By Roger Jackson
Previously: Secret 19-Point VoD Marketing Plan, Part I
Here’s Part II of our 19 point plan…
This post was going to be Part 2 of Two. But I try to avoid overly lengthy posts. And feedback over the past couple of weeks has convinced me to focus this post on just a couple of points: VoD Windowing, and Facebook Marketing. So…here are points 11 & 12 of the 19 point plan, with the final 7 to follow in a fortnight. It’s not bait & switch, just that, as the Dude said, “new shit has come to light.”
11. VoD Windowing: The film industry is adept at double, triple and quadruple-dipping. They are one of the few businesses that have found a way to sell the same product to you over and over …and over again. It’s genius if you think about it. You pay to watch a movie in theaters, and then maybe you buy or rent the Blu-Ray or regular DVD, or you catch it on Cable VoD or subsequently online Transactional VoD. And even on iTunes or Amazon or Vude there’s a form of mini-windowing by this oh-so-devious business — the choice of watching the film in Standard Definition, or pay a buck extra for HD. A few months (or, these days, weeks) later it’s on television pay-per-view, which more or less lines up with Subscription VoD, like Netflix. And somewhere in there you also “pay” (via your airline ticket) to watch it on that flight to Paris. And while this is definitely a business model under pressure, with shrinking windows (and therefore profits) it’s still very much the way Hollywood does distribution…and VoD is no exception.
