Film Bosses Ponder How to Make Money in Net Free-for-All

By Paul Vaclik

THE proliferation of premium television and film content on the internet is inevitable. We’d better do something about it now.

I was at the Forbes Meet conference in Hollywood earlier this month and that was view from the heads of the film and television worlds when they spoke about the effect of the internet on their industries.

The conference was truly a meeting of minds by the worlds of film, television and new media.

The impressive list of CEO and CTO speakers ranged from Harry Sloan, of MGM Studios, and Robert Iger, of the Walt Disney Company, to Tero Ojanpera, of Nokia, and Chad Hurley, of YouTube, with plighter notes added by Daniel Lyons, the senior editor of Forbes magazine and author of Steve Jobs’ parody blog, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs.

Many of the sessions led by this impressive group focused on how traditional media are facing the challenges and opportunities presented by fixed and mobile internet.

Today, consumers expect premium content will be available on the net. And if they can’t get it legally, they’ll sure as hell find a way to get it illegally. The answer is simple. Make it available legally. Time it well. And price it well.

But then, what does well priced mean in a world where consumers don’t expect to pay for online content? At Meet, the big players believed consumers would pay for convenience, either direct via a pay-per-view model or by allowing themselves to be subjected to advertising – although the question of which advertising model is right for internet video is far from answered. One area that also attracted a lot of attention was mobile.

One speaker said the next million new mobile users will never have used a PC – their first computer will be a phone.

The numbers re mobile stack up nicely for anyone looking to monetise their content.

More than one billion mobile phones will be sold this year and research shows that 75% of owners use built-in cameras, 60% listen to music and 45% surf the net – a figure that really surprised me.

I found it interesting that, despite all this interest and investment in new media, it actually still delivers a very small part of their revenue.

Only EUR1.5bn of Disney’s EUR30bn revenue last year came from new media, and even the most frequently downloaded video on iTunes delivered a volume of just 5,000 sales a week at EUR7 each.

However, if they take their own advice – to act now, to get their content online, to price it well and time it well – I’m sure we’ll see those figures rise tremendously in the next five years.

Paul Vaclik is head of Codeworks Digital Media Technology

(c) 2007 The Journal – Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.