On this episode of the podcast I've been hosting we explore how a major legacy media company is navigating the shift from the 'lean back' experience of linear television to the short and on demand mode of viewing on phones, tablets, and other screens large and small.
We’ll look at this paradigm shift in the context of Viacom, one of the world’s largest media conglomerates. Viacom is best known for creating some of the coolest, edgiest, youth-oriented programming ever seen on TV. Think Beavis & Butthead and Comedy Central Roasts, for example.
But all the cool in the world wasn’t enough to defend Viacom from the array of content options people had once the internet became the dominant mode of content distribution.
How has Viacom found its way back to millions, if not billions, of viewers around the world? How is it defending its turf against the likes of TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube?
In this episode we’ll dig into these questions with Brendan Yam, Vice President and General Manager of Viacom Digital Studios International, or VDSI. He's been with the company since 2005, and for the past year and a half has led the company’s short-form digital content output and its expansion into global markets.
What led to Viacom experimenting with short-form digital video content (2:24)
What works and what doesn’t in this format (8:39)
Viacom’s short-form strategy and its successes around the world (10:43)
Business models in digital video (16:34)
Related Links:
During the interview I reference an article on Viacom by Matthew Ball and Jason Hirschhorn. The full title of that article is “Why Viacom Fell (And Why It Can Come Back).” Read it here on REDEF.
“Viacom Sets Up International Hubs to Pump Out Short-Form Content” on Digiday
“Viacom Digital, Facebook Watch Cut Four-Continent Deal for Short-Form Shows” on Forbes
If you’ve ever seen a TV show or film set on location, you know that production—with its rows of trucks and trailers, power generators, and catering services—is often the equivalent of a small city setting up shop.
A quick tally makes it obvious that non-trivial amounts of waste and greenhouse gases are generated on any set. As people become more environmentally conscious, anything and everything from plastic cutlery to idling vehicles become opportunities to implement sustainable production practices.
This episode of the podcast I host deals with the 'greening' of film and TV production with Zena Harris, a sustainability expert and the president of Green Spark Group.
Highlights include:
The origins of growing worries over environmental sustainability on TV and film sets (1:54)
Some key contributors to a production’s environmental footprint (5:33)
Productions of all sizes and shapes can go the green route (11:50)
Industry leaders demonstrating how production greening is done (13:13)
On this episode of Now & Next, the podcast I host, we journey into the business aspects of one of the media landscape’s most talked about areas: Podcasting.
Last season we examined the emerging podcast industry with Vancouver podcasting company Pacific Content’s Steve Pratt and Dan Misener. Since then, their company has been acquired by Rogers Media, while another company we talked about during that episode, Gimlet Media, has been acquired by Spotify for $230 million. The latter also acquired Parcast and Anchor earlier this year, spending over $400 million on podcasting acquisitions in total.
Such acquisitions speak to the industry’s real-time build-out as well as the rapid rate of growth it’s experiencing; i.e. there were about 500,000 podcast series last year, and today, there are upwards of 800,000. And more importantly, from the business point of view: The ad revenue supporting the burgeoning industry is on a major upswing. Between 2015 and 2019, revenues jumped from just over $100 million per year to over $600 million annually and are expected to top $1 billion by 2021.
Our guide for this episode is Nicholas Quah, founder of Hot Pod, the leading newsletter on the podcast industry.
In this episode, Nicholas Quah:
Takes stock of the key moves that occurred in the industry over the past year (2:19)
Reflects on how the influx of money in podcasting will impact the industry (6:50)
Ponders how business models will evolve in the podcasting space (15:04)
Shares his thoughts on what the next round of big moves in podcasting will imply (20:07)
This episode of the podcast I'm hosting presents an in-depth conversation with acclaimed documentary filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin, one of the world’s most notable Indigenous filmmakers.
She has made over fifty films over the span of her fifty-year career. Her documentary on the 1990 Oka Crisis is among her most widely known works. Now in her late eighties, Alanis has not slowed down. Her 53rd film, Jordan River Anderson, The Messenger, premiered at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival. It also won the ‘Best Canadian Documentary’ award at the 2019 Vancouver International Film Festival.
A lot has changed in the world of documentaries since Alanis Obomsawin started making films in the 1960s, and much of that change has occurred in the last few years. We are now in the midst of a documentary gold rush, with streaming services and on-demand video platforms opening up new avenues for a genre previously relegated to limited theatrical releases, home video or DVD—and maybe one or two broadcast slots. As a result, we’re seeing documentaries become bona fide hits and some bring in well into the eight figures at the box office. It’s a truly unusual phenomenon in the doc world.
So, what does an iconic documentarian make of all the changes afoot in the world not just of documentary, but of media and technology in general?
In this episode you’ll hear about:
How Alanis Obomsawin views the role of documentary filmmakers today (4:15)
“Everyone wants to be a creator,” says Eitan Pilipski, VP in charge of developing Snapchat’s ever-evolving augmented reality (AR) platform. Pilipski was one of hundreds of executives who took to the stage at Collision. This year, the conference featured a dedicated content track, with practitioners and executives sharing their insights and experiences with creating content across constantly changing platforms and user expectations.
To set a baseline, it’s worth doing a quick tally of the volume of content being created online in 2019. Every day, over 500 million tweets are posted, about 100 million photos and videos are shared on Instagram, about 4 million blog posts go live, and the amount of video uploaded to YouTube every minute now sits at around 500 hours. Every minute.
Indeed everyone can be a creator, and hundreds of millions around the world are making the wheels of the Internet churn like no other form of media ever has. But with all the new form factors for content and new user experiences, both creators and tech platforms are in a state of constant flux. And embracing what at first appears to be chaos but is in fact a highly dynamic marketplace is what it takes to compete.
Take Snapchat for example. If you’re about 30 or older, you may think it’s yesterday’s news. In fact, it’s very much a going concern for teens and twentysomethings, with hundreds of millions of video stories created daily, and those stories yielding several billion views. The company and the community are in an ongoing state of reinvention, creating hundreds of thousands of lenses and filters so people can personalize their disappearing snaps with goggles, elevators, pickles, and anything else that can be imagined and digitized. 50 billion views later, Pilipski, a veteran of AR companies that created early AR applications for phones and smart glasses, sees the bigger picture: “AR used to be just for experts, but now anyone can do it,” referring to the reality-stretching tools Snapchat’s products have put into the hands of several hundred million people.
And Snapchat is but one app out of millions. The burst of content activity is taking place across screens big and small, and media producers and brands are vying for the same attention as every person posting from their smartphone. Consequently, if you’re trying to get the word out about your project, product, or service, it’s harder than ever to break through the clutter. So how are the tech companies, publishers, platforms, and brands thinking about content creation in this free-for-all environment? And what does it take to get noticed in that infinite sea?
Banking and basketball, 3D printed dresses and innovation
A brick and mortar bank faced this challenge when it wanted to communicate a new idea. Wells Fargo wanted to give its customers control over their financial lives with Control Tower, an online product and app that provides access to all accounts, credit cards, and digital transactions in a single place. CMO Jamie Moldafsky delivered the message by giving people control over a favourite pastime: the bank created an app for the NBA playoffs that offered control of the game-viewing experience. People could choose cameras, angles, and favourite players for the version of the game they wanted to see. “And we’re not interrupting people’s lives with something that is irrelevant,” adds Moldafsky.
GE faced a similar challenge, as CMO Linda Boff explained: “The best things we do as a company are invisible, and we wanted to make them visible. And while it’s not easy to get the average person excited about electrical infrastructure or the technology backbone of the aerospace and healthcare industries, you can get them excited about the underlying principle behind it, which is innovation.”
To make innovative thinking visible to a mass audience, GE partnered with fashion designer Zac Posen, equipping him with the company’s 3D printing technology and setting him loose to create eye-catching, futuristic gowns. Three stars wore the 3D printed dresses on the red carpet at New York’s splashy Met Gala this spring. “You used to be able to get all the attention you needed by advertising during Friends or Cheers,” quips Boff. Now, the name of the game is creating buzz and attention in the real world, and having it cascade through thousands to millions of impressions on the likes of Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, as well as through mainstream print and media outlets, who also picked up the story.
Platforms and publishers
It’s no secret that local media outlets have suffered a significant erosion of advertising revenue as a result of the dominance of Facebook and Google, and that algorithms dictate who sees which content, and under what circumstances. Speaking to the tricky economic interconnections between people, companies, and platforms, Justin Hendrix of the NYC Media Lab, described the new phase of the relationship this way: “Media publishers and platforms are now in the ‘conscious uncoupling’ phase, and we’re asking ourselves how do we want to live the rest of our lives.”
Hendrix lays out the facts of how the dynamics have evolved between individual creators and platforms as well as brands and publishers and platforms. “Only publishers with scale can thrive on the big platforms, he points out, and social media stardom, it’s more like a lottery now.” He states that, for most creators, ad revenue on its own is no longer enough to support them, let alone those YouTubers, bloggers, and vloggers that require production or editorial staff to keep to a regular posting schedule.
Hendrix is hopeful, however, based largely upon the flowering of ideas and prototypes coming out of the student groups with whom his lab works. “Things that seem like fringe ideas now may actually end up solving the problem at scale,” he notes. Among those projects are a multi-user AR challenge, created in conjunction with A&E Networks, and a framework for metadata and machine learning for news produced in partnership with Hearst Media.
Are platforms best for marketing, or for monetization?
Platforms aren’t going away, so the fact that so many people use Twitter, Facebook, and Google as their starting point for information is a reality which media organizations now have to contend. Meg Goldthwaite, Chief Marketing Officer at NPR, explained that her public media organization decided to move away from a reliance on social platforms and to more O&O (owned and operated) media channels.
“We’ll never leave radio, but we want to find new places we can meet people,” she explains to the audience at Collision. For NPR, this meant finding out what all the places are. It used to be easy: it was in the car or in the kitchen. Now the audience is spread across multiple platforms and devices, and is consuming the content in conventional broadcast forms and also via streaming and on demand. Some of the places NPR’s audiences can be found are O&O, some are on smart speakers (NPR was an early partner with Amazon and Google and is now also working with Apple and Samsung), and some are open platforms, such as YouTube, where the network’s Tiny Desk Concertspull in several million views per month.
“YouTube is the centre of gravity for young people,” acknowledges Kelly Day, President of Viacom Digital Studios, the two-year-old digital arm of a company whose hallmark for several decades has been youth-focused, category-defining brands such as MTV, Nickelodeon, BET, and Comedy Central. “We don’t use digital to market TV shows but to create digital intellectual property (IP), to build communities, and to serve personalized, on demand content,” says Day. For Viacom, that means targeting and reaching the 2 to 12 and 13 to 24-year-old demographics. And even though substantial efforts are being put into IP on open platforms like YouTube, Day says Viacom is seeing continued growth on the company’s O&O channels, which are netting approximately 5 billion views per month.
Day and her team at Viacom are well aware that teens are spending much of their time on Instagram and Snapchat, so they have developed programming for IGTV, the new product introduced by Instagram in 2018 to accommodate videos up to 10 minutes in length. Such initiatives have the potential to corral audiences and create high engagement that in turn are attractive as sites for branded content or ad placements. Two other recent Viacom acquisitions speak to the ways in which the company is defending itself in the face of declining audiences for linear broadcast TV: the mid 2018 acquisition of Awesomeness TV, the youth-focused digital media network generating hundreds of millions of monthly views, and the early 2019 acquisition of the free, ad-supported streaming platform Pluto TV.
On this episode of Now & Next, the podcast I host, an in depth look at the world of competitive video game playing, otherwise known as eSports. Our guide through this fast-paced world is professional player Stephanie Harvey.
Stephanie at work
Stephanie is originally from Quebec City, and in addition to being a five-time World Champion for the game Counter-Strike, she is the recipient of such accolades as being named to the Forbes 30 under 30 list and the BBC’s list of 100 inspiring women.
eSports is predicted to become a billion-dollar global industry this year. It’s particularly popular in Asia, where large cities boast thousands of gaming rooms packed, day in and day out, with players vying for video game domination.
As the trend picks up speed, Stephanie Harvey knows that several impediments still exist to its full mainstream acceptance. There are, for example, widely held negative perceptions of the gaming industry that need to be overcome as well as the fact that, from players to spectators, eSports is predominantly a boys’ club. Still, she remains hopeful.
On this episode you’ll hear about:
Recent pivotal moments in the mainstreaming of eSports (3:40)
For several decades, placing long-shot bets and hoping for the best was pretty much all there was when it came to making TV shows and movies. Then along came data and analytics.
In this episode of Now & Next (the podcast I host), we hear from Jack Zhang, who believes he’s found a better way to tackle the problem of matching supply with demand. He’s a recent Waterloo grad who started a company called Greenlight Essentials to combine his love of math with his love of movies. Zhang calls his system ‘audience demand analysis’. It uses an AI-based system to develop probability models that determine the demand for a movie, before it’s made. Think a ‘Moneyball for movies’.
So far, the tests Jack Zhang has run look promising. He created a trailer for a movie that didn’t exist using the database he created that itemizes over 40,000 attributes found in movies. With little expectation of anything happening, he posted the trailer to Facebook. It ended up getting close to 3 million views and tens of thousands of comments. That movie is now in the process of being ‘packaged’ (the industry term for bringing together writers, producers, directors and on-camera talent) by executives in Los Angeles.
Show Highlights:
When Jack first realized data could help transform the film industry (05:09)
When it comes to financing documentaries, many think the options are either running up a tab on credit cards, shaking down family members for cash or calling in one favour after the next. And all the while, colleagues and acquaintances are probably starting to seriously think about blocking your calls and texts.
But it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way. Though all the above possibilities form part of the picture, particularly for documentarians just starting out, there are other financial avenues available for exploration. Each one comes with its own basket of risks and potential rewards, of course, and this was the focus of a fireside chat at the recent Hot Docs Industry Conference in Toronto.
The documentary gold rush
After years of being limited to the film festival circuit and one or two broadcast windows, the advent of subscription-based video on demand services has brought a whole new audience and new sources of dollars to the world of documentaries. Over the past two years, seven documentaries were sold for over a million dollars and even well beyond that amount – numbers that were previously unheard of in the sector. And yet, when feature documentaries such asWon’t You Be My Neighbor and RBGare grossing $22 million and $14 million respectively, it’s not hard to understand the rush of interest in the genre.
The big ticket story at Sundance this year was the $10 million sale of worldwide rights to Knock Down the House, the story of the unprecedented influx of women in the U.S. Congress, most notably the firebrand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
In addition to Canada’s federal and provincial funding sources and tax incentives for documentaries, there’s a whole other world of financing to consider. However, as with anything riddled with risk and uncertainty, there are different trade-offs to consider, as well as new knowledge required for navigating new systems.
The main types of documentary financing, outside of self-funding and governmental funding bodies, include:
Private equity
Venture capital (VC)
Co-producers’ equity
Loans
Broadcast equity
Crowdfunding
Private equity
This is a type of investment that, as its name suggests, is private and thus not listed on a public exchange. It’s considered a high-risk investment that, in some sectors, can also yield a high reward. In the world of film financing, it’s usually placed in a portfolio as a tax credit to offset the returns from other investments.
Venture capital
This investment category is also high-risk. It is usually associated with startups and comes with the expectation of potential for longer-term growth and a high return on investment. It is rather uncommon as a source of financing for films. However, a science-themed film, for example, could cross over from the usual, more targeted science audience to a mass audience, and therefore yield a substantial return.
Co-producers’ equity
These investors are producers themselves, and as people from within the industry tend to have a deeper understanding of its particularities and may therefore have additional demands. “Not recommended for control freaks,” said Yi. Also, the granting of producer credits to Americans or other foreign producers can be tricky when working within the Canadian funding guidelines.
Loans
These include startup loans, gap financing loans and finishing loans, among others. All are dependent on how they can be secured and the stage of the production process. For example, producers may be able to use unsold rights as collateral. As this is a contract between a producer and a financial institution, there is a legal obligation to repay and any collateral used is put at risk.
Broadcast equity
This is used when a larger broadcaster offers a higher fee than usual (i.e. an over-licence fee) for the film and acquires the rights for global distribution instead of just one or two markets. The broadcaster is then able to take the project to Netflix or any other streaming service. EyeSteelFilm’s Moore says: “For Canadians, generally all rights are not available, as opposed to European broadcasters, who are able to partner with someone like CNN.”
Crowdfunding
Here, there are many pros and cons to consider. As James J. Yi says: “It’s its own full seminar.” Some filmmakers use platforms such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo for the early stages of fundraising and awareness building, while others turn to funding websites to finish their project. Yi pointed out that many filmmakers have underestimated the time and cost to fulfill the obligations of the campaign, leading to a redirection of scarce resources.
Business deals & legal obligations
At the 2019 Hot Docs conference, the challenges and benefits of these options were considered from both a Canadian and US perspective. The former was provided by filmmaking veteran Bob Moore, of Montreal’s EyeSteelFilm, and the latter by Sundance award-winning documentary producer/director James J. Yi.
Yi was quick to point out the main differences between Canadian and US funding models. More specifically, when dealing with private investors, there are binding contractual requirements. “It’s a business deal with legal obligations,” he reminded the session’s attendees. EyeSteelFilm’s Moore made it even plainer: “Your house can be on the line… so all of a sudden, your legal line is big.”
Assuming most filmmakers, like them, are lucky enough to have houses, Yi and Moore offered a high-level breakdown of each category of financing, along with the risks, rewards and potholes that may initially not be visible when going down the documentary road.
In addition to providing a crash course on the many financing options available to documentary filmmakers, Yi and Moore also had some tips for producers, noting that some options apply more to US financing models than Canadian ones.
Among their top tips:
Start a separate company for each film
Be sure to contract based on net profit share, not the company, and not the intellectual property/IP
Your investors are just that: investors
As a courtesy, filmmakers may allow showing a cut of their film to investors. However, it’s important to specify, not just verbally but in the actual contract, that the film’s producers and director retain final cut rights
Manage expectations. Clearly specify what investors can expect in return for their $50,000 or $100,000 investment. A partnership? A tax benefit? An on-screen credit?
Note that public financing for documentaries in Canada dictates how contracts must be structured, as opposed to the US, where it’s possible to designate Pool A and Pool B investors, with different terms, incentives and payback schedules
With all the new outlets available for the distribution of non-fiction films, many believe we are witnessing the decade of the documentary. Also, while a $22 million gross for the Mister Rogers feature is an outlier, there’s now potential for such films to reach audiences outside of limited theatrical runs or a brief broadcast window. And along with the broader landscape for distribution come new sources of enthusiasm and funding. James J. Yi is optimistic about the prospects for filmmakers but reminded the audience at the Hot Docs conference that documentary funding is a particularly difficult process. “If possible, he said, look for an investor with a more philanthropic mindset.”
For more information on industry standards for documentary financing and crediting, see this recently released report from the DPA (Documentary Producers Alliance).
“In the last 10 years, we’ve seen more changes than in the previous fifty, and it’s all due to digital technology,” said Hulu Chief Data Officer Jaya Kolhatkar while speaking at Collision, one of the tech world’s biggest conferences, held recently in Toronto.
By now, most of us have heard about streaming services’ deftness with deep reservoirs of data to make viewing recommendations and encourage extended viewing sessions. But what is less known is how data impacts almost every corner of the streamers’ operations and strategy. At Collision, Hulu’s Jaya Kolhatkar and Amazon Studios’ Head of Marketing Mike Benson offered up examples of the ways they’re using data that go beyond the personalized recommendations that keep us on the couch longer than we initially planned.
Netflix is undoubtedly the elephant in the room, with a 2019 content spend of $15 billion, about 3 times that of Amazon’s $5 billion and almost 7 times that of Hulu’s $2.5 billion. Also worth mentioning is that Hulu is a domestic platform and its core service is ad-supported. So for now at least, it’s playing in a very different space than Netflix and Amazon. With the recent full takeover of Hulu by Disney, the expectation is that Hulu will experience significant growth in the next 5 years and compete more directly with the other large streaming companies. Analysts estimate that, with the access to Disney’s catalogue, Disney’s upcoming shift to a direct-to-consumer model and its considerable marketing muscle, Hulu will grow from its current subscriber count of 28 million to 40 to 60 million by 2023 or 2024.
What Hulu does with its 15 billion daily data points
As CDO, Hulu’s Kolhatkar oversees a team that analyzes the fifteen billion data points generated each day, and uses this cache to inform almost all the decisions the company makes, from product development to programming to ad targeting. With 28 million subscribers, 85,000 episodes of programming and thousands of content partners, there are many decisions to be made, and on an ongoing basis. Kolhatkar explained how Hulu leverages the data to understand the particulars of its audience behaviour. For example, the average Hulu viewer is 31 years old, a full 20 years younger than the average broadcast or cable TV viewer, and therefore has very different tastes and expectations. Hulu knows these viewers well, armed with each one’s search history and second-by-second behaviours such as scrolling, rewinding, fast forwarding and pause frequency. To augment its profiles of audience clusters and members as well as sharpen its ad targeting capabilities, Hulu also purchases third-party data.
How does the company think about merging all this data with its decision-making processes? Kolhatkar explained that in big data circles, people talk about ‘the 4 V’s’:
Volume
Velocity
Variety
Veracity
In other words, how much data do you have, how quickly is it being accrued, how heterogeneous is it, and how accurate is it. Data scientists and analysts then mine this raw data according to these attributes, with the objective of creating a fifth V, which is value, specifically creating value for the viewer that in turn creates value for the business.
For example, there’s Hulu’s sophisticated CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system, which houses the data at the level of the individual viewer and customizes offerings both inside and outside the app, with features such as push notifications and email, designed to increase viewer engagement and satisfaction. The company also uses AI and machine learning to reward binge viewing (defined by Hulu as more than 3 episodes consumed in one sitting) with an ad-free viewing experience. Also being experimented with are less intrusive ad formats, such as those served on the screen when viewers hit the pause button, as well as ‘situational ads’, described as ads that “target binge viewers with a creative that is situationally relevant to their viewing behaviour”. The company’s plan is for half of their ad revenue to come from these new ad formats by 2022.
Amazon looks to experiential marketing
In some ways, Amazon Studios competes with the other giants in the streaming space and in some ways, it does not, as it’s a perk that comes with an annual subscription to Amazon Prime, a service that provides free shipping, along with access to digital music, video and book content. Even though it’s an add-on to what is principally an e-commerce offering, Amazon Studios is still spending billions on content each year and knows it's competing for its customers’ time across an array of services and platforms.
As Amazon Studios’ Head of Marketing, Mike Benson is tasked with figuring out how to use data to anticipate the size of a show’s audience and how to keep fans actively engaged in-between their binge viewing sessions. Benson used a classic principle of marketing to explain the mindset he uses: “You either think in terms of getting more customers to buy what you’re selling, or you can think in terms of getting existing customers to buy more, or buy more often.” Benson and his team therefore use data to understand how to put shows in front of the right people, to determine which ones are likely to satisfy niches and which ones are likely to be hits, and they then allocate resources accordingly.
That’s how Benson and his team decided upon an ‘in real life’ brand activation for the popular Amazon series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel in late 2018. The concept: bring New York City’s legendary Carnegie Deli back to life, albeit temporarily. The deli first opened in 1937, experienced its real heyday in the 50s, and then closed its doors in 2016. It was known as a popular hangout for comedians in the 1950s and is itself a character in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Benson and his team came up with the idea of a week-long Carnegie Deli pop-up, complete with 1950s prices, period-specific design elements, rotary phones that let you eavesdrop on recordings of imagined conversations from nearby tables, and even anachronistic messenger boys who delivered the news about the re-emergence of the deli to press and social media influencers.
As one might expect, the lines were often hours long, though 11,000 New Yorkers managed to get served during the Carnegie’s comeback. But the real upside was the buzz, the positive sentiment invoked, and the media impressions created by brand activation: over 3 billion impressions in total, with 70 million reached on social platforms through deli visitors’ posts on the likes of Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook; and an overall positive reaction to the week-long event pegged at 98%. As Benson put it: “Social scales the experience.” To build on the success, the activation was not a ‘one and done’. The pop-up also received coverage via traditional media, through outlets ranging from The New York Times and Vogue to the Today Show and Entertainment Tonight. Also, to keep the buzz alive, it was brought back as a mobile pop-up in 6 locations in New York City in May of 2019.
Several years into the move to streaming and data-driven entertainment, the biggest players are demonstrating how far they’ve come from pulling data from viewer behaviour and pushing thumbnails to screens. Today, a blend of on-screen and off-screen initiatives is keeping the data points flowing in both directions, from platform to person and from person to platform.
Are trailers miniature versions of your film? Are they marketing tools? Are they fundraising tools? Or are they mood creators, offering just a taste of what’s to come from the finished product?
The answer is yes to all of the above.
That’s because there’s more than one kind of trailer. Some are intended for fundraising, some are designed for audience engagement on digital and social platforms—before, during, and after production—and some are to showcase the finished product and hopefully draw in the hordes. With documentary trailers, which were the topic at the recent Hot Docs Industry Conference held in Toronto, there’s the added challenge that the story you start with may not be the one you end up with.
So what’s a documentarian to do?
A group of producers, filmmakers, and editors came together at the Hot Docs 2019 conference to share their knowledge of things non-fiction with people interested in tips for making the best trailers. For documentaries, trailers are often the number one marketing tool, and not just in their final form. As many documentaries start their lives as indie projects seeking to drum up interest on funding platforms such as Kickstarter and Patreon, sneak peeks and early montages are often important parts of the filmmaker’s toolkit.
“Death, grief, and older women”
The New York-based brother/sister filmmaking team of Jonathan and Elan Bogarin learned about the multiple use cases for trailers early on in the development process for their documentary 306 Hollywood, described as “an archaeological excavation of their late grandmother’s house.”
The two siblings started the project by self-funding it with dollars from their day job, which is their company that produces digital media for museums and cultural organizations. According to Jonathan Bogarin, figuring out what approach to take with an early trailer for the film was anything but obvious. “We had a not famous grandmother, she died, my sister and I went through her stuff. That’s a terrible description for a trailer.” So what the Bogarins did instead was opt for a visual treatment that expressed the underlying themes of the film. “Death, grief, and older women,” said Jonathan. “We used art forms that come from outside the world of documentary, like mythology and literature, and this approach helped us get to those who otherwise wouldn’t engage with the story to engage with the story.” One review of the film said it felt like “a whole new way of tackling documentaries,” and that the filmmakers looked at their family “through a Wes Anderson lens, with a tone so playful and visually poetic that it drops into surrealism.”
When asked when they started working on the trailer, Jonathan Bogarin answered, “As it became necessary,” which in this case meant just before they came to pitch the project at Hot Docs 2017. “We had an editor we were already paying a weekly rate to, so we just put her full time on the trailer, and did the whole thing in a little over a week.” 306 Hollywood became the opening-night film at Sundance 2018, was featured in 35 film festivals, and broadcast on PBS. “And we didn’t get any outside dollars until two weeks before Sundance,” revealed Bogarin.
Think “Back to School”: A trailer is like an essay
Toronto-based editor Christine Armstrong, who has a long track record in TV, shorts, and feature films in the United States and Canada, says she approaches the task of creating a trailer in a back-to-school manner. “It’s like writing an essay. Know your thesis. And then ask yourself: What does the director want to say or convey?” Sometimes editors are tasked with creating an “in-between stage” trailer to demonstrate progress made to date for funders and broadcasters. Armstrong said this is the moment when filmmakers look at the footage they have, and then need to think about what the threads and themes are. She found herself in this situation when working on a mid-stage trailer for Desmond Cole’s The Skin We’re In, a documentary that aired on CBC described as “the Canadian contribution to the Black Lives Matter movement.” Because the story was still in the process of unfolding, Armstrong’s solution was to construct what she called “a more ambiguous narrative,” leaving space open for interpretation and for the footage that had not yet been shot.
A promise not to waste the audience’s time
Producer Mila Aung-Thwin of Montreal’s EyeSteelFilm had additional insights to share about the construction of mid-stage trailers, in which the filmmaker often has the choice between showcasing sample footage and creating more of a “teaser” type of trailer. The former puts the filmmaker in the position of having to show an actual scene unfolding, as opposed to a montage of edited highlights, and according to Aung-Thwin, “a scene shows that you’re actually a filmmaker.”
He also shared some of his experiences as producer of the 2007 feature documentary Up the Yangtze. The film is the story of the building of the world’s largest hydroelectric dam on China’s Yangtze’s river, which also marked this largely rural area’s shift from an agricultural-based economy to an industrial one. Aung-Thwin notes that though the film was passed on by a big Canadian distributor, it ended up becoming what he described as a “secret hit,” with $2 million in North American box office. “We didn’t expect any of that. But the audience found the film,” which he partially credits to the various cuts of the trailer that were posted to the then-new video sites YouTube and Vimeo.
With close to three dozen documentary production credits to his name, Aung-Thwin knows that a trailer has many functions. But when asked to define what a trailer is really for, he replied, “It’s a promise to the audience that I’m not going to waste your time.”
There are official co-productions, with the close to 60 countries that Canada has treaties with, but there are also other ways to get your film, TV, or digital project made that involve partnerships that aren’t necessarily part of bilateral treaties. With the market for entertainment being more global than ever, partnerships have gone from a way to dip into more than one bucket of funding to a whole new way of getting projects made and, perhaps more importantly, new avenues for getting them seen. A number of sessions at the Hot Docs industry conference held recently in Toronto spoke to the array of new financing and production options available to documentary filmmakers that include, and go beyond, conventional co-production structures.
"There's never been so many places for long form content to go"
WGBH Boston is home to World Channel, a factual programming network that describes its missionas presenting documentaries that “examine and celebrate the human condition through personal stories from around the globe.” World Channel Executive Producer and Editorial Manager Christopher Hastings explained his programming mandate to the Hot Docs conference crowd this way: “We’re trying to get as many voices that you wouldn’t otherwise hear from.” What that has looked like in practice up until this year is short form and long form documentary content dealing with topics ranging from social and cultural to environmental and political, acquired from independent filmmakers in and outside of the U.S. Starting later this year World Channel will be expanding the way it works by moving into co-productions. As Hastings put it, “What we’re finding is that a little money from here and a little money from there really helps get things across the finish line.” And what lies on the other side of the finish line for a World Channel documentary is 38 million people reached annually, with an audience that over indexes on diversity and has a viewership that is 50% under the age of 50, an unusual feat for a public broadcasting audience.
On the commercial networks side there’s also cause for optimism. "There's never been so many places for long form content to go", said ABC News Senior Producer Terri Lichstein. Among ABC’s recent documentary productions are the 6-part series 1969and Unfaithfully Yours, the story of the fall of televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, which Lichstein points out brought in a whole new audience of younger people who didn’t live through the glory years of Bakker’s PTL Club television ministry.
From Film Fest Favourite to Network TV, From Network TV to Podcast
Perhaps most interesting about ABC’s activities in the documentary space are the ways in which non-fiction content is being adapted and sometimes even taken cross-platform. One example is ABC 20/20’s The Wolfpack, a television adaptation of the documentary that told the peculiar tale of 6 siblings who spent most of their lives locked in a Lower East Side Manhattan apartment, culling most of their knowledge of the outside world from movies. “We saw it at Tribeca and were so blown away by it that we wanted to do something for the network”, revealed Lichstein. “We used some of the doc but also did new interviews and were able to create a new entity that aired on ABC.”
More recently the network has been experimenting with concurrent podcast and broadcast production, as was the case with The Dropout, the story of ex-Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes and A Killing On The Cape. On top of being able to enjoy some of the efficiencies that come out of producing audio and video at the same time, Lichstein pointed out that the network was able to reach a whole new audience with the audio versions of the story, an audience that over the past few years has been moving away from network television and toward streaming video and audio entertainment.
To Co Pro or Not to Co Pro?
But how does one decide if a co-production is the way to go? Co-productions are different from regular productions in many ways, not the least of which is that they multiply the usual difficulties encountered by a factor or of two or three. According to Ina Fichman, a producer with dozens of producing credits, the most recent being the France/Canada collaboration Inside Lehman Brothers, "It's not just a financial transaction, it's a creative and business relationship. I have to feel I can navigate those relationships, and that there’s respect on all sides”, she added.
Paul Cadieux, a veteran with 150 co-productions to his credit, among them the 2019 feature documentary Gaza, knows from experience that agility is also key. "If Plan A doesn't work there are still 25 other letters in the alphabet.” There’s also something to be said for creating ways of working as you go, according to Cadieux. “If you get through 1 co-pro then you’ve got a model that can make it faster and easier in the future.” At the same time, producers need to be aware of the various non-negotiables that come with doing a project as an official treaty co-production. “It generally means a lot more legal fees and lot more requirements”, Cadieux reminded the audience. “Vs. co-financing partnerships where you work it out on a case by case basis.”
And there definitely are some red flags producers need to be aware of. “Changing the composer may not be a big deal in some countries in terms of the bottom line and tax incentives”, points out Cadieux, but in Canada it is. He remembers a co-production earlier in his career with France, during which he received a call from a counterpart in France who said, “You know those things we were going to do in Canada? Well now we’re going to do them in France.” As Cadieux reminded that producer, and the audience at the Hot Docs conference, “It doesn’t work that way.”
One way to think of the world of theatrical releases and TV schedules is as limited shelf space. There are only so many cinemas and so many slots on the TV schedule, so the odds of getting one are not that great. And now, with streaming being the preferred mode of viewing for many, the very notion of limited shelf space gets thrown aside, just as it has for retail since Amazon came along. So does the seemingly endless shelf space of streaming and video on demand mean that the distribution bottleneck has been solved?
Not at all. But it does look markedly different.
Both producers and distributors can benefit from a new approach to the slate of work that comes after the picture is locked, specifically one that blends marketing and distribution activities together. This was the sentiment put forward by Jon Reiss at the Hot Docs Industry Conference held recently in Toronto. Reiss is a documentary filmmaker and author of Think Outside the Box Office and Selling Your Film Without Selling Your Soul. And while Reiss has spent the bulk of his career in the trenches of indie and DIY filmmaking, he assured the capacity crowd at the Hot Docs session that “the fun and miserable process of doing it on your own can also be the fun and miserable process of doing it with a distributor.”
Whether you go the route of doing things largely on your own or decide to share the fun and misery with a distribution partner, Reiss believes there are a handful of new skills and perspectives filmmakers can benefit from familiarizing themselves with, particularly when it comes to everything that happens once the production phases are complete. “50% is making your film. The other 50% is trying to connect with your audience,” he reminded the producers in the room. Not only that, Reiss estimates there are about 50,000 feature films released each year, and 20,000 documentaries. That’s a lot of supply, and even with all the new buyers at Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix, the competition for those slots is keen.
So what can filmmakers do to increase their chances of success? Understanding the new contours of the marketing and distribution landscape is critical. That means learning about the various elements now expected from a movie marketing campaign – from traditional press and promotion to digital and social media – and how these activities can be interwoven with distribution efforts using new tools and techniques.
About 10 years ago, Reiss came up with the concept of a PMD, a producer of marketing and distribution, to fill precisely this position. This is the person who comes in for that all-important second 50% of the work, the part dedicated to finding the audience. The PMD heads up a team that might include a publicist for online and offline media placement, a social and digital media specialist in charge of everything from SEO to paid campaigns on Facebook and Instagram, and an impact producer whose job is to initiate and manage the partnerships and community relationships that help the film achieve its social impact goals. In the words of one indie film blogger: “It’s a gargantuan task, akin to herding cats, yelling into cyberspace, and looking for that needle in a haystack.”
In addition, there’s the importance of learning the language of social and digital media marketing, because filmmakers, especially independents, need to know how to communicate with PMDs, social media specialists, or digital agencies. There are some basic acronyms, like ROA (return on advertising) and KPIs (key performance indicators) and also concepts such as the sales funnel, which is a visualization of the customer journey from knowing that your product exists to taking an action such as making a purchase. Or at least that’s where it used to end. In digital, the funnel doesn’t end once the purchase is made, or in this case, the film is seen, but it can continue with a positive feedback loop of fandom and advocacy.
In other words, in the digital space marketing can also be distribution. Loyal fans can do more than just click the ‘like’ button: they can also serve as advocates and micro distribution nodes for elements of your campaign such as trailers, images, and articles.
Another unique property of digital and social media is the ability to micro-target, to go beyond mere demographic segments and reach people within specific communities and special interest groups and to do so on a city-by-city basis. That’s what filmmaker Sanjay Rawal did with his 2018 documentary feature 3100: Run and Become. The film tells the story of the world’s longest race, a 3,100-mile odyssey that takes runners from the deserts of Africa to the temples of Japan and through the Navajo lands of the American Southwest. Using the granular targeting abilities of social media ads, Rawal was able to speak directly to the communities most likely to have an interest in the film, such as people of the Navajo Nation in Arizona. The film, which began its life on Kickstarter, ended up having theatrical releases in 15 markets and enjoying some of the highest recent local box office in cities such as Flagstaff, Arizona.
Knowing the unique capabilities of the new tools available and understanding how audiences can be activated in ways previously not possible need to be in the producers’ purview. As Reiss put it during his Hot Docs session: “Your distributor is your Plan A. You need to have your own Plan B, because the distributor doesn’t always do what you think they’ll do.” And in reality, he pointed out, you often end up doing a blend of Plan A and Plan B. So it’s really about how distribution and marketing strategies can work best hand in hand and, hopefully, up the fun quotient of the process while keeping the misery part at bay.
It seems like every week there’s another company outside of the conventional TV, film, and ad agency business launching a content studio. Among the most recent high-profile examples: Canadian e-commerce giant Shopify expanding into media production, with studios in Toronto and additional personnel in New York and Los Angeles pitching in to create original film and TV productions along with a weekly video series and podcast.
Last year, indoor fitness phenomenon SoulCycle also entered the custom content space and, over the past few years, media companies ranging from The New York Times to BuzzFeed have added native advertising and branded content to their slate of offerings. In every one of these cases, the hook is that there are new and less interruptive ways for brands to capture the attention of audiences.
H&R Block Not Interrupting You on The Onion
Source: https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/07/07/native-advertising-examples
A recent panel discussion at Toronto’s TIFF Lightbox, titled “The Future of Work for Creators”, went deeper into these new avenues for content creators, bringing together producers and executives for a more detailed look at the evolving landscape. Tom Evans—who runs the Zulubot studio at agency Zulu Alpha Kilo and works with brands such as Tim Hortons, Harley Davidson and Interac—admitted that the days of earning $10,000 a day to direct a commercial are getting fewer and further between. “But now, there are so many opportunities to do other things, such as short and long form documentary for clients,” he said, and these business models are based on freelance directors.
Whether you’re a Jack or Jill of all trades that can write, shoot and edit all on your own, or a director more accustomed to overseeing multiple camera shoots, new options are emerging. The reason behind these shifts? It’s a moment of many overlaps in the business of strategy, media production and marketing. Explained Evans:
“Consultancies like Deloitte are under pressure to act like ad agencies
Ad agencies are under pressure to act like production studios,
& Production studios are under pressure to act like ad agencies.”
Not only are the structural elements of the industry changing, but so are some of the media brands themselves. Take Air Canada’s in-flight magazine En Route, for example. The publication that meets 48 million passengers annually from the back of the plane seat in front of you is being transformed into a cross-platform media ecosystem. Malcolm Gilderdale of Bookmark Content explained En Route’s expansion from print to social, digital, video and podcasting this way: “Media production for the travel sector can be a lot more than just destination marketing and travel tips and hacks. We’re interested in how travel intersects with music, with food, with architecture and with technology. And what we’re learning is that you can tell amazing stories with the backing of a brand. And you don’t have to compromise your vision.”
It may be OK to inhale, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to advertise cannabis in Canada. Shaka Licorish, Director of Culture and Experience for Aurora Cannabis Inc., a medical marijuana company expanding into the recreational cannabis market, explained just how challenging creating content for the burgeoning cannabis market is. “This is not the tobacco or alcohol industry—cannabis is a medicine, tobacco and alcohol are not—but there are some parallels, and that’s why educating consumers with narrative content about responsible consumption is going to play a significant role.” Licorish continued: “There’s a lot of noise out there, and a lot of confusion.” He cites Bill C-45, better known as the Cannabis Act, as the reason for much of the fuzziness. Referring to sections 16 and 17, the parts of the Act that govern the depiction of cannabis for marketing purposes, Licorish points out: “It’s so specific yet so vague at the same time.”
Despite the litany of restrictions, there’s little doubt about the scope of the opportunity that lies ahead in the cannabis market. In other market spaces exploring new formats for content, it isn’t about adhering to legislation, but rather how to deliver enriching content to an audience less interested in a 30-second ad and more interested in new information wrapped in a novel experience. And, in every case, it’s about understanding the larger shifts in the marketing and promotion of products, services and brands. As Zulubot’s Tom Evans put it: “As the model changes, the people you should be talking to changes too.”
Commercial web browsers followed, and tech enthusiasts around the world started logging on to the Internet. No longer would it be confined to universities and academic researchers. Four years after the Berners Lee web protocols, the consumer Internet had caught on enough to produce this now famous cartoon, showing a dog in front of a computer monitor and keyboard, looking at another dog, with the caption: “On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog.” The point was that on this new communications platform, anonymity was built in. You could be whoever you wanted to be.
In those early carefree days of connectivity the anonymity led to new forms of interpersonal communication that were, for the most part, good-natured. But as is the case with so much recreational activity, it’s all fun and games, until somebody gets hurt.
And in the past year or so in particular, people feel like they have been getting hurt online: By data breaches, through ethical missteps of the most popular social platforms, and via pernicious information masquerading as news. All this has brought issues of Internet governance, or how the Internet is managed and held accountable, in the broadest sense, to the popular conversation.
Source: https://cira.ca/betterinternet
Governing the Ungovernable
By definition, a decentralized technology such as the Internet – i.e. nobody ‘owns’ it – is extremely challenging to manage from legal and policy points of view. Furthermore, the nature of the Internet can differ substantially from one country to the next. We may think there’s one Internet, but in fact there are several. “This global resource connects us all, but it is not administered in a homogenous way around the world. Diverging ideologies have created an Internet with stark differences from region to region, and contrasting philosophies within those regions.” These were the words of Byron Holland, CEO of CIRA aka the Canadian Internet Registry Authority, the member-based organization that represents Canada in matters of international Internet policy and governance and also administers the .ca domain, the Internet country code top level domain for Canada.
Holland made this statement as he delivered the opening remarks at the recently held Canadian Internet Governance Forum, a gathering of Internet policy makers, professionals, academics, and advocates whose objective is to safeguard the original vision of a widely distributed, co-operation-enhancing communication platform in the face of threats posed by misinformation, cybercrime, and data and privacy breaches.
Canada and Internet governance
Though the players and companies are not household names, Canadians play an important role in the Internet’s operational and governance structures. CIRA, for example, broached online privacy issues years before the European Union instituted the personal data compliance regulations of GDPR. Canada is also home to Tucows, the Internet’s 2nd largest domain registry that issues millions of web domains annually. While delivering the keynote address at the Canadian Internet Governance Forum, Tucows CEO Elliot Noss pointed out that when it comes to global discussions of Internet policy, Canadians are known for being objective, rational actors. “Canadians are diverse by definition,” emphasized Noss.
On a global communications platform defined by heterogeneity, the Canadian perspective is indeed a big plus. It’s also a particularly good fit for dealings with ICANN, the non-profit organization that oversees the provision of the domain names, IP addresses, and root servers for the Internet. “ICANN is the only multi-stakeholder organization in which members sit side-by-side, in a non-hierarchical way, and that’s a fundamentally different approach to governance,” Noss reminded the conference participants.
And though one of the organizations that provides the undergirding for the Internet’s operation and stability is uniquely democratic, the global Internet is not. Outside of the western world a very different Internet exists, one in which information control through website blocking and content censorship is a common technique used by the authoritarian regimes of, for example, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, and Iran. There are also methods outside of outright site blocking that countries are using to limit information access and curtail free speech. Uganda recently levied what’s being called a ‘social media tax’ on those using their mobile phones to access Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Whatsapp. The fees are billed directly through the mobile operators, and in a country where the average wage is about $100 per month, the hit on the pocketbook was felt almost immediately. In less than 6 months, 5 million Ugandans stopped using their devices to access the Internet.
Bad Actors and Lessons Learned
A more optimistic development in Internet governance can be seen in Canada’s Bill C-76, passed in December 2018. Also known as the Elections Modernization Act, the legislation represents a major turn toward transparency in online advertising, requiring tech companies to keep comprehensive records of the sources of advertising that could in any way be considered political or partisan. In other words, lessons have been learned the hard way from the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the associated data harvesting that enabled the creation of psychographic profiles of tens of millions of Facebook users and the serving of biased ads during the 2016 U.S. election and the Brexit vote of the same year.
As a result of Bill C-76 as well as a desire to not repeat anything resembling the Cambridge Analytica debacle, Google recently announced it would not be accepting any form of political advertising for the duration of Canada’s upcoming federal election campaign. Said Colin McKay, Head of Public Policy at Google Canada, “We’re focusing our efforts on supporting Canadian news literacy programs and connecting people to useful and relevant election-related information.”
A Work in Progress
If we compare the Internet of 30 years ago with the Internet of today there really aren’t that many similarities. In the early 90s the Internet was more of a community than a marketplace, defined largely by the ability to publish without needing anyone’s permission, to collaborate across great distances, and to give voice to people and movements that would otherwise go unheard.
But when new communications technologies emerge so do new business models, new types of content, and new user behaviours, most of them unanticipated. That’s how the great open platform for global connectivity, co-operation at scale, and knowledge and information has also become the opposite: a machine for creating discord, division, and chaos.
So is the Internet the greatest thing ever invented, or the worst? The answer, paradoxically, could be yes, to both. Complex problems don’t have simple solutions, and in the opinion of CIRA CEO Byron Holland, the answer won’t lie in any single response, but in a combination of technology solutions, policy solutions, and our own digital literacy and online behaviours. “Canadians cannot remain silent, or get too comfortable,” said Holland. “The Internet we have today can be gone tomorrow if we are not vigilant.”
Further Reading:
• The CIRA report titled “Canadians Deserve A Better Internet”
You’ve probably heard the saying “reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated”, a phrase that originated in the midst of a global speaking tour Mark Twain was on in 1895. When Twain found out that the rumours had evolved from an illness to his demise he uttered the now oft-repeated phrase and then carried on with his schedule. With the marked shift away from broadcast and cable TV and toward on demand OTT services, it’s worth asking if linear TV is on its deathbed. Or could it just be the Mark Twain of media?
In the screen-based industries the hot topic for the past few years have been OTT streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime. And as you’ve probably noticed from your Twitter and Facebook feeds, people are talking about streaming fare such as The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Russian Dolla lot more than they’re talking about the network sitcoms and sports and live events that fill large parts of broadcast schedules.
In Canada there are also the OTT/streaming offerings such as Crave, Alt TV, Ignite, and Illico from Bell, Rogers, Corus, and Videotron. Together, Canadians spend about $1 billion annually on these on-demand options, making it easy to see how the rumour mill gets churning about the death of traditional TV.
A closer look at the viewing habits of Canadians would suggest that not unlike Mr. Twain, rumblings about the death of linear TV in Canada have been overstated, at least for the moment. A December 2018 report that tracks cord cutting behaviour in Canada reports that about three quarters of Canadian households still use non-OTT delivery channels such as cable or satellite TV.
For many there’s a comfort in the relationship between established viewing habits and push models of TV programming. According to GlobalWebIndex, Canada ranks #9 in the world in linear television viewing, and the linear TV numbers are particularly striking for francophone Canadians. In French Canada the average daily consumption of linear TV is highest among G20 countries, ranging from 2.2 hours daily for those in the 16-24 age bracket and 3 hours daily for those aged 55-64.The above are just a few of the surprising statistics about Canadians and linear media consumption in 2019. There are also things that are not surprising, such as the correlation between age and cord cutters or cord nevers. 45% of Canadians under 30 are either cord cutters, or those who had cable and then stopped subscribing, or cord nevers, or those who never had a cable subscription in the first place, with the percentages declining as age increases, as one would expect.
Research from Media Technology Monitor (MTM) issued in January 2019 provides additional insights into the distinct viewing habits of Canadians. It reports on a phenomenon in Canada known as ‘cord jumping,’ in which people with a subscription to either OTT or cable services cancel them, but with the intention of subscribing again in the future. This on again, off again relationship with subscriptions may be related to promotional offers, or to synching up cable or streaming commitments with special live events or premieres.
As evidenced by research on viewing habits, there’s a relaxed familiarity associated with the ‘lean back’ experience of traditional TV for some, though in the Canadian market there are additional factors affecting modes of viewing.
Industry analyst Jeff Fan recently noted that Canadian media companies aren’t witnessing the same decline in video subscriptions as their U.S. counterparts. Fan sees various factors at play, among them the fact that the dominant service providers, Bell and Rogers, “are still very much vertically integrated, especially when it comes to sports content.” Simply put, there’s a concentrated ownership of teams, specialty sports channels, and fixed and wireless distribution. Therefore, Fan points out, there’s “a larger vested interest to protect the traditional linear video subscriber base and ARPU [average revenue per user].”
As our local market has the unique challenges of Canadian content considerations and the related policy implications, the country also trails behind the U.S. in terms of unbundled and à la carte services. Through these, consumers can subscribe directly to, for example, HBO without a cable package through its HBO Now offering, or receive a variety of cable and specialty channels without the constraints of a pre-assembled cable package or subscription. These options start at from $15-$25 (USD) per month, through providers such as Spectrum, that offers 60 channels to Apple TV or iPhones for those and Philo, with a channel line-up including premium channels such as A&E, BBC America, Comedy Central, and Sundance TV, but no sports or local broadcast channels.
Other factors being thrown into the mix are the direct to consumer options in the pipeline from Disney in late 2019 (at which time the company’s contractual obligations to Netflix come to a close), Apple, and AT&T (owner of Time Warner since 2018). It remains to be seen if consumers view direct to consumer offerings for specific media brands as an addition to their media diet or as a substitute for the cable and/or OTT services they may already be subscribing to.
