SuBo on Britain's Got Talent
My jaw dropped when Brand Republic posted a story about Michael Grade, Chairman of ITV talking about charging for video clips of shows like Britain’s Got Talent.
This a classic example of a highly experienced ‘traditional’ media guy struggling with the world of digital. The embarrassment of having missed out on millions of pounds of advertising revenue during the Susan Boyle craze (because Grade and his team had failed to agree on a revenue share deal with YouTube), has lead ITV to leap to the conclusion that the only way forward is to charge between 10p-50p per clip.
I just don’t get this thinking. So, you get a viral phenomenon like SuBo on Britain’s Got Talent. It drives up the ratings, it makes the show even more talked about an popular across the globe. So, next time, instead of finding multiple ways of monetising the viral/exponential growth by maybe doing exclusive distribution deals of the content with one of the many video aggregators or social networks or even providing the content on their own ITV embedable video player – all of which could be monetised through advertising – they are going to but a great big barrier to viral growth. All this will achieve is some very mediocre content revenues and a mountain of legal costs in protecting the content that will inevitably appear on the torrents and unofficial video sites.
