@VOD Summit: More Lessons

(by Dorian Benkoil) A few more takeaways from Kagan’s VOD summit:
Placement is Key. Just like anywhere else, where you put your stuff, how you display it, can drastically affect the number of people who ultimately see it. Jeff Shultz, whose CONCERT produces on-demand music programming, says one MSO creates a 100-times lower monthly view rate than another by putting CONCERTS material two clicks deeper into its site.
Ad tolerance: How many ads will users tolerate? If someone is paying for their VOD will they also tolerate ads? How many? I know this argument was made early on in cable TV – that people paying for cable wouldn’t tolerate ads. But how many ads can you watch on a mobile phone or computer when you’re only going to watch for a couple of minutes total?
Rights matter. In content “clearance is by far the biggest cost,” said Ron Lamprecht of NBC Universal Cable. Contracts right now are all over the place – rights are negotiated both a la carte and as an all-encompassing and very expensive package. Says Clint Stinchcomb of Discovery: Every content provider “is looking to parse all of their rights” and have payment for each.

Finally, my final observation is that people in VOD are still feeling their way. Right now, the largest players and video producers by and large control the space. I wonder what happens when the video equivalent of Podcasting hits strong and a few folks start getting popular and can support themselves, or when vLogging starts to get really good, when what is happening to print journalism starts to happen to the broadcast/video world, when small-time producers seriously challenge the large operators. We’ve already had the example of Jon Stewart’s controversial “Crossfire” appearance, when viewership of a piece of content distributed across the Internet dwarfed the number of views it got through its “proprietary” channel, CNN.

What if I had bumped into Stewart and managed to get him to say something into my video camera?
What if paparazzi start posting videos on their own sites, effectively competing with the big TV shows and networks that used to buy the stuff? It could happen.

The Kagan VOD Summit coverage is sponsored by Maven Networks’IP VOD Delivery Platform

Comments have been disabled for this post