TimeWarner’s COO: Make it all VOD. Whither Local TV?

At the NCTA show, TW President and COO Jeff Bewkes, told programmers they should offer their entire schedules on VOD – free. Bewkes todl those attending that they’d make their money from advertising revenues; and he pithced it as a way to preverve cable from newer platform competitors. Bewkes told the networks they should do it within a year.

from Lost Remote.

Rolling out entire program schedules as VOD offering wouldn’t mean the end of “live” television; but if this massive commitment to VOD becomes a reality, it means public television is going to have to think about VOD’s perhaps marginal impact on viewership and on-air fundraising, and – more important – the greater potential to leverage its program assets to create revenue streams, perhaps with premium offerings in addition to free content, or the creation of more “event” specials for purchase or as “pledge events” of sorts for VOD viewers.

Terry Heaton writes today that local stations are eerily silent about this – perhaps because many of them have no idea that their business model may partially collapse around them.

To paraphrase Umair Haque, when your core competency is crumbling, look to build edge competencies. For an industry accustomed to exploiting artificial scarcity, that means understanding the value chain where abundance exists. Smart aggregators help people sort and filter (themselves) in the midst of that abundance, and that’s where local media companies are missing the boat.

That means moving from the supply side of the on-demand world to the demand side. Counterintuitive? Yes, but that describes just about everything in the media 2.0 paradigm.

So if you’re an affiliate, and you’re thinking that sharing download and ad revenues with your network is the road to profitability, ask yourself this. Can I make more money as a pure content provider or as a company that helps people sort, filter and use all that content? Think about it.