Mark Halper in The Hollywood Reporter has published an interesting article about how the Finnish mobile television market has been delayed by content producers asking for mobile TV-related income. It’s a lesson Halper says should be heeded during the current Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike.
A French media group, Digita, licensed about a dozen television channels for a mobile TV trial in Finland. The trial was successful and Digita planned to offer the channels to Finnish cellular operators who would package them to mobile TV subscribers, the article says.
The beta testers were surveyed and said they’d pay $14 per month for the service, The Hollywood Reporter says. Unfortunately, the companies that licensed the programs for the trial said they didn’t have the rights to license them for commercial mobile TV services.
Long delay
As a result, instead of offering many channels, Digita was could provide only one, a music video channel. “Things turned so downbeat that Nokia even decided at the time to withhold its broadcast-equipped handset from Finnish stores,” the article says.
The article notes that it wasn’t the writers, per se, that complained. It was the copyright organizations representing writers as well as actors and musicians, although “the principles are the same” as in the WGA strike.
For Finland, the copyright organizations and the broadcasters are negotiating and Digita expects to offer many more channels. But that launch isn’t slated until the spring, about a year and a half later than Digita expected, The Hollywood Reporter says.
Heed the lesson
“If CBS, NBC and others really believe they are content companies, they should heed the lesson that Digita provides, but not take 18 months to do so.
“They should start honoring their content creators with a bigger slice of the action, rather than taking goods from them as if writers were some off-the-shelf provider of an all-in-one tonic,” Halper writes.
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