From Production To Placement, Big Business Is All About The Money

Richard Wheeler, head of music partnerships for Orange, explained at MusicAlly’s digital music convention how the operators choose which songs get shown at the top of the deck and hence recieve all the promotional benefits of that. “When the subject was first raised in a panel discussion, Wheeler, who joined Orange from Sanctuary, agreed that it was truly valuable real estate. Mobile users will only get to see 10, or at most 20 picks because of limited screen size and bandwidth. So to that end, Orange was developing sophisticated recommendation engines based on pinpoint demographics, he said…A few minutes later, he augmented this with an answer that might be somewhere nearer the truth…”Yes, placement is based on the margin we get from the labels” reports The Register. People might like to think that art belongs to a higher sphere than commerce but it shouldn’t be a surprise that placement is determined on how much revenue it generates for the carriers — they’re mainly pushing content to replace deteriorating voice ARPU.

CBS president Leslie Moonves also had a “show me the money” incident in Wired: “We don’t care how you get our content — over the air, over cable, satellite, the Internet, or on your cell phone — as long as we get paid for it.” Earlier in the interview he was bullish on mobile TV, saying: “We think wireless is going to grow tremendously. Do I think people are going to watch an episode of Survivor on a 2-inch television set? I doubt it. But I do think somebody’s going to go to a grocery store in the middle of a football game and watch that game.”

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