Rooster Teeth Takes Bite Out Of Pandemic With 10th-Year, 10-Day RTX Virtual Gathering

A year ago this week, long-time Hollywood entertainment executive Jordan Levin took on his latest challenge, becoming head of Rooster Teeth, the pioneering digital video site whose founders were still helping run the company even as new owner AT&T moved to exert more control.

And also this week, not long after depositing his daughter at college for her freshman year, Levin is preparing to move to Austin, Texas, where he went to college and where Rooster Teeth has been based for all of its 17 years. Finally, this same week, Rooster Teeth is making a string of announcements as part of a 10-day virtual version of RTX, its annual live gathering of the tribes, remade for the pandemic era. It’s been a full September.

 “We’ll see what happens, but RTX is always a little bit about chaos and a little bit about spontaneity and surprise, so we’ve just really been trying to encourage that,” Levin said. “People are bombing other people’s panels and we’re just trying to have fun.”

Levin is practically the definition of a Hollywood entertainment executive, starting at Disney
DIS
, then becoming CEO of the WB Network at just 35, followed by stops as CEO at production studio and talent management company Generate (which became part of Defy Media), head of Microsoft Xbox’s aborted dalliance with entertainment, chief content officer at the NFL, and then CEO of AwesomenessTV before it was sold to ViacomCBS.

This time last year, in the wake of AT&T’s full acquisition of parent company Otter Media, Levin joined as Rooster Teeth general manager while co-founder Matt Hullum moved into a new role as chief content officer. Two other co-founders, Burnie Burns and Geoff Ramsey, also moved into creative roles in the company.

Rooster Teeth is one of the O.G. digital-video companies, predating even YouTube in distributing treasured animated shows and other video programming on the web and beyond.

Ask Levin what other companies out there of similar vintage still exist, and it takes a while before he comes up a bare handful, including recently announced programming partner CollegeHumor.com, which is creating shows on Rooster Teeth’s video-podcast network.

That long incumbency, taking care of a devoted fan base, has helped build an unusual entertainment company.

“Rooster Teeth has two things about it that are really, really unique that I haven’t experienced before,” Levin said. “The closest on the first one was my two years with the NFL and that is this incredibly powerful community of fans. And the reason I equate it to the NFL is the fans feel like they own the team or the company. They know the real fundamental owner and they know there’s a GM but at the end of the day, they feel like it’s theirs. It’s a two-sided sword.”

The other unusual factor, Levin said, is how many people who work for the company came from that ardent fan base, helped no doubt by Rooster Teeth’s big-fish, small-pond position as an Austin media company.

“This symbiotic relationship between company and community is really, really tightly wound,” Levin said. “And it’s unlike anything else I’ve experienced.”

Normally, RTX is the place where fans, whether they’re employees or everyone else, comes together to celebrate Rooster Teeth shows and stars, and their own sense of investment and ownership. When the lockdown made impossible a physical gathering, in the 10th year of RTX, it spawned a lot of strong feelings.

“RTX for us, this year became a real emotional issue,” Levin said. “Because it wasn’t just a financial issue of, ‘OK, we have the conference room held and we have hotel rooms held and what do we do?’ It became this real emotional way within the company about what now more than ever this community wants and needs this distraction and needs this camaraderie and we’re not able to provide it and they’re disappointed.”

The company took what traditionally was essentially a long weekend, and stretched the virtualized RTX across 10 days of events, panels, flash sales, reminiscing, show reveals, screenings and more, Levin said.

“This event tries to entertain, tries to bring people together, tries to facilitate community,” Levin said. “So we’re doing things like live polling, a lot of these panels are live. I think most virtual (conferences) are pre-taped. We’re doing soup to nuts, and we’re having some fun, like we’ve been encouraging everyone to be spontaneous.”

There’s been plenty of news for the faithful, for series like the original franchise, Red vs. Blue, and RWBY, the popular animation franchise that is getting three new series.

There’s also what Levin calls “a weird Home Shopping model of sorts, with our e-commerce team.” That latter initiative has paid off, literally, with more than $100,000 a day in merchandise sales, Levin estimated.

And because it’s the tenth anniversary, the company is running fan testimonials and memories from previous RTX gatherings, and re-running notable panels too.

They’ve also had to accommodate, for the first time, a global audience. That means re-running the many live panels eight hours after they initially debut (the more politically oriented Texas Tribune Festival, which is running all month from Austin, could take a cue, given its numerous early-morning events, some of which are live-only). And there’s been a lot of experimenting.

“The big mantra we said is,’Look, not everything’s going to go right. Certain things work, certain won’t. Some technical things will be great, some won’t,’’ Levin said. “We’re doing a virtual rave. Not everything is gonna work but it can’t feel canned.”

The company is changing in other ways since Levin took over from the company’s founders, most notably in creating more premium content, for more outlets, and getting on more of the big platforms that are increasingly defining digital entertainment in the streaming era.

“The company clearly showed it could produce more premium content, but it didn’t have a distribution ecosystem that can support that content,” Levin said. “So now we’re producing premium content for third parties, as a studio model.”

That includes a recent Transformers animated series for Netflix.

Rooster Teeth is also creating a second season of Gen: Lock, moving the sci-fi animation series from its own platform to corporate cousin HBO Max, the recently launched subscription service. Gen: Lock’s cast includes Michael B. Jordan (whose company is also producing), Dakota Fanning, David Tennant, and Maisie Williams.

The company is also launching what Levin calls ‘living room apps,” starting with Roku, Xbox, Apple TV, and Amazon Fire, with more platforms to come soon. There’s a “convoluted tale” about why such a pioneering site hadn’t already ventured onto connected TVs and streaming devices that comprise the next generation of digital video beyond the web, Levin said, but at least the company is now catching up.

“It’s about time,” Levin said.

The virtual RTX response so far has been encouraging, Levin said, with some 500,000 views on roosterteeth.com and its social-media sites, panels with three times the usual turnout for Rooster Teeth live streams, and 9,000 people tuning in for two screenings of a panel on RWBY.

“So it’s been good overall,” Levin said. “Ultimately, it’s if our people happy? Are we entertaining them? Are we offering some escape? Are we offering a way to connect? It’s fun to see people all over the world interacting with each other. It’s nice. It’s a very positive, positive thing.”