M+E Daily

by Terence Keegan

Highlights from Wednesday’s paidContent conference in New York:

• Is Amazon “predatory” against other retailers — physical and digital alike — or has the company merely established a dominant position for itself in books and other media segments? Best-selling author Richard Russo took the former view. He lamented the plight of independent booksellers that spend time and effort to curate a retail selection and educate shoppers on new titles — only to see those shoppers leave empty handed, presumably to purchase the same books on Amazon for a couple dollars cheaper.

After being asked about the extent to which Amazon should be blamed for the business problems of brick-and-mortar retail — surely part of the situation can be attributed to physical retail’s inherent inefficiencies? — Russo said that physical retailers certainly seemed at an unfair disadvantage compared to Amazon when it came to paying state sales taxes.

“I think what you want in any ecosystem is variety,” he said of competition among book retailers. As it stands, with Amazon’s share of online book sales purportedly nearing 75 percent, “it’s becoming like a company town.”

• Charlie Redmayne, chief executive of author J.K. Rowling’s Pottermore site, sidestepped the issues raised by Russo when discussing his site’s own deal with Amazon for Harry Potter eBooks. How many other publishers could get Amazon to send traffic off Amazon.com and onto the publisher’s own site, as Pottermore has?

Redmayne first noted that Pottermore did not “drag [Amazon] kicking and screaming” into accepting its terms. “Amazon wants to make sure Kindle users have the widest possible [eBook] selection, at the cheapest possible price,” Redmayne said. While Pottermore is the exclusive seller of the Potter eBooks, Redmayne said the site’s commitment to selling titles at affordable prices — and without copy protection restrictions (albeit with watermarking technology to track piracy) — was “consistent” with Amazon’s core objectives.

Pottermore saw more than £1 million in eBook sales in the site’s first three days of operation; Redmayne said sales continue to exceed his expectations, and “surprisingly, over 50 percent of sales are coming direct” to the site, as opposed to through traffic sent from Amazon or other Pottermore retail partners.

“We have demonstrated the power of a brand,” Redmayne emphasized. “This model can work for other parties as long as they are dominant brands.”

Publishers, Redmayne said, don’t regard titles as “brands”; they still are too steeped in trade marketing, buying shelf space for a given title at physical retail. Redmayne, who himself was formerly chief digital officer of HarperCollins, said the onus was on book publishers to remake themselves as “experts in consumer marketing” to succeed in digital distribution.

• Cable networks and television production companies looking to monetize their video libraries across digital platforms face two major challenges, according to Lisa Gersh, president of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. First, networks often must confront a host of rights clearance issues (among them, talent appearances and music usage). Second, networks can be daunted by the task of “just sorting through library content” to find relevant video clips of a suitable length, Gersh said. Networks, she added, may not even digitized years-old library content yet, much less tagged it with metadata.

That’s not to say such challenges are insurmountable, of course. Rob Burnett, president of David Letterman’s production company, Worldwide Pants, noted that “our big web initiative” for “The Late Show with David Letterman” is mining the show’s “enormous” archive for classic moments. “The web is perfect for small chunks of comedy,” Burnett said, adding that at least for “Letterman,” the humor value of library content is now in its age.

• Second screen is not just for entertainment and sports. For NBC News, online second screen experiences “drive live television in a way that doesn’t feel phony,” says Vivian Schiller, the organization’s chief digital officer. Schiller said that audience engagement with TV programs on second- or even “third-screens” represented a “reject[ion]” of the industry’s previous idea to build interactivity and e-commerce functions into a single-screen experience (via the living room TV). Schiller predicted that her organization would further develop its second-screen presence over the next 12 months.