Media & Entertainment19 DECEMBER - 2022s a head of development and digital media, what are the day-to-day responsibilities?CH Media is basically divided into two main business units. One is publishing, newspapers mostly. And the other is entertainment. I am leading digital platforms that we have there, our own digital initiatives, as well as business development. What does that mean? In the entertainment division, we have approximately 10 radio stations, we have five regional TV channels, and we have eight national TV channels, as well as a streaming platform. We also have four regional news platforms that combine online radio with TV to bring the best of news to the top producers and we manage those platforms down to the government. We also do business development, which basically means partnerships that we made have revenue sources, for the replay initiative, which is an industry-wide solution to monetize replay to catch up on TV experience with telcos. For the streaming platform, we have some vandal partnerships with a child telecom provider call center. Offering platform subscriptions is directly bundled into the premium packages of the telco operator. I am in charge to enable such partnerships. What are some of the trends that you're seeing in the industry? Can you provide a good industry snapshot from your perspective as well?We have seen in recent years that all the major studios, the rights owner, offer their own VOD app, for example, Disney or Warner Media. These major studios centralize the content and plan to stream first on the VOD app until they pedal back a little bit and give thought to releasing it in the theatres. There is another trend related to that wherein people buy and subscribe to multiple subscriptions. But there is a limit to that, and the appetite to subscribe to many different services is more and these subscriptions are costly as well. So, in the US it is normal to have up to four subscriptions but in the Nordics, in Europe, it is more than enough to have three or three subscriptions. Considering the sales in Europe the number should be between one and two and a half.For example, when Disney announced they had enormous growth, their initial thought was to grow to 18 million subscribers by 2024, which they reached within months of launching the online platform. They revised the forecast and announced they will soon have 260 million subscribers by the time. By now, they already have 244 million subscribers. Disney’s market is also fueled by India, a very specific market, where they have a much lower average revenue per user (ARPU), but the growth is massive. However, what Disney figured out pretty quickly is that they have a huge brand power. The best IP that one can find on the market is with Disney, Lucas Films, Star Wars, and Marvel. The incredible amounts of sequels possible with Marvel were still not enough to keep people engaged in the platform, because there was not that much content. Disney started to pull stars on the dismantled platform. And now in the US, they have done all that with Hulu and ESPN plus. They try to understand that aggregation needs to rationalize for clients. From a financial point of view, the subscription at such low costs is not feasible for companies especially when they are spending literally billions in content. For instance, Netflix reached 20 billion last year, and Disney is not far from that at all. To be able to finance that, they need more subscription costs and that's going to be a problem. Looking at the financials on Netflix, it is clear that finance is not an easy game. I believe right now it is hard for individual platforms to survive. There are a few ways for them to survive, the easiest is to come out with great content. For example, a studio has good enough content with which they can make way more money licensing those titles, rather than keeping them on my platforms. ONLINE PLATFORM AND TELCO PROVIDERS COLLABORATE TO OFFER WHOLESOME ENTERTAINMENT Paul Fournier, Head of Business Development and Digital, CH MediaByAPaul FournierCX O INSIGHTS
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