Fries
The amount of money Liberty Global spend on linear channel carriage will decline and shift to online rights, digital rights, On Demand rights, and SVOD rights.
Speaking during an investor’s call, Mike Fries, vice chairman and CEO of Liberty Global, said: “If you look at the way we spend money today and you had a pie chart in front of you with how our programme expenditures which are north of $2 billion, are being allocated today, the first point to make is that the manner in which they’ll be allocated in four to five years’ time or if you were to reproduce that pie chart in four to five years’ time, there will be some differences.
“And firstly, the amount of money we’re spending on linear channel carriage which is traditional cable channels, et cetera, no question, will decline. And the amount of money, the percentage of money we spend on online rights, digital rights, rights, SVOD rights, will increase and there might be a little bit of retrans, more retrans in there. But retrans is not material for us. It’s not material, given the size of our business. It’s not material on a cost-per-sub basis. It’s not material market to market. It doesn’t mean it won’t grow. It might grow.
“The pie itself will increase. We will clearly have a bigger pie, both as revenue grows and because we think we’re a bit underinvested in content. Convening that, in addition to changing the breakdown of that pie, we have to grow that pie probably — I’m not going to give you a number, but pretty materially, because it’s important for us to stay competitive and be aligned with our customer needs. [-]
“Yes, it’s going to increase and it should increase, because we’re underinvested in content when you look at what’s happening around us in Europe and certainly what’s happening elsewhere. We think the margins are sustainable to a large degree and things like the Olympics, we think the deal Discovery did for the Olympics is a great deal, smart for them. We will try to participate in creative ways of offering those Olympic sporting events, either through broadband or through premium services or other ways of – smart ways of getting those to customers.”
(Transcript courtesy of www.SeekingAlpha.com)
