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Disney Acquires Fox; Does Your Wallet Have Room for More VOD?
December 18, 2017

Disney Acquires Fox; Does Your Wallet Have Room for More VOD?

Disney-Fox-AcquisitionUnless you have been hiding under a rock (or even if you were), you heard this week that Disney acquired 21st Century Fox. A great summary of the benefits is summarized in Jeff Berman’s blog Analyst: Disney to Benefit from Scale of Fox Transaction. Historically, analysts would have listed content as being the main driver; however, many now see Fox’s stake in Hulu and the ability to consolidate and quickly launch other OTT services an equally important factor in the decision.

One of the most interesting bits of information shared by Berman was a quote from Bob Iger:

“The OTT sector “is evolving because the business of going over-the-top direct to consumer really is still a relatively nascent business—although obviously Netflix probably wouldn’t look at it that way.”

This quote was in sharp contrast to a Fortune article in June where Netflix announced it had more subscribers than Cable TV. So, if Netflix has a boat load of subscribers, how can Iger classify it as “nascent”? The obvious answer is that there is a whole world of viewers beyond the US, but the bigger picture is that as the OTT market matures, verticalization and specialization in VOD and OTT services will occur. Said another way, you will have many types of VOD subscriptions and—by the looks of it—Disney is positioning itself to offer a service for every age and interest group…including the sports fan. That doesn’t mean that these will all be distinctly separate services. They can easily be add-ons offered through an existing platform…like…Hulu?

Underlying this all is infrastructure and many in the space have used AWS to reduce their time to market. One of our predictions for 2018–2019 at Caringo is that as Amazon and Google will continue down the path of becoming formidable content creators and that Disney and others will need to become infrastructure service providers so they can bring these very strategic and core operations in house. One of the critical components to this exodus to OTT and digital video is storage.

Want to learn more? Join me and Caringo Senior Consultant John Bell for our Object Storage for Digital Video webinar. Register to attend live December 19 at noon PT/3 p.m. ET or to watch on demand.
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