Colin Dixon, Senior Partner, Advisory
December 2, 2010
On a soggy Wednesday in New York City I braved the elements to attend a VideoSchmooze breakfast panel discussion. A subject dear to my heart was on the docket: How Connected and Mobile Devices are Transforming the Video Landscape. Will Richmond, the moderator and owner of VideoNuze, had gathered an interesting panel of industry insiders:
• Charlie Herrin, SVP, Products and Technology Comcast Interactive Media
• Doug Knopper, Co-CEO and Co-Founder FreeWheel
• Olivier Manuel, Director of Content Samsung Electronics
• Steve Robinson, CEO and Founder Panache
• Jeremiah Zinn, SVP, Digital Products MTV
The event was held at the Samsung Experience in the Time Warner Center. It was a perfect place to host this event as the attendees could play with cool Samsung equipment like the new Galaxy Tablet (an Android based device about the same form-factor as an eReader.) Of course, we were surrounded by more TVs than you could shake a stick at with lots of 3D on display (as usual, I got dizzy watching the demos!)
Will jumped right in with a great question to start us off: Is the Internet Disruptive or Additive to existing TV? Jeremiah thought it is was not so much about the death of PayTV but more an opportunity to get premium content everywhere a customer might want it. Charlie said he saw the connected lifestyle as additive. He gave a couple of examples: being able to search more easily through VoD assets on a PC and caller ID on TV.
Generally, all the panelists agreed the Internet was additive. This seemed just a little too cozy a position so Will pressed the issue a little with a follow up question: The industry has lost subscribers for the first time in history this year. Could this be due to cord cutting? Olivier didn't think cord cutting was the right way to think about the issue. He thought it provided a more open channel for reaching consumers which operators can take advantage of as well as everyone else. Doug thought that it was a great thing for consumers but for content providers it was challenging to ensure that their content extracts value from each device. Again, general agreement that cord cutting wasn’t an issue.
Later on Will asked Charlie if he thought consumers buying a Roku for $60 and getting an $8 subscription to Netflix was resetting consumer expectations about the price of media. Amazingly, Charlie was "not concerned." He returned to the cord-cutting mantra that it was only due to the economy that people would come back when things got better.
I must admit, as an audience member I was little frustrated with these answers and when Q&A came at the end I asked: By keeping premium content behind the PayTV wall are content providers risking encouraging competition from the Internet. Doug gamely said that there’s no easy answer for every provider and talked about what a great job Discovery was doing in releasing clips to drive viewers back to the channel behind the pay wall. Again, general agreement that this was the way things would continue to work.
I’m afraid I find it pretty hard to believe the Internet poses no threat to PayTV after seeing the devastation leveled at the music industry. I’m sure Internet broadcasters like Jim Louderback of Revision3 would also have had something to say about this.
One of the most interesting parts of the discussion was about the how Social networking would become part of the experience. Doug thought that social media brought two key things to the media table: real-time feedback and clips driving viewers to watch a show ondemand. Jeremiah had lots to say about this subject. MTV’s audience is perhaps the best target for leveraging social and he said they absolutely loved it. They use it so much now that they have what he called TJ’s or twitter jockeys that watch twitter feedback and decide which tweets get thrown up on the screen with the live show. He also talked about how MTV had created a suite of social applications around the John Stewart/Steve Colbert rally which really engaged MTV viewers. Later Jeremiah told me the applications on mobile used GPS to allow people at the event to gain access to content (crowd shots etc.) that people not at the event couldn’t see. Really innovative stuff here!
One moment of humor occurred when Jeremiah talked about how MTV had done "depravation studies" where they had taken mobile phones away from a group of test subjects. He said it was almost like waterboarding to these kids!
All in all, a very well run event with lots of thought-provoking subjects. If you get a chance to attend a VideoSchmooze breakfast you won’t be disappointed.
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