Dauman Nixes VOD Day-and-Date Release
Viacom CEO Also Defends Google/YouTube Lawsuit
By Gary Arlen -- Multichannel News, 6/1/2007 8:11:00 AM
Carlsbad, Calif. -- Simultaneous release of motion pictures into theaters and video-on-demand “will not happen” at least “for a few years,” Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman declared at the D: All Things Digital conference here.
“There may be a time in the future” for such day-and-date distribution, said the man who oversees Paramount Pictures and other Hollywood interests, as well as Viacom’s program networks. But he insisted that such a move would mean, “You won’t have great movies.”
“You have to make sure you have a viable market,” he said, noting that when the simultaneous release does arrive, “you’ll have a different movie-making model.”
Dauman acknowledged that Viacom’s test with Comcast of a day-and-date release via VOD and DVD is underway, but he did not reveal results. Previous reports have indicated that VOD usage has benefited from the publicity surrounding DVD debuts.
The Viacom executive focused much of his D remarks on the company’s $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube and its new parent, Google, for unauthorized posting of video clips from Viacom networks, especially Comedy Central.
The “5,000 engineers” at Google could have devised an automated process to flag and eliminate the filched clips, Dauman argued, rather than forcing the programmers to cull manually through the Web-site postings to discover their content. He added that Viacom spends “hundreds of thousands of dollars” each week to identify purloined video clips, and the cost is even more painful for smaller networks.
At a subsequent session, Google CEO Eric Schmidt dismissed Dauman’s allegations as “largely a business negotiation.”
“I think they just made a mistake,” Schmidt said. “They should have waited [to file] the lawsuit,” and given YouTube and Google more time to implement the tools Dauman desires.
Like other D speakers from old media -- or “traditional media,” as CBS CEO Les Moonves preferred to call it -- Dauman described initiatives to develop multiplatform content for distribution on emerging digital systems. He cited The Hills and L’il Bush, an animated series debuting this month on Comedy. L’il Bush began as mobisodes for cell-phone distribution.
Dauman envisioned that as “we move to fragmented communities of interest,” the media titans can “pull together” various audiences through the various distribution outlets.
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