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Quick Jump Menu to this Issue’s Articles April 28th, 2004 Overview It’s Live, No, it’s FTTP – On-Demand NAB – From a Telco Perspective SoapCity – Online, at Digital Hollywood and, now, at IP Video @ Supercomm
SoapCity – at Digital Hollywood and, now, at IP Video @ Supercomm
by Ken Pyle ([email protected]), Viodi, LLC
April 28th, 2004 Issue
One of the most interesting developments in the on-demand world is what Sony is doing with soap operas and the Internet. SoapCity is Sony’s low-profile effort to understand how they can monetize television content by adapting it to an on-demand world. In SoapCity’s case, the delivery method is the Internet. Mary Coller, Sr. Vice President of SoapCity described this offering as a, “web brand evolved”.
As indicated by its name, SoapCity is about soap operas, such as the Young and the Restless and Days of our Lives. All the things that many people tape and watch later at home [yes, I do have personal experience with this sort of thing]. Coller described the service as sort of a network PVR that is programmed for the user, so it is very easy to use. She described it as “soaps in seconds” as the time between ordering and playing on the PC is very fast. Pricing is typically $1.99 per episode, but there are also some package prices, such as any ten current episodes for $15.00.
The numbers prove her right, as suggested twice in her talk that they are seeing 40,000 downloads per month and 2.5 million unique users per month. Episodes are only aired once and are available for 28 days. SoapCity uses Windows Media 9, so if the link is 450 Kb/s it takes approximately 30 minutes to download the 125 Mbytes (it begins playing relatively quickly, however, as it is a progressive download).
This project has been two years in the making for SoapCity, so it is not a trivial undertaking. Encoding the content and asset management are a challenge. Until recently, there was no reason to justify digitizing, storing, clearing rights, etc. of regular television programming. The technology challenge is one of logistics, as being able to store content into libraries and then being able to easily manage the assets is something that was a new discipline.
Some of the challenges and concerns they face include:
- Storage is an issue. Ideally, they would have unlimited ability to store content.
- A more consumer friendly availability window than 28 days
- Clearing music rights is a huge issue. For instance, it took four months to clear the music for four episodes of Dawson’s Creek.
- Does the business model scale?
Their business model consists of licensing content directly from producers, so that is how they avoid advertising issues that they might have if they were licensing content directly from the networks. The producers are responsible for making residual payments to the performers. SoapCity derives income from the paid downloads, as well as advertisers.
They seem to be bullish on the future of this approach. They are looking at using the same kind of vehicle to deliver other type of programs. 75% of SoapCity customers say they would download other television shows. Mostly comedies and sitcoms are the other sort of content that people would be interested in viewing.
Moving the content from the Internet to the television is something they believe is important for long-term success. They apparently are doing some work with the PlayStation as a set-top box to bring this programming from the Internet to the television [not clear whether they are looking at the BroadQ software, which turns a PlayStation into a set-top]. They are already cross-promoting the SoapCity service on the soap operas, so the ability to order up an on-demand program via the set-top seems like a natural extension.
I am thrilled that Mary has accepted our invitation to speak at the IP Video @ Supercomm, as I believe Sony’s SoapCity could be very complementary to the networks being deployed by independent telcos.
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