This panel at the Future of Television featured:

Brett Bouttier, SVP, Digital, Warner Bros. Television Group
Marc DeBevoise, SVP, Business Development & Strategy, Starz Media LLC
Matthew Glotzer, SVP, Digital Media, Fox Entertainment Group
Joe Patrick, EVP, North American Television Distribution, MGM
Moderator: Andrew Wallenstein, Deputy Editor, The Hollywood Reporter

Anything surprising about adoption of content on these new digital channels?

Response to ad supported streaming of premium content has been wildly successful. However, the ad supported model cannot keep up economically with sell through or even rental. So the challenge becomes how to do both and not cannibalize the sell through business where someone will pay you $1.99 for a download.

Long tail content has proven to be surprisingly successful. For example, Airwolf has turned out to be one of the most downloaded programs on Hulu.

How can film play a role on Hulu?

Joe Patrick said “I can’t get someone to pay the long tail content, but they might watch it on Hulu when its ad supported.” They might not pay $2.99 for this kind of content, but they might watch it for free. They are working on how to get sampling increased to help drive consumption.

What about Vongo?

Vongo licensed content from Starz. It just goes to show that consumers will use subscription models for premium content. Perhaps the key is to make it feel like free, or close to it. Subscription starts to approach this as demonstrated by cable subscriptions and Vongo.

What about iTunes – how important is it?

Starz will be releasing on iTunes tonight according to Marc DeBevoise, SVP, Business Development & Strategy, Starz Media. NewTeeVee did a video interview with him.

iTunes is clearly the leader in sell through. In this segment, they are the 850 pound gorilla in this segment. In other segments, there is still more competition and variety of players.

itunes has been very successful. All of us are in the business of trying to get distribution. iTunes will be one of these key channels, but there are lots of other channels like the Xbox that will be important. We want the content to be available everywhere at the right times.

Is digital content seen as a threat to mainstream broadcasting?
So far, the evidence has been the opposite. By streaming content shortly after on air play, it can actually help increase audience.

What about FCC regulations – do you see them applying to the internet?
We need to be responsible and self-regulate to some degree. More importantly, the sponsors will require certain levels of content standards so that will likely drive content strategies to a large degree.

Are these alternative channels a threat to contracts with talent?

The sense was that it is potential threat, but the ability for talent to move from one studio to another has always been there when contracts expire. The key will be to leverage core capabilities of distribution, marketing etc and let the creative do what they do best.

[tags]Future of Television[/tags]