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OTT Blitz Week: Flexibility adding and canceling channels

July 30, 2020

Maribel Ramos-Weiner

The Future Of OTT Bundling

Flexibility to make it easy for consumers to add or cancel subscriptions to a channel, confusion among users regarding how to find contents, reduction of big channel packages, offering alternatives and advertising on digital TV, among others, were some of the trends highlighted on the panel The Future of Bundling Over OTT on the first day of the virtual event OTT Blitz Week organized by Fierce Video.

The panel was comprised by Bob Leighton, Senior VP Programming at Liberty Global; Stefanie Meyers, Senior VP Distribution at Starz; Jim O´Neill, Main Industry Analyst at Brightcove; Greg Riker, Senior VP Sales for the Americas at Metrological; moderated by Jon Watts, Director of Strategy and Editorial at Beet.TV.

Before the panel, there was a fireside chat with Warren Schlichting, former Executive VP and Group president of Sling TV, and Dade Hayes from Deadline Hollywood. Schlichting highlighted that all the companies specialized in channels that are launching their own OTT, as is the case of WarnerMedia (HBO Max) have a huge gap in marketing to consumer experience that other companies such as Roku, Netflix, and Amazon already have.

“They must inject this knowledge in their DNA if they have been channels all their lives. There is a huge gap and enormous pressure by the stockholders to see results,” he said. He also mentioned that big operators like Comcast do not want to simply be broadband providers, that is why they are launching alternatives such as the Flex boxes for streaming. “The path is competitive and changing,” he added.