If you want to know what the future of content is, ask James Bond …
Amazon and Apple are bidding for the rights to upcoming James Bond films, competing with traditional players such as Sony, Universal or Fox, and possibly willing, according to The Hollywood Reporter, to outmatch their bids. It is still too early to know whether or not the negotiations will come to anything, but if Apple or Amazon finally got the rights to the megafranchise, we could be talking about a very important change in the way big productions are distributed, and how new players are willing to do things differently.
What happens now that the big technology companies are breaking into the content market and its distribution and win awards? In a word, disruption.
Disruption is what happens when a technology company, by considering a global market, a global distribution channel and a series of very different business models to those in the industry can offer more money than a traditional content company that focuses its activity on a world artificially divided by geographic zones: a different way of looking at the business, with infinite possibilities that so far have scarcely been developed. Most of the traditional actors we know in the entertainment industries are playing by the rules of the last century, a world before YouTube, Amazon or Netflix, in which Apple only made computers, and in which rights were negotiated region by region, country by country or support support. The approach of technology companies is, in that sense, completely different, and that leads them to be able to compete in a potentially much more efficient way.
Traditional TV is only watched these days by the over 65s. Everybody else watches in myriad other formats. Live events are virtually the only thing that still bring people together at the same time. Prediction: in a very short time, the rights of major sports competitions and live events will no longer be in the hands of traditional television channels, but technology companies willing to pay more based on being able to make more. Imagine a time when the global rights of Spain’s La Liga soccer division, the NBA or other sports are managed by Amazon, Apple… or Facebook? It may not be that far into the future.
(En español, aquí)
