I had an interesting (and informal) chat with the VP Sales of a large film distributor yesterday, whose responsibilities cover monetisation of content rights post-theatre. We covered many subjects, but he seemed most concerned by the ongoing decline in the DVD market; where revenues are falling due to lack of demand, BluRay is failing to prop up the market and the industry appears to be suffering from a lack of vision, similar to that which has led to the gross destruction of value in the music rights business. This is a classic strategic problem and one which cannot be solved simply. I am not, in case it was unclear, an advocate of the cognitive school of strategy! Instead, I thought it'd be fun to lay out how I'd use a hypothesis-based approach to seek and select options for turning around the post-theatre film monetisation business. To start with, I see four broad value models in this business: "buy-to-own" sales of DVDs; "pay-per-view" either through vid...
Thoughts on strategy in a Digital Economy