Euromedia May June | Page 5

flannel_flannel 21/05/2015 18:32 Page 1 EUROMEDIA DIGITAL MEDIA INTELLIGENCE PUBLISHER AND EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Nick Snow [email protected] MANAGING EDITOR Colin Mann [email protected] CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Chris Forrester [email protected] PUBLISHING ASSISTANT Nik Roseveare [email protected] ART EDITOR Steve Overbury [email protected] COLUMNISTS Larry Gerbrandt Steve Gold CONTRIBUTORS Robert Briel - Amsterdam Dieter Brockmeyer - Frankfurt Gail Chiasson - Toronto David del Valle - Madrid Chris Dziadul Pascale Paoli-Lebailly - Paris Philip Hunter Joe O’Halloran Farah Jifri Branislav Pekic - Rome SALES DIRECTOR Sanjeev Bhavnani [email protected] PUBLISHED BY Advanced Television Limited Unit N202 Westminster Business Square 1-45 Durham Street London SE11 5JH Tel: [phone] www.advanced-television.com PRINTED BY Headley Brothers Ltd The Invicta Press Queens Road Ashford Kent TN24 8HH, UK Tel: [phone] Fax: [phone] [email protected] © Advanced Television Limited 2015. All rights reserved. Reproduction without permission is prohibited. In this issue we focus on VoD. For many years, this was the sleeping dog of the multichannel TV era; the many and various VoD efforts of American and European cable MSOs and pioneer IPTV providers met with a unanimous indifference from the audience. Poor usability, unexceptional content and overpricing all played their part in dooming early VoD propositions. But mainly it was a profound misunderstanding of what audiences, subscribers, wanted from VoD. The model was VoD as a video shop; come in and browse, then buy. Or come in with a particular programme (by which we mean ageing film) in mind and look for it – but good luck with that given the search facility is from the famous ‘blind man’s bluff’ brand. Three things changed all that: OTT, iPlayer, Netflix. Fast Internet connections meant the ability to stream shows to entire markets of homes became available. In a world where you can send anything to anybody, some people suddenly clicked; why don’t we make everything available all the time to everybody (obviously that’s an exaggeration but you get the point.) The BBC led the way with the iPlayer. As usual, it had the technology smarts to do something and, as usual, it decided because it could do something, it should. With a fre