Editor’s note: Made in Tarrant is an occasional Q&A series on small businesses started in Tarrant County. Submit your business here. 

Americans love animals. In the Dallas-Fort Worth area, U.S. Census numbers put the number of households with pets at about 50%, with 41% having at least one dog and 17% having at least one cat. 

While movies about dogs and cats, such as “Marley and Me,” “Cats and Dogs,” “Beethoven,” etc., have enjoyed success over the years, a new streaming service called buddi is aimed at animal lovers featuring curated content such as ad-free movies, shows, original programming and documentaries via streaming channels to a television or mobile device. 

Layla Kasha and Ryan Sullivan launched buddi earlier this year, with plans to grow the channel through the fall. The service costs $7.99 per month or $79 per year. For every new subscriber, buddi makes a donation to their Champion of the Month, an animal-based charity that changes monthly. 

Contact information: 

Website: watchbuddi.com

Fort Worth Report business editor Bob Francis spoke with Nathan Fletcher, who is executive vice president of programming for buddi. If Fletcher’s name is familiar, he is also executive vice president of programming for Aeroverse, a Fort Worth streaming service designed for the aviation industry.

Bob Francis: Tell us a bit about buddi. 

Fletcher: The founders are husband and wife Layla Kasha and Ryan Sullivan. They moved here from California a few years ago and they really love Fort Worth. Ryan is involved with the Rotary in Fort Worth and he owned his own agency and recently sold it to focus on buddi. Layla is a C-suite executive and she’ll be the CEO of buddi. We’ve really just started, but it’s exciting. 

Francis: Tell me a little bit about the concept behind buddi. 

Fletcher: There are streaming services out there, what we would call specialty streamers — like Shutter is just horror films and Crunchyroll is just anime. So buddi’s genre is pet content for the pet obsessed. So dogs, cats, you name it, but we’re focused on serving people who want to see pet content. It’s movies, documentaries, TV shows. We’re going to be releasing 11 new movies, movies that are new to buddi. We’ll release a new movie, and have a couple of Christmas movies in there too. We’re also adding more content. We just really want to super serve the pet lover, the pet-obsessed person. 

Francis: Since much of that content is available out there, how are you differentiating what buddi has to offer?

Fletcher: It’s kind of two things. We are creating our own original content. We have two series that we already produce. One’s called buddi’s Besties, and it’s a talk show which Layla hosts. She has different experts on, or groomers, or people that run rescues. So we are going to add to our own exclusive content. 

The other thing is that if you go to any major streamer, Disney or Netflix, Discovery, Max, whatever, it’s going to be hard to find the pet content. It’s not going to be easy to find because they have such massive libraries, and they’re more focused on getting you to watch their original, new stuff than they are the other stuff. You take a cable network like Animal Planet, which is a great network with great content. They stopped making original, exclusive content a few years ago because the cable TV system is just collapsing. So there’s not really anybody making this content right now? Nobody is making original, exclusive content in the pet space, and we feel like we can fill the gap there. 

Francis: How did Layla and Ryan get the idea for buddi? 

Fletcher: They had a cat that they loved, Hermes, and the cat got chronic kidney disease, and Layla tried to find good information about it, but it was really hard. Her vet told her she should join some Facebook groups because they don’t teach us a whole lot about that in vet school, that basically you need to educate yourself. She really just had a rough time with it. They told them originally that the cat was going to pass away in just months, and the cat ended up living another four years. And so that kind of process really made them feel like there needs to be easier sources of information out there, reliable sources of information.

When we looked at where the white space was in the media landscape, it was the pet space, because no one is really serving that community. When it comes to TV shows, documentaries, movies, no one’s really serving that, so animal wellness is something that we’re very going to be very focused on. We have a documentary called the “Dog Doc,” which is really fascinating, for instance. 

Francis: Do they have investors behind them? 

Fletcher: They’ve self funded it up to this point right now. 

Francis: Where are you guys in the launch process? 

Fletcher: We consider that we’re in a soft launch, but we’re available in about 80 million U.S. homes, in 71% of the connected TV space. But there are some major ones, like Samsung, Vizio and LG, that will happen in the next 12 months. But we’re really just kind of getting our name out there, doing some brand awareness. 

We’ve gone to a CatCon convention in California. We’re going to another convention in Ohio in October to do some grassroots marketing, talking to people and making some relationships. But in January, we really plan to ramp up marketing and advertising and also add some more content.

Bob Francis is business editor for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at bob.francis@fortworthreport.org.

At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.