dataset more valuable, which compounds into a real moat.
For the industry at large, the benefits are concrete: discovery that surfaces the long tail instead of burying it, advertising aligned to emotional context rather than crude demographics, and programming decisions backed by data on how content actually makes audiences feel. The companies that figure this out will own the next decade of streaming. We intend to be one of them.
Want to hear more from Erick? Don’t miss his fireside chat at the StreamTV Show: “AI-Powered Revenue Strategies Targeting Fandoms,” happening Thursday, June 18 at 4:10 pm.