OTT Growth Opening Up Storytelling Opportunities, Panelists Say
Growing subscriber rolls at some cable TV providers, even as the over-the-top (OTT) market booms, indicate people "really like to watch TV," said Corie Wright, Netflix director-global public policy, Wednesday at Incompas' 2016 Policy Summit. "It's not an either/or proposition -- a price point for something like Netflix or [Amazon] Prime makes it easy to add onto your core package," she said on a panel on the streaming video content marketplace.
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Allison Abner, supervising producer and writer on Netflix series Narcos, said that OTT isn't beholden to advertising and network standards means "you can tell these advanced stories. We are encouraged to tell very experimental stories." But she said "it's not like The Good Wife is sacrificing quality because they have to go to commercial break." Narcos' success in Spanish with English subtitles could lead to a genre of bilingual casting and storytelling, Abner said.
A major issue in the OTT world is the convergence of growing demand for content with the lowering barriers for entrants into OTT distribution and creation, said Sarah Hudgins, Amazon senior manager-U.S. public policy. At the same time, she said, the quality of OTT content is being driven not by the format itself but by the libraries of video content that such providers are building up, she said. "When we make a show, we know it's going to compete against the first season of Game of Thrones," Hudgins said. Multiple panelists said an increasing premium is being placed on building up libraries of content. While the linear broadcast model depended on getting viewers to tune in at a specific time, Wright said OTT content sees its value over its lifetime. "If we don't have long-tail content, plus original programming, [subscribers] will leave," Wright said.
The content world is paying massive attention to the "mobile-first" millennial generation, with that being a big motivator for Verizon's Go90 video service, said Leora Hochstein, that company's executive director-federal regulatory and legislative affairs. The company recently said Go90 video content wouldn't count against Verizon Wireless customers' monthly data limits. After the panel, Hochstein said that, as the FCC looks at other zero-rating offerings by AT&T, Comcast and T-Mobile (see 1512170030), the agency "will look at this [too], I guess." Net neutrality proponents have said Verizon’s zero-rating plan -- under which content providers can pay to provide consumers with data that doesn’t count against the data allowance in a subscriber’s monthly plan -- potentially raises similar net neutrality concerns as offerings by those companies (see 1601190070). But Hochstein said "we think we're fully in compliance, and it's great for consumers.”
On their companies' OTT priorities, Wright said topping Netflix's list are finding content with a global audience as it now has a global reach, and the preservation of open broadband networks in the U.S. and their expansion globally. Hochstein said Verizon is focused on ensuring flexibility in content acquisition.