One of the techniques we've been playing with this year is The Digital Nightmare Competitor, a framework for stretching the thinking of executives in a business by showing them how their industry could look strategically, operationally and economically in a digital world. I recently did such an exercise for a studio client and thought I'd share a nightmare I particularly like. Think of it as a Grinch-like Christmas present :)...
November
5th 2026, London
In late trading, shares in Wintermute,
the apex media business of the 2020's hit a record high, valuing the business at more
than $400Bn. This success marks a remarkable rise to prominence for an organisation
barely a decade old.
Classical
disruption started with the customer
From its launch in late 2016,
Project Wintermute
targeted
people turned off by the complex media distribution and rights landscape of the
mid-2010’s. By offering a single monthly subscription to unlimited premium
digital content at a significantly lower price point (EUR 15 a month, without
contract) than the EUR 50 (typically with a 12 or 24 month contract) or more
that the traditional pay TV industry charged, Wintermute
created a ‘no-brainer’ decision for tens of millions of younger consumers
around the world. Basing the experience around mobile and making it impossible
to share subscriptions through ‘Totally Secure Streaming’
technology or find content without ‘Total Social Search’ (which only allows you
to watch if you’ve been recommended and only being recommended if you’ve done
likewise) only made Wintermute more cultish and compelling.
Top-to-bottom
data redefined the industry’s value chain… backed by billion dollar parents
Although giving early equity to
A-list content creators certainly helped build momentum, Wintermute’s
unreal economics are really a combination of Digital Economy technologies and
business concepts.
Making a virtue of short content windows enables the company
to manage the cost of essential 3rd party content. Artificial Intelligence enabled Wintermute
to assess the quality of talent and creative concepts from the structure of a
pitch and find great behind the scenes and on screen talent from their own job
network with radically greater success than the industry they replaced.
Combining funding with talent in a single platform created an instant and
enviable ecosystem of virtual independent producers. And with billions of
dollars of backing from the Valley’s largest funders it was able to ride out
years of heavy spending while it built global scale, leaving Wintermute
free to compete with the incumbents in an unequal competition between a global
over-the-top player and local oligarchies.
Starting and staying
lean is an essential strategic advantage
Despite its rapid growth, Wintermute
remains a very small organisation,
assembled from an ecosystem of seven-person, multi-disciplinary ‘icebreaker’
teams, each of which owns one of the business’ small set of outcomes. Each team
operates semi-autonomously, drawing in external experts where they’re needed,
resulting in a business that does the job of tens of thousands with a few
hundred full time employees. By building its business around talent, rather than vice versa, Wintermute believes that it remains perfectly placed to lead further disruption in the trillion-dollar global media industry.
Comments
Post a Comment