Daily IPTV Updates Power by Cogni360
IPTV Industry & Market News.- “They are all knocking on our door wanting all our content for free, and it’s so difficult when they don’t understand the costs involved and how this industry operates”. The reason I started Digital TX Ltd was due to hearing this in conversation more times than I care to remember. Time and time again I’ve heard movie studios, broadcasters, TV production companies, record labels and games publishers express to me their deep concern that the enthusiasm shown by ISPs to offer premium content is not tempered by any consideration or understanding for the processes, risks and costs involved in the acquisition of rights to their intellectual property.
When you have the same conversation with ISPs, the talk is of a highly competitive market where loss leading products are the norm and margins are forever falling. The landscape never seems to stabilise for a minute, with both regulatory and market forces changing faster than the rate of the technology that is being deployed There is frustration and bewilderment at how time-consuming licensing negotiations are with content owners, indignation at apparent arrogance and pre-paid sales guarantees, and even the most innocent of confusion as to why an industry that could seemingly prosper so effectively from technology seems to regard it with such fear and contempt.
Both industries are stepping out into a brave new world and taking commercial risks based on excitement over an as yet unproven technology. ISPs want to deploy ‘triple play’ services that include IPTV entertainment, and content owners are realising an entire new audience has emerged that they can licence the rights to their intellectual property to. Both also suffer the nagging issue of chronic piracy, but in differing ways. Ironically, they are the answers to each others’ problems. My company exists to help them understand each other and to help them build a vision of a very exciting future ahead.
The old cliché is that content is king. Now the structural issues of IPTV are reaching an initial degree of quasi-maturity (in the sense that working deployments are in place around the world and operating effectively), and both management and engineering teams have solved what are the intellectual riddles of putting the equipment into the field, the focus is now on getting hold of the right material that will attract and keep viewers. For those that have been here before, that is an absurd way of going about things as that content takes a very long time to acquire and is the lifeblood of an entertainment business.
The business of agreeing rights over the distribution of content is almost always tedious and long-winded. If you’ve ever been privy to negotiations for channel carriage, record deal signings or sub-licensing, you’ll know that Its about as unsexy as it gets – lawyers talking to other lawyers, defining every last detail of allowances, sub-clauses and limitations, for every single time the content is re-licensed to someone new. Forget cigars, champagne and dancing girls – this is solid paperwork and a crash course in pulling teeth. And it is a big boy’s game – a billion-dollar industry that everyone wants a piece of, which means you better have some serious chips to get a seat at the table. Read the whole article...
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