NBC Universal President und CEO Jeff Zucker hat am 27.2. an der Entertainment and Media Conference der Harvard Business School in Cambridge teilgenommen. In einem Gespräch mit Studenten kamen einige interessante Aussagen zusammen über den Writer's Strike, Hulu, iTunes und das Big Picture:
What we know historically is every time there’s a new avenue of distribution, that’s good for the consumer. I think it’s additive to this whole process, I don’t think that cannibalizes what we have.
If anyone comes in here and tells you exactly what’s going to happen in the digital frontier and tells you what’s happening, they’re lying. What we have to do is make sure we’re playing in both worlds, the old digital world, and the analog world. The economics around these digital properties are not yet fully formed — they will be, but that’s five years at least. We can’t trade analog dollars for digital pennies.
Aber der Erfolg von Hulu hat ihn schon überrascht:
The advertisers’ response to it has been phenomenal, far greater than we would have expected. We’ve put [the library of old shows] online, we’ve been surprised at how much interest there is in it. Frankly there’s one person interested it — there’s streaming costs, you have to cover it — but that’s more than we would have had before that.
Das Ende von Network TV, das Warner Bros. TV President Bruce Rosenblum Ende Januar ausgerufen hat, sieht Zucker noch nicht dräuen:
I don’t think that that’s gonna happen any time soon. There’s still nothing that aggregates an audience like network television, broadcast television, if you’re an advertiser, and you want to reach a large number of people…If Warner Bros. wants to bypass the networks, they’re never going to be able to produce a program of the quality of ER or Friends. Digital distribution is opening up tremendous new avenues for everyone, but I don’t think it replaces the broadcast networks, the cable networks.
Die ganze Story hat NewTeeVees Liz Gannes.