Coda
by Staff -- Multichannel News, 8/17/2008 8:00:00 PM
Disney Grants SVOD Wish
How does a cable operator gain subscription distribution rights to a trove of popular movie studio titles? In the case of Charter Communications, you just ask for it.
This past Spring, the St. Louis-based MSO initiated talks with The Walt Disney Co. about offering family films such as Honey, I Shrunk the Kids via subscription on demand. The recently launched 20-hour service generated over 3,000 subscribers in less than a month, according to Charter senior director of video product management Maria Rothschild.
Charter and Disney's $4.99 “Disney Family Movies” package offers 10 to 12 titles a month, including Air Buddies; Disney Princess Enchanted Tales: Follow Your Dreams; Tarzan & Jane; and Geppetto, as well as six to eight classic Disney animated shorts. She said the package is split into genres such as princess movies, adventure movies and family movies.
“These are the Wonderful World of Disney movies that we used to watch on Sunday nights,” she said.
Charter approached Disney in March about creating a family-friendly SVOD package that would appeal to kids and parents, Rothschild said. While the MSO offers other SVOD services, including the gay-themed Here TV and In Demand's Howard Stern vehicle Howard TV On Demand, she said the Disney package is very compelling for its subscribers.
“We initiated the idea based on the idea that our library video-on-demand content isn't as strong as we would like it to be, so we were looking for a different business model that would be more of an 'all-you-can-eat' model for our subscribers,” she said. “We felt like Disney movies were the kind of movies that kids would consume a lot of and [Disney] has been great partners in putting together the package.”
Disney/ABC domestic television and pay TV interactive media executive vice president Dan Cohen said the company was already in the midst of developing a business plan for a SVOD movie service when Charter came knocking.
He added positive VOD results for library titles such as Alice In Wonderland convinced the company of the viability of a SVOD offering.
“When you look at what's offered via SVOD today, there isn't anything like this targeted to families,” he said. “Howard Stern and [World Wrestling Entertainment] have their place, but we've heard from operators that it would be great to have something like this sitting alongside those services.”
Since a soft launch of the package two weeks ago across approximately 85% of Charter's 5.2 million subscriber base that is VOD-enabled, the MSO has already signed up more than 3,000 subscribers without the benefit of a major marketing push. Cohen said Charter has been very passionate and enthusiastic about the SVOD package.
“We couldn't ask for a better group to roll this out to first,” he said.
Rothschild added that Charter could approach other studios about creating similar packages. “I want to be able to offer a lot of movies to people on an all-you-can-eat basis, so if other studios come to the table we'd be excited to consider it,” she said.
Cohen said Disney will look to offer its package to other MSOs, but he would not reveal specific operators nor disclose a rate card for the package.
“We've had very positive conversations with other MSOs, telcos, satellite companies and we're going to distribute this much more widely,” he said.
— R. Thomas Umstead
Kudos to Multiroom TV Demonstration
A low-cost approach toextending video services to multiple devices in the home stood out at last week's “Innovation Showcase,” put on by CableLabs during its summer conference in Keystone, Colo.
Silicon Image, a semiconductor firm that helped develop the HDMI high-definition multimedia interface used now to connect many home TVs and HD converters, was chosen as the best new product idea for the cable industry.
CEO Steve Tirado said his firm showed off “a micro-client architecture” that would place an inexpensive chip on a television or other display device, with software that would go into a cable set-top, and distribute video and a user interface from the set-top to devices in other rooms.
Eleven firms made “lightning round” presentations at the confab, according to officials.
Comcast chief technology officer Tony Werner said of the Silicon Image demonstration: “We see the number of devices exploding in the home and we want to get our content to them, and we want to get our [user interface] to them, and this gives us a cost effective way” to do that in a high-quality digital format.
“Provided things go the way as we think they will, we think there's a lot of hope for technology like this and a big application for it,” Werner said.
Marwan Fawaz, Charter's CTO, also said Silicon Image could enable a cost-effective approach to popular offerings like a multiroom digital video recorder.
Tirado said the chips themselves now would cost about $8-$10 each to produce, though the cost of an eventual product was not estimated. He said it could begin being produced late this year and, after testing, might be commercially deployed late next year.
— Kent Gibbons
Kagan Report Sees Cable Ad Slowdown
New York — The cable advertising market, coming off of a strong year in 2007, is expected to slow in the second half of this year and into 2009, mainly because of continued weakness in the overall economy, according to SNL Kagan.
In its report “Economics of Basic Cable Networks,” SNL Kagan said industry revenue rose 12.6% to $38 billion and ad sales were up 10.5% to $19 billion in 2007. That momentum continued into the first half of 2008, but Kagan believes that the growth will slow in the back half of the year. Kagan forecasts that cable ad sales growth will dip to 4.7% in 2009, rebounding to 11.1% in 2010 on the back of a strengthening economy.
— Mike Farrell
'Seinfeld With Laptops' Coming To IFC
New York — The IT Crowd, an offbeat comedy from the creator of Father Ted, will be seen in the U.S. for the first time this fall on IFC.
Produced by Ash Atalla (The Office) and distributed internationally by FremantleMedia Enterprises, The IT Crowd, currently airing on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom, is about the technical support team housed in the basement of a fictitious corporation.
IFC will air the first two seasons this fall beginning Sept. 30. The third season will premiere on IFC in early 2009, following its debut on Channel 4 this fall. Each season includes six 30-minute episodes.
“The show is about a group of workmates hanging out, getting into humiliating scrapes and then getting out of them,” writer-director Graham Linehan (Father Ted) said in a release. “Seinfeld with laptops, I suppose.”
The IFC Automat is a four-hour block scheduled to launch Tuesday nights in September.
— Kent Gibbons
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