Desperate to find a balance between profitability and growth media companies are throwing business models at the wall, a trio of leading execs told the IBC Conference.
“The business of content provision and distribution used to be growth at all costs but now it’s also about profitability,” said Anshul Kapoor, Head of Media and Games Market Development, Google Cloud. “That means experimenting with ad funding, ad loads and subscription with transaction services on top. Customers are taking data-driven decisions about what piece of content should be released to what business model.”
Phil Wiser, EVP and Global CTO, Paramount said: “The big question is whether media companies like ourselves or Warner Bros. Discovery will stay vertically integrated on the streaming side or whether hyper-scale companies like Google will re-aggregate consumers around video. The jury’s still out.”
Vijay Sajja, Founder & CEO, Evergent Technologies agreed that content distribution has become a push to profitability. “It’s now about offering all options to all consumers all the time.”
Citing Sony’s 450 million users in India Sajja said, “You can’t have one size fits for all the users. You need flexibility in your back office so you can offer different things to different users and monetize the eyeballs.”
When it comes to transforming the operating model of a studio like Paramount, the challenge is not the technology but “bringing people along for the ride,” Wiser said.
“Technology changes faster than people do. AI is an example which humans can get very resistant to based on what they don’t know. A big part of our time is spent educating with programs around technology. We even sit in on productions to talk through ideas rather than try to push top down.”
With Paramount on the verge of a U$D8bn takeover by David Ellison’s Skydance Media, Wiser insisted the business was in a good position.
“The good thing about being a content company is any distribution changes upstream means we’re still going to supply content into them.”
He said the studio’s current heads were “not tech-first thinkers” but that the Ellison family “have a media and technology vision which makes our job easier.”
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