Latest Articles
ITV’s Overlay Advertising Trial Panned
Troubled ITV is experimenting with ‘automatically placed overlay advertising’ to help revive flagging revenues. NMK’s Chris Lee canvassed opinion from around the new media industry about the move.
moreMore Web 2.0 Needed In Schools
An influential think-tank calling for more Web 2.0 use in school and technology experts agree, arguing that children should get used to collaborative tools before they enter the workplace.
moreUK Council for Child Internet Safety Launches
The UK Government launched its programme to help protect children from exposure to potentially harmful content on the Internet, including some forms of advertising. New Media Knowledge spoke to AOL, one of the companies involved, to see what real impact the new group would have.
more- US Presidential Election Gets Social
- i-design 08 - Brendan Dawes, My Interactive
- i-design 08 - Simon Waterfall
- YouTube gets into Top Gear
- Goldfarming for Fun and Profit
- Sky Appoints its First Head of Mobile Advertising: an Industry Viewpoint
- Industry Welcomes Intel/Yahoo! Internet TV Tie-In
Related Articles
Brief Encounter: SpinVox
NMK's Tim Hoang interviews James Scroggs of SpinVox about the company's secrets of success and the way both the Web and the business world are likely to evolve to embrace social media. more
Content Still King
US trade body the Online Publisher’s Association has introduced new metrics to account for consumers’ behaviour online. Initial results show that content sites account for nearly half of consumers’ time, with that proportion rising on a monthly basis. more
Managing Content in a Converged World
Robin Daniels talks about the challenges to the ability of companies to retain customers when convergence comes around. more
Scoopt Sell Blog Content to Big Media
Scoopt, the world's first citizen journalism picture agency has launched ScooptWords, its blog syndication service. Now bloggers can sell their writing to the mainstream media and tag content with commercial or flexible licences... more
User Content - The Real Deal?
Since we held this event on 8th November 2005, user generated content has ballooned in simple volume. But that includes the mainstream media's adoption of it, large-scale new arrivals like YouTube and small companies springing up with user-content as the cornerstone of a variety of experimental and innovative business models, reports Deirdre Molloy... more
Related Events
Writing for the Web (One Day)
Location: University of Westminster
Price: £175.00 Reduced to £150.00 if you are eligible for a discount.
Copyright and Rights Exploitation: Film, Television and Digital Platforms (01zero-one)
Location: 01zero-one, Westminster Kingsway College, Soho Centre, Peter Street, London, W1F 0HS
Price: £110.00 Reduced to £100.00 if you are eligible for a discount.
InSync: Rights Will Make You Rich?
Location: 01zero-one, Hopkins Street, Soho, London, W1F 0HS
Price: Reduced to £0.00 if you are eligible for a discount.
Branded Content Forum (2 days)
Location: The Selfridge Hotel, London, Orchard St, W1H 6JS.
Price: Reduced to £0.00 if you are eligible for a discount.
Part 3: IPTV & User Generated Content
Location: The Arts Club, Dover Street, London
Price: £125.00 Reduced to £93.50 if you are eligible for a discount.
Rights & Personalised Content
StumbleUponOn-demand models of content delivery require rights models that fit the new context. So what rights models look workable for the era of personalised media, asks Michael Nutley...
By Michael Nutley
of
[Register and post your own comments on this
article below...]
“It’s all going to
come down to who owns the rights”.
That was the view expressed to me six months ago over lunch by NMA columnist and digital marketing specialist Tim Hayward. Since then hardly an issue of the magazine has gone by without that view being borne out.
And it’s happening because we’re moving to an on-demand culture. Interactive media always held the possibility of mass-personalisation of content; the mass uptake of broadband is making it a reality, to the extent that people have started talking about the coming post-TV era.
On-demand content faces rights obstacle-course
The BBC, for example, sees itself moving from being a producer of content to a gate-keeper. Through initiatives such as the Radio Player, the Internet Media Player, Podcasting and the Creative Archive, it is committed to giving people much greater access to content. The main stumbling block is ownership of the rights. New contracts are being drawn up to reflect the appearance of new channels, but archive material is another story. Tracing the people who own the rights to all the various elements of a programme is turning out to be a massive undertaking.
Over in the world of commercial television, the situation is different, but no less serious. ITV has already redrawn its contracts to give it online rights, but further ahead, programme-makers are looking at a future of dwindling ad revenues due to increased channel numbers and the decreasing effectiveness of interruptive advertising.
The question here is how will programmes be funded. One of the answers is through distribution across multiple platforms, allowing the same basic property to be sold multiple times. Hence the increase in the number of production companies starting to experiment with mobile video versions of programmes, or mobisodes. Once again, the crucial issues are who owns the rights, and how can their value be maximised.
Powershift from broadcasters to producers
As a result, power is moving to the production companies. When terrestrial TV was the only game in town, the broadcasters had the power. They controlled what would appear on the nation’s screens. Now, as rights ownership becomes crucial, that balance has shifted.
Increasingly though, the people are starting to question the way rights are organised. Traditionally, rights have been assigned by delivery mechanism, so the TV rights would be sold separately to the radio rights, and might have ended up being held by different organisations. But when you can watch the same piece of content via TV and broadband, this model starts to break down. One alternative, being proposed by Nigel Walley, MD of the consultancy Decipher, is a model based on time windows. He thinks that having one set of rights for live transmission, by whatever means, then another set for use up to a week after transmission, then another set for the next month, and so on, might suit developing patterns of consumption better.
In some areas, this is already happening. Rights to show football highlights are already staggered by time as well as platform, in order to avoid jeopardising the investment made by the company that bought the live rights. And such a model would suit the next phase of TV, the hybrid model of video-on-demand and live broadcast that is already on the horizon.
Rights models to reap the long tails’ benefits
But the benefit to broadcasters of this model is what is known as the “long tail” effect. Retailers are finding that, once freed by digital storage from the physical limitations of stock holding, they can make more money from the aggregated sales of content outside the best-seller lists than they can from the best-sellers.
So changing the rights structure only solves part of the problem. For broadcasters to successfully move to offering content on demand, there has to be a significant archive of content to offer, otherwise the long tail benefits don’t kick in. And in order to be able to offer that content, they have to go back to the original rights holders and renegotiate.
Michael Nutley is the editor of New Media Age.
The University of Westminster is a charity and a company limited by guarantee.
Reg. No: 977818 England. Reg. Office: 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW
© 2008 New Media Knowledge.
Site created by Green on Black and designed by Imagination
Comments
You must be logged in to comment.