When Walt Disney was scoping locations for DisneyWorld years ago, the selection of Orlando was no accident. Walt saw I-4, the Florida Turnpike and an airport and knew that “Location, Location, Location” really meant “Access, Access, Access.”
Ol’ Walt had the right idea. He knew that it wouldn’t matter how much money was poured into a project if people couldn’t get there easily.
So here we are today with Hollywood embarking on another venture—not quite on the scale of DisneyWorld—but significant nonetheless. Wayne Friedman of MediaPost wrote this week that a who’s who of studios are working with the cable industry to launch a new effort to jumpstart Video-on-Demand. The “Movies On Demand” service has been depicted as a $30 million effort to “highlight VOD services, which would heavily compete with brick-and-mortar video stores and other digital film services targeted at consumers.”
Wayne says this is a major effort that will include increased availability of recent box office hits; a sweeping promotional campaign that will encompass TV commercials, print and interactive; and a dedicated Web site called CableVideoStore.com. What’s not to like?
I’m excited that there’s a big commitment to VOD, but let’s not forget the big reason why DisneyWorld landed in Orlando and not in Outer Mongolia. You’ve got to have a simple way for consumers to get to the product, or they’re not going to be motivated to buy.
Imagine if parts of DisneyWorld were tucked away in a daunting maze of one-way surface streets and stop signs. Or if the airport could only handle short-hop flights to a few nearby hubs. You’d have people clustered in one part of the park while other attractions went unused. Or worse, you would have people who would say that it’s just not worth the effort to go there in the first place.
While operators are working hard to make improvements, cable VOD remains saddled with outdated interface paradigms, most notably an EPG extension, where VOD titles are listed as if each movie is a separate “channel”; and a flat category and title menu system, which leads to a preponderance of purchases of movies with titles that start at the beginning of the alphabet.
A promotional campaign and improved film availability windows won’t change that, but hosting the navigation interface in the network “cloud” can. CloudTV™ (Doncha just love the way I weave that term in every now and again?) can enable operators and on-demand content providers to offer customers the flexible search and discovery they need to find the titles, actors and genres they need. Just as importantly, it allows Netflix- and Amazon-like recommendation engines to help titles “find” customers, based on established viewing preferences.
And, of course, because the navigational interface is delivered as a single MPEG stream, it can provide VOD customers with the same search and discovery experience on any digital set-top box or web-connected CE device.
When DisneyWorld was just a gleam in Walt’s eye, not even he could have imagined just how big an impact it would have on its market. Nor can we know, in a world of increased consumer choice and control, just how big on-demand viewing will become.
What I am certain of is that promotional efforts and movie windows will be only parts of the success story. If we’re going to get maximum return from our VOD investment, it will be important that customers have the easiest possible access to the content that they want to see.
