The end of Mipcom is in sight! My last interview was with Martin Blakstad, formerly of Sony Music, Columbia Tristar and Altavista amongst others and now heading up new media for Granada International.
— A new broadcast landscape: “Broadcast deals used to be very straightforward – exclusive deals for a particular product for a fixed time-span for a licence fee and a fixed amount of money. Now you’re talking about loads of business models that the telcos have, you’ve got revenue share, minimum guarantees, advances. and so on. You need to negotiate because there are 101 different ways of cutting a deal in this new space whether it’s the traditional licence fee model, subscription, video on demand, free to consumer, the ad-funded model – and all the different products that go into that. Basically you’ve got to understand the business models of the clients you’re dealing with, so you can work out what sort of share you should get of their revenue, or how it should be cut and sliced between the two of you.”
— On-demand services: The ‘new content’ is all about W6 – what they want to watch, when they want to watch it. “In five years’ time, I think that we are going to laugh at the thought we had to get home at a certain time to watch a certain programme.” Among Granada’s current projects are its contribution to the 10,000 hours of digitized content as part of the ITV digitization programme, and work with T-online in Germany. The telco is planning to deliver BDSL, a very high speed DSL service, with bandwidth of 25Mb rising to 50Mb next year. “Now we’re getting these great big fat pipes in people’s homes, we’re getting requests for high definition content. We’ve got a high definition catalogue and these high def files are massive, but they’ll easily fit – you need about 8Mb more to deliver high def streaming service. So that can easily manage it.”
— On the actual content: Granada works with indy producers to advise them about the kind of content they create for online and for mobiles, part of which will be new productions and some brand extensions. But there’s nowhere near enough content being made for these platforms at the moment, said Blakstad. “It’s one of those chicken and egg situations. If the content was there, maybe the market would develop further, but until you know how the market’s developing, the producers aren’t going to be willing to spend the money to develop the content. It’s going to take a leap of faith.” Repurposing content just isn’t enough – it has to be built in at the commissioning stage. “You want someone to actually write the one-minute or three-minute mobisode as a coherent episode for the mobile and build it up from there. Also, when you’ve got a programme you want to turn into a mobisode, you’ve got to shrink down the frame. Cut-down footage works well for things like football goals, but when you talk about dramas or style programmes they need to be thought about a little more. I don’t think the message has got through to the creative community yet and that’s because there’s not much money to be made. There’s going to be a lot of trial and error to work it all out.”
— The YouGle deal: “It makes absolute sense – the only way that YouTube is going to make money is from search ads, which Google is very good at delivering. But I hope for Google’s sake it has warrants in place in case it gets sued the hell out of, because sure as hell there’s an awful lot of illegal copyright sitting on YouTube at the moment. People will now look at its very wealthy parent and go after it – I’d be very surprised if it didn’t happen. I’m delighted that YouTube has gone to a reputable company like Google who have got standards to maintain and a reputation to protect and they will clean it up, I’m sure.”
This article originally appeared in MediaGuardian.
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