Today the business school is hosting a series of guest spreakers from Disney, CNN, Forbes, the BBC, and the Wall Street Journal to discuss the customer experience of media and communications. I dropped into a presentation by Lawrence Aldridge, SVP of Disney's Corporate Alliances.
He gave a nice talk about Disney's strategy of leveraging creative content, technology, and global distribution to grow the company. There were also a few interesting questions from the audience about piracy. His response was essentially that Disney is preempting piracy by using technology to provide legal, convenient routes for consumers to purchase media. What he did not mention was Disney's use of digital rights management tools such as traceable watermarks embedded in content.
As for Disney's stance on youTube, they seem somewhat neutral at this point. They haven't joined News Corp and NBC in their deal to provide content through AOL, Yahoo, MSN, and myspace, but they haven't inked a deal with youTube either. Perhaps they're taking a 'wait and see approach' or counting on iTunes to satisfy consumer demand for Disney content. He did highlight Viacom's $1billion lawsuit against Google for copyright infringement, which points to the ongoing war between Google and content providers over who will capture the revenues of ads tied to streaming video content. Billions of ad revenues are at stake, but some big players like Disney are still sitting on the sidelines rather than to throw their lot in with unproven, but industry backed channels. The user base of youTube is large enough to grant some leverage to Google in negotiating ad revenue deals, but it's by no means settled that Google will secure a place as the mediator between the content providers and the consumers.
I asked Lawrence to address why ESPN withdrew from mobile and why the content didn't resonate within that channel. His answer was pretty cookie cutter; they weren't reaching scale and users weren't will to pay for premium content, so they pulled the plug and moved to a licensing model. He also pointed out that Disney Mobile is doing great, which it is. I was clumsy in my phrasing, but I was really wondering what the limits of leveraging across media platforms are. Does anyone besides compulsive gamblers really need sports scores second by second? Does the nature of ESPN make it a silo within the Disney family? When should content providers license and when should they go it alone?
Disney has historically taken the licensing and alliance strategy. Perhaps the failure of ESPN mobile was a lesson in sticking to your core competencies; in this case, creating content.
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This is the blog of Richard Conn, Oxford MBA. I'm originally from Vancouver, Washington, but have lived in LA for the past ten years. So far, I've traveled to 26 countries and have a passion for digital marketing.
