The home entertainment crew fretted about online availability’s gutting the lucrative market for digital downloads and DVD releases. Network advertising executives sweated meeting their sales targets as a separate digital sales team hawked ads for online distribution of the same shows. or for international distribution, given their broad online availability. #Youtube celine dion i surrender license#Why would viewers pay for a monthly cable or satellite television subscription when they could stream popular prime-time shows like Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and 24 for free? The syndication team worried, presciently, about their ability to license reruns to secondary cable networks in the U.S. “The broadcast people, the cable people, the ad-sales people, the syndication people, the home video people, would all come into my office and say, ‘You’re going to destroy my business.’”īroadcast executives at News Corp’s Fox unit and at NBC worried about kicking the moorings out from under the $68.6 billion pay-TV ecosystem that subsidized the cost of programming (and network profits). “What was interesting is that almost everybody in the company hated it,” said one former News Corp executive. Like any corporate initiative that shakes up the status quo to position a company for the future, the first iteration of Hulu faced massive internal opposition. “We all sat there and said, ‘Shoot, what’s the alternative?’” recalls Perrette. NBCUniversal struggled over its inability to recruit a third media partner to the venture, known internally as “ScrewTube,” but decided to push forward anyway, with the support of the company’s chief executive at the time, Jeff Zucker. Viacom ultimately got cold feet, choosing instead to fight YouTube in court-a battle it ultimately lost. Disney-owned ABC saw it as a threat to the network’s own digital initiatives and demurred, saying joint ventures don’t work. CBS’s Les Moonves politely declined after in-house advisors persuaded him it would dilute the Tiffany Network’s brand. If a new video platform to be built on Hollywood content was going to emerge online, News Corp wanted to own it.įox and NBCUniversal were committed, but they struggled to win over any other digital converts. It had outmaneuvered rival Viacom to capture the world’s largest social media network at the time, MySpace. Its Fox broadcast network was at the top of the prime-time heap, thanks to the pop culture phenomenon American Idol, which helped bring audiences to its other shows, including 24 and House. Executives at Rupert Murdoch’s media company were negotiating from a position of strength. NBCUniversal and News Corp began formal talks. Perrette and NBCUniversal’s new media chief at the time, David Zaslav (who is now CEO of Warner Bros Discovery), set out to erect a fortress against the digital insurgent and looked for allies. ![]() “We were sitting there at NBC going, ‘Holy sh-t, these guys that started this company two minutes ago just got sold for a billion six-on our content,” recalls former NBCU digital executive Jean-Briac Perrette, now at Warner Bros Discovery. “Everyone was worried that we needed to control our own destiny,” says Mike Hopkins, who at the time was president of distribution for Fox Networks Group, “and not just license all of our content to third parties and then let the market develop without any exposure to it.”Įxecutives at NBCUniversal came to a similar, jarring realization: Suddenly, YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen had the resources to develop the already fast-growing site, which had amassed some 50 million worldwide users in less than a year, into a significant new entertainment platform. ![]() The $1.65 billion acquisition in October 2006 was a wake-up call. ![]() Along with Yahoo, all of the hopefuls would end up vastly out-bid by the deep-pocketed Silicon Valley company that Hollywood loves to hate: Google. Viacom, News Corp and Time Warner all sought to acquire YouTube, in an effort to bring the unruly site onto the show-business reservation. When YouTube arrived in 2005 and immediately upended traditional entertainment, media companies responded the best way they knew how: They tried to buy it. 'Binge Times', The First Book About The Streaming Boom, To Arrive Next Spring
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |