Last week, Liz Bales, Chief Executive at the British Association for Screen Entertainment (BASE) and DEGI: The Digital Entertainment Group International (DEGI) joined the OTT Question Time Online panel to discuss whether, with streaming services increasingly adopting broadcaster characteristics, the old broadcast model was right all along.
When asked about what made the broadcasting model so successful and lucrative, Liz said, “It’s really about content, consumers, and choice. In the earlier model, you had a much more captive audience with social media use significantly lower. Additionally, the content mix was sparse, it was improving but not overflowing with content. You had a ready-made audience and a market that was much easier to tap into considering the noise and disruption you have to cut through now. Today, there is real competition for ownership of the living room, audience engagement, and loyalty, with services trying to hone you into their ecosystem so you’re spending more time with them, leading to increased value and advertising revenue.”
While discussing the introduction of ad-tiering and the history of streaming, Liz said, “When you take a step back and look at the global value of entertainment, paid TV and ad revenues are a significant proportion. When streamers first came along, their valuation was driven by subscriber uptake. Now the market looks at profitability, with streamers needing to find the profitability somewhere. In the UK the largest ad spend is actually online entertainment, with the industry advertising itself in its own ad-tier which is quite fundamental in the shift of what we are advertising and to who.”
Liz was joined by Gulliver Smithers, formerly of Sony Pictures, the BBC, BBC Studios and ITV, Agathe Renard, Senior Director, Distribution, Ecosystems and Strategic Research at Bedrock Streaming, and host Kauser Kanji. You can view the discussion in full on the VOD Professional website here: https://www.vodprofessional.com/ottqt/ott-question-time-online-s5-ep1-back-to-the-future/
