Commercial innovation: Freedom to explore

The growth of IP-based consumption and the digitalization of “value” chains is driving material opportunities for commercial innovation. It’s time to get creative.

Your business models are no longer constrained by proprietary technology. You have scope to experiment with your consumer proposition, how you go to market and how you support and manage your internal commercial decisions. Much of this innovation stems from how companies are starting to think differently about the “assets” they have (customers, content, brand, etc.), and how they can leverage their value in the emerging IP paradigm.

What to watch

We see a number of emerging trends by different types of video business:

Content Creators and Broadcasters

Innovative new partnerships are sprouting between broadcasters in the advertising space: Fox, Turner and Viacom’s OpenAP initiative, or The European Broadcaster Exchange, founded by ProsiebenSat.1, TF1, Mediaset and Channel 4. Broadcasters are recognizing that they need new kinds of partnerships in the advertising space to compete with the reach and scale of the digital disruptors. Beyond advertising we are seeing broadcasters make major moves to create meaningful direct-to-consumer propositions. Disney’s sustained acquisition of content creators (including Pixar, LucasFilm, Marvel) has given it the propositional firepower to launch new subscription-based services.

Operators and CSPs

Established operators are themselves seeking to better harness the position they have in the home. As a first step, many are starting to push much more sophisticated analytics through their existing customer bases, to understand how to better serve their customers and to extract value from their existing lines of business.

Platforms

New platform-based entrants (such as Amazon) are innovating in the other direction – seeking to build relationships with content providers as they build out their video offerings for their customer bases.

Here, we expect to see significant innovation in the types of services which content providers receive from the platforms to which they license their content.