Jonathan Laor and the future that kept the sofa

Jonathan Laor had a prediction about the future of television. The sofa would survive. In a 2013 interview, the Applicaster co-founder argued that the couch would remain at the centre of the living room, with a television nearby. Coming from someone selling mobile technology to broadcasters, this was an unusually considerate forecast. The furniture could relax.

Everything around it, however, was becoming negotiable. Which screen held your attention. Whether a programme ended when its broadcast did. Whether a broadcaster could keep a relationship with its audience once that audience started tapping, voting and watching somewhere else. Laor’s business grew around those questions. His career offers a view of the streaming industry from an interesting position: beside the people trying to make television work after the television schedule lost its authority.

The sofa stays. The audience moves.

Laor co-founded Applicaster with Neer Friedman in 2009. Before that, he worked in executive consulting, including strategic projects and mobile properties for governments and corporations. Consulting meant dealing with organisations that already existed, with habits and constraints of their own. His later comments about broadcasters suggest an appreciation of that predicament. A technology company could get excited about the future; its customers still had a business to run on Monday.

By January 2013, he was talking about Latin America as a market leading the adoption of participatory mobile television. Applicaster had employees in countries including Uruguay, Colombia, Mexico and Brazil, as well as Spain. He described a practical complication: customs and import policies could affect how readily audiences acquired the devices on which those new experiences depended. The future arrived through quite ordinary bottlenecks.

He also understood that broadcasters were hardly campaigning for their own decline. They wanted to retain their brands, audiences and revenues while people acquired new viewing habits. His proposition accommodated that desire. Television could remain familiar while becoming more participatory. A viewer could sit on the same sofa and do considerably more than sit.

A show with a life after airtime

The early Applicaster worked in the territory known as the second screen. Its tools let broadcasters add interaction around their programmes, bringing mobile devices into the experience. By February 2015, the company had launched more than 100 apps for over 40 customers worldwide. Its customer list included Univision, Endemol, Mediaset, Televisa and Fox International.

That breadth matters to Laor’s story. He was building around an existing appetite for particular shows, rather than asking viewers to develop an appetite for a technology platform. Sports, entertainment and scripted programmes each offered different reasons to reach for a phone. The commercial opportunity came from helping a broadcaster give that gesture somewhere useful to go.

In 2015, Applicaster raised $10.5 million in a round led by Pitango, with participation from 83North. The announced purpose included expansion in Europe and North America. The business had moved beyond a local experiment: its tools were being used across television markets with different languages, formats and commercial arrangements. Laor’s bet on participation was acquiring an international operating structure.

There is an important distinction between a television app that people enjoy and a system a broadcaster can keep running. Each additional programme, device or market adds work. A successful launch creates its own next problem: somebody must maintain it. Over time, that less glamorous problem became central to the company Laor was building.

Six channels, one recurring problem

Applicaster’s own account of its origins describes a company that began making custom apps for media brands. Zapp, its software platform, emerged from the difficulties of that work. The team wanted to reuse code, scale development across apps and platforms, and simplify the management of numerous services. Building the next app should benefit from having built the last one.

A German television group provided a concrete demonstration. In August 2016, ProSiebenSat.1 launched six channel apps using Zapp, covering ProSieben, SAT.1, kabel eins, SAT.1 Gold, sixx and ProSieben MAXX. They combined live streams, catch-up viewing and engagement features. The broadcaster could integrate its own video player and replicate the approach for further channels.

Remote management was part of the proposition: some changes could happen without sending viewers back to an app store for an update. The company also allowed broadcasters to retain their preferred analytics, advertising or content systems. For Laor, the business was increasingly about giving established media organisations room to make their own decisions without commissioning every piece of machinery afresh.

In March 2019, Applicaster announced a $20 million growth round led by Viola Growth, alongside investors including 83North, Pitango, Saban Ventures and Planven. At the time, Laor put its customer count at 100, including Fox, DirecTV and Viacom. The company had 100 employees, with 40 in Israel and others in New York, London, Miami and San Jose.

Those are company figures, rather than a personal scorecard. Still, they show the scale of the organisation the co-founder had helped assemble. An idea about how viewers would use screens now required people working across several cities to help media businesses serve them.

The ordinary work of staying useful

In June 2020, Applicaster introduced Quick Brick within Zapp. The framework addressed a familiar development burden: producing visual interfaces across multiple platforms. It supported work spanning Android, iOS, Apple TV, Android TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Samsung and LG televisions. Developers could create reusable components; non-developers could make interface changes after launch.

Laor, then CEO, presented the goal as giving media companies greater control over their apps, closer to the control they already expected over websites. This is a revealing ambition for a technology founder. The desired customer experience involved fewer requests for technical intervention. The tool would earn its place partly by making routine work less dependent on its makers.

As streaming expanded, the question of what to change became as consequential as the ability to change it. In 2021, Applicaster surveyed 95 digital media executives and decision-makers. Fifty-four percent planned to change their business models that year, while another 22 percent were considering it. The study counted 19 combinations of revenue models. An app could carry a subscription, advertising or some mixture; its business assumptions were still moving.

By then, company announcements named Ido Hadari as CEO. Laor appeared as co-founder and president on the 2023 conference circuit, discussing monetisation in a market where launching a service was only the beginning. The titles changed, while his public interests remained close to the meeting point of product decisions and media economics.

Even his household had a bundle

Laor’s account of his own viewing arrangements makes the industry rather easier to picture. In a 2023 discussion with Evan Shapiro, he described children who wanted different streaming services because different programmes lived on each. His household accessed services through a web of commercial bundles and benefits. Even someone who helped companies build streaming apps had to navigate the family’s subscriptions.

“My kids all want all these services,” he said. It is an admirably economical description of a complicated market. He saw customers exploring subscriptions that could span several apps, with packages beginning to resemble familiar cable arrangements. Streaming had scattered the channels; commercial ingenuity was finding ways to gather them again.

His attention also settled on the small indignities of using a television app. Typing a username and password on a smart TV could produce a different outcome from scanning a QR code or using an email link. Those details helped determine whether somebody actually got inside. An ambitious catalogue still had to get past the login screen.

“My kids all want all these services.”

Jonathan Laor, in conversation with Evan Shapiro, 2023

Leave some room for surprise

Laor’s thinking about personalization includes an entertaining reservation. In 2020, he used cooking programmes and The Crown to describe recommendations that become overenthusiastic after a little viewing. Watch a few things in one category and suddenly that category seems to occupy the whole service. He argued for a balance between recommendations and editorial surprise.

That observation gives his work a human scale. Viewers want convenience, but their last choice need not become a permanent description of their tastes. He also urged smaller broadcasters to build their data capabilities in stages. Collect useful information first; add sophistication as the business grows. His advice treated limited resources as a design condition, with a sequence of manageable decisions.

In a later conversation with Shapiro for Applicaster’s How To Cure Your Pain in the Apps series, he returned to the relationship between the interface and the business behind it. Pricing, advertising, analytics and customer relationships all found expression in the app. He discussed generative AI and deeper personalization, while arguing that customers should direct their budgets toward capabilities that gave them a competitive advantage.

That is the continuing thread in Laor’s public work: an interest in what media organisations can do once the underlying tools become easier to manage. The couch from his early forecast remains an apt place to end. Someone settles down, opens an app and hopes to find something worth watching. Behind that ordinary gesture sits the work he has spent years trying to make less cumbersome.