Needham & Co analyst Laura Martin says they are — and her new report making that case should rattle media execs. Martin thinks more deeply about corporate strategy and game theory than any analyst I know. And she warns traditional content providers that streaming infotainment companies including Google, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft and Vevo are shrewdly sneaking up on them by focusing on young people who like to watch videos on mobile devices including tablets and smartphones. The tech companies are “creating short-form premium videos that are difficult to monetize, and therefore largely ignored by incumbents,” who’d rather create hit TV shows, Martin says. The big guns have to pay attention to conventional programming: Attractive shows help to keep pay TV subscribers attached to today’s high-priced packages. “Unbundling threatens up to 50% of the total revenue of the TV ecosystem,” Martin says. But media money follows time, and as mobile devices become more popular we could see “advertising share shifts away from TV and toward the new premium-video online ecosystem.” The big producers are “fighting over the 0-2% viewing growth pie rather than the 50% viewing growth pie.” Martin says that she’d “feel better” about the long term prospects for Big Media “if they were allocating 10% of their budget increases to short form premium video…designed to push young viewers toward their hit TV shows.”
CANNES: ‘Jane Got A Gun’ Moving Toward U.S Deal

if by, ‘too lax’ you mean are the film companies about to be slammed just like the record companies because they are slow moving and set in their ways, the answer is, ‘absolutely.’
#FilmSchool
Large media will adapt faster the small media can monetize.
Small Media will NOT win against Large media for the simple fact they will be unable to afford and employ the large groups of people required to make serious video productions.
Can’t tell you how many people have almost missed their stops on the train watching movies or whatever on their mobiles! Too funny watching them scramble at the last minute or pulling on the emergency to get off!! LOL!!
For a long time a could not figure out why anyone would watch a movie or a series on a 10″ tablet. Last year I bought one now I carry it everywhere, and I’m not some twenty something, I’m a baby boomer. If the big 4 don’t watch out time will pass them by. Each year they lose a few more viewers, the internet with Hulu and Netflix is all anyone really needs.
Absolutely. I’ll straight up, without shame, admit here that I download television episodes online because they are impossible to access anywhere else. CBS is the biggest offender here, refusing to stream anything more than the 3 most recent episodes of their shows on Hulu, Netflix, or even their own website. I don’t mind paying, heck I have a subscription to both Hulu and Netflix, but none of that does me any good if their content isn’t available at all. Am I willing to pay 2-3 bucks per episode on iTunes? Absolutely not, because at those prices they end up being more expensive than purchasing a physical DVD or Bluray copy, which is mine forever, but I would pay CBS a monthly subscription of say 10 dollars if they allowed me access to their entire library. Maybe that isn’t as much as they want for such a service, but it’s ten dollars a month more than they are getting from me right now.
Btw, these are only broadcast shows I’m downloading, as I don’t have to download Walking Dead, Game of Thrones etc because THEIR networks put those shows online in a friendly, high quality fashion. You could learn a lot form the basic and pay cable networks, Les.
Infotainment companies aren’t just attacking Big Media on the tablet front. They also want to leapfrog ahead in quality as well by delivering 4K (UltraHD) content to homes and devices. How long did it take US broadcast stations to upgrade to 720p/1080i? 10+ years? And imagine how much that cost.
Ask US broadcast to upgrade to 4K in the next two years and they would say it would be impossible and also extremely unnecessary. Who even owns a 4K device, right? You’re talking about resolutions that even Bluray doesn’t currently deliver. Unfortunately, Apple is already leading the charge there with their Retina Display marketing and iPhone ubiquity. The Retina Display MBP 15″ has a 3K monitor, the Nexus 10 is 2K for $400 and Sony’s Playstation 4 will push out 4K video as well. Ultra HD (4K) was also the new sexy at this year’s CES and all the big electronic companies are hoping it might be their ticket to the next big wave of TV sales.
But what about delivery? This is where Silicon Valley shines. Youtube can (and does) already stream at 4K. Netflix announced its plans. Unlike broadcast, all it really takes for tech servers to upgrade from delivering 1080p to 4K is more bandwidth. Same machines, more bandwidth. It’s part of the reason why Google cares so much about building out its own fiber lines. It doesn’t even matter to them if the they make money off of it, as long as they can force the other telcos to compete against them and offer 100 MBps up/down.
But who can afford to acquire content in 4K? This is where Silicon Valley is getting a lot of help from the big electronics companies and their race in Moore’s Law. The Sony F35 camera, the $250k camera used to shoot Alice in Wonderland, Tron Vengeance, Superman Returns, etc, was a 1080p camera. It’s successor, the Sony F65 shoots 4K and dropped in price to $65k. Sony’s most recently released youngest sibling, the F5, can shoot 2K at $16k or 4K for $20k. The F35 currently sells for $12k on ebay, btw. At the rate technology is moving, it won’t be far fetched to see consumer 4K camcorders in the $1k range in the next 3 years. Heck, your iPhone might be able to do it.
Which leaves the last component, content creators for 4K. This is the trickiest part and big media’s biggest stronghold, but ad dollar swings like those mentioned in the report can quickly turn the tides. And considering a Kickstarter funded documentary short just won an Oscar and Freddie Wong’s group on Youtube just set a new milestone by raising $800k for the second season of their web-series, the indie community is making good strides. Google’s Youtube is also cultivating an army of hungry & entrepreneurial desktop filmmakers soon to be armed with 4K cameras.
It’s now up to the ISP’s to deliver these high def goodies in quality streams that don’t hiccup or freeze in the middle of an episode. In fact, most video streaming quality pretty much sucks, as it relates to both picture and speed. What’s the point of creating a Bluray+ quality video if it can’t be delivered as such to mobile devices?
None of my large sports league clients have any interest in adopting 4K outside of a couple cameras here and there around the fields, and btw, these cameras are only being used to zoom into a 1080 crop.