Yahoo and Sony Map Out Digital Living Room Strategies
While there's intense interest in streaming content for living room viewing, the exact form that consumers will prefer and that will win out is still hazy. To talk about their differing strategies for reaching living room viewers, representatives from Yahoo, Sony, Clicker.com, and DBG met in a panel discussion at the recent Streaming Media West conference in Los Angeles.
"We're really a creator of content but we're also a distributor of content," said Russ Schafer, senior director for Connected TV at Yahoo. "Our primary focus is really on where the consumer happens to consume content no matter what the device it happens to be on."
Yahoo Connected TV is now in 10 million homes only 36 months after release, Schafer noted. The platform recently added tablet and phone support, so that viewers could enjoy content on handhelds and even push content between devices.
"One of the challenges you'll find is that TV and the way people consume content in the living room is not as much a search process as it is a lay back consumption process, so we created technology called Broadcast Interactivity which actually senses what you're watching on TV and then automatically finds the appropriate content if its in an app or however it needs to be presented, and it presents it on the TV -- or on your tablet or your phone, depending on what device you have in your living room with you," said Schafer.
For many years, said Jason Spivak, senior vice president for worldwide digital distribution at Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, the question for long-form content was how to get it to the television. Game consoles and other connected devices have solved that, so the question now for Sony is how to sharpen its offers for consumers, to stand out from the completion and deliver value.
To view the entire panel discussion, scroll down:
The Digital Living Room
Join experts from all sectors of the digital video world to discuss the ever-changing topic of the "digital living room" and how content producers and creators, service providers, and other video web services will thrive in this new economy. What business opportunities lie in the coming surge of internet connected TVs? What role does mobile video play in the future of the digital living room and streaming content in general? Come hear which technologies and services are poised to be the market's biggest disruptors and how content owners, producers, and distributors can capitalize on them.
Moderator: Paul Sweeting, Principal, Concurrent Media Strategies
Speaker: Chris Young, CEO, DBG
Speaker: Jeff Shultz, SVP, Business Development, Clicker.com
Speaker: Jason Spivak, SVP, Worldwide Digital Distribution, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Speaker: Russ Schafer, Senior Director, Connected TV, Yahoo!
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