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COMING TO TERMS WITH ON-DEMAND

Jul 21, 2003  •  Post A Comment

CTAM last fall undertook the enormous task of getting its arms around the growing on-demand business. Bob Davis, managing director at Dove Consulting, led the charge with the formation of CTAM’s On-Demand Consortium. He’s receiving a TAMI for those efforts.
The group came together initially last November in a one-day meeting of programmers, operators and equipment makers to assess the state of the business and to delineate key goals. The first such goal is to develop an industrywide public relations and marketing effort so programmers and operators will communicate to the press in a similar way. The second is to devise standards for reporting video-on-demand data that can be extracted from the VOD servers. The third is to advance standards around the user interface.
“We are meeting with the MSOs, because all of this data flows out of their database, to see if we can agree on these things being the standards, [such as] buy rates, usage, usage patterns, demographics, who’s buying, when they use, for how long,” Mr. Davis said. “We’ve finalized the data sets that are the top priorities of the content providers and are now working with MSOs to come up with a timeline for when that data could be provided.”
Additionally, CTAM is devising a request for proposals for public relations agencies to produce a cooperative press initiative for the on-demand service.
“This is an experiment. We think this will accelerate the growth of the industry,” Mr. Davis said.