M+E Daily

At the May 12 Futuresource New Content Horizons event, Gabriel Berger, EVP of North America sales for Vubiquity, quickly touched on something that’s been on Hollywood’s minds for months now: day and date VOD with theatrical.

And he’s not only a fan of the idea, he thinks it’s a long overdue solution that traditional pay TV providers can make part of their business.

“You need to allow that more and more,” he said. “What we’re seeing is that except for sports, [windows] are collapsing.”

There’s been mostly pushback against the idea of day and date VOD for the home, mostly from theaters, since it was leaked that Napster cofounder Sean Parker was launching his Screening Room service, which would ask consumers to buy a $150 box to watch new release films for a premium price.

With traditional pay TV providers shedding subscribers left and right, and with consumers turning to OTT services more and more, folding in day and date into their services may be an option to keep subscribers from leaving.

DirecTV and other operators do day and date, but almost always limited to small indie films.

“Clearly the impact of OTT is being felt by broadcasters,” said Sarah Carroll, owner of Futuresource Consulting.

Traditional pay TV providers have other problems: they still haven’t gotten search and recommendation down in a way that makes consumers comfortable, Berger said. “Navigation is a problem,” he said. “Are you trying to dare me to watch television? It’s problematic.” And with consumers increasingly buying digital content instead of renting, that’s another area pay TV companies need to seize on. “Once a film is purchased via a multichannel video programming distributor, you have a closer relationship,” he said.

Still, Gene Hoffman, CEO and chairman of digital subscription provider Vindicia, said that bundling isn’t going anywhere soon, even with the challenges facing pay TV providers. “The bundle isn’t going anywhere, but the change is going to accelerate in the next 3-5 years.

However, Larry Namer, president and CEO of Metan Global Entertainment Group, made no bones about what he thinks is happening: in the next 3-5 years, OTT will surpass linear TV, he said. It’s just the way it’s going, he said.

Also during the conference, Jim Wuthrich, president of Americas home entertainment for Warner Bros., made a mention of windowing, suggesting that studios collapse windows even more, to help confront piracy.

“The challenge is a changing business model,” added Vincent Marcais, EVP of marketing for 20th Century Fox. “A lot of it is moving to the SVOD window.”

And a presentation by George Barrios, chief strategy officer and CFO for World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), saw him touting the success of his company’s $10-a-month WWE Network OTT platform, which has more than 1.8 million subscribers and now ranks as the fifth largest platform out there.

Barrios likes to point out that WWE Network was out before HBO Now or CBS All Access, and is currently available pretty much everywhere in the world, other than China. “Netflix like to say it’s the first global network,” Barrios joked. “I sent them an email [disputing that].”