Todd Mason

William Todd Mason (born May 3, 1963) is a broadcast and digital media entrepreneur, innovator, live broadcast director, and television production executive. He is the founder and CEO of Broadcast Management Group, Inc. (BMG), a live production, managed services, systems integration, event management, and consulting company. Mason has produced, launched, and managed thousands of hours of television specials and series for broadcast and cable networks, including ESPN, ARTE France, FOX, ABC, MTV, Discovery, PBS, Comedy Central, and Showtime. He was a co-creator and executive producer of the series The Pet Psychic for Animal Planet. He has served on the launch team and provided ongoing production management, staffing, and facilities for ESPN’s shows, Pardon the Interruption, Around the Horn, and Cold Pizza.

Early life and education

Mason was born in Richmond, Virginia, and later settled in the Washington, D.C. area. He established a lawn business at fourteen and a car waxing business at sixteen. While growing up, he attended a church that started to televise their weekly church services. Fascinated by the technology and the live production aspect, he negotiated his way into being on the production crew despite being younger than the required age limit.

Mason studied Business Administration at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Career

Broadcast and digital media entrepreneur

In 2005, Mason founded Broadcast Management Group, Inc. (BMG), a video production company with a focus on music, news, and entertainment events. It works with networks, event companies, and digital media companies on multi-camera productions live to air or live to the web. The company handles the technical design, engineering, and management for each production, as well as all the crewing, transmissions, and overall logistics. BMG operates broadcast facilities in New York, Chicago, Las Vegas, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles.

Mason is a sought-after live broadcast director for a wide range of programming, including music, news, entertainment, series, and specials. Most recently, he directed the Two Friends concert in Chicago. In 2022, he was the broadcast director for all ten January 6th hearings. Mason directed the cast interview broadcast for the Disney + series Willow and directed the cast interview show for Amazon Primes' series Riches. He has directed two of the Netflix cast talk show Geeked. One was for Cowboy Bebop and the second was for The Witcher. Mason has directed live post-Emmy and Oscar shows. He has also directed three days of live 90-minute shows at SXSW for Mashable/Twitter called The Mashable Show and several live broadcasts for truTV's Impractical Jokers at Comic-Con. He has served as an executive in charge of production for several shows, including two 2021 Daytime Emmy Awards shows for the National Television Academy.

Before founding BMG, Mason was the President and COO at Atlantic Video from 1998 to 2005, where he grew the company's revenue by 400% and expanded its operations to multiple locations across the United States. Prior to Atlantic Video, he was the President and CEO of PVS SPEER International, from 1996 to 1997. His responsibilities included turning around the company's profitability and reputation, overseeing technical facilities in multiple locations, and leveraging the company's international news client base for digital content and distribution.

From 1990 to 1996, Mason served as the Senior Vice President and CFO at Henninger Media Services. He expanded the company’s facilities to multiple locations and led several successful acquisitions. He spearheaded a joint venture between Henninger and The Tribeca Film Center, which resulted in an innovative non-linear equipment rental company for feature films.

Throughout his career, Mason has served on the board of directors for numerous industries and communities, including the International Television Association, DC Technology Counsel, and DC Marketing Center, and served on Mayor Tony Williams’ transition team for economic development.

Innovator

Since beginning his career, Mason has consistently focused on using technology to improve the quality, creativity, speed, and cost of content development and distribution. In the transition from linear to non-linear editing, he led the movement of film editing from streamback to digital non-linear in 1992 through a partnership with Robert De Niro’s Tribeca Film Center. While the industry explored digital content management and distribution, Mason worked as part of a team that built the world’s latest full-service central content management and distribution center in 1996. In 1998, he designed and developed one of the first major fully integrated non-linear tapeless post-production operations. In 2003, he designed and built the first tapeless broadcast facility, which was located in New York. Working with major manufacturers, Mason created an environment that produced superior technical quality and speed to air while reducing operational costs via cutting-edge automation.

In 2021, Mason built the first complete cloud production ecosystem that enables centralizing technology at the BMG Cloud Control CenterTM while decentralizing production teams.