Value Creation and Branding in Television's Digital Age

By Timothy M. Todreas

Until recently, profit in the television industry went to the owners of the conduit, the distributors of content. As the industry enters the digital age, the distribution bottleneck will disappear and be replaced by the content creators themselves. This book explains patterns of profitability from the golden age of television to the emerging digital age. Television today is not just 500 channels: it is countless millions of hours of programming stored on video servers around the world. For media companies wanting to create value in this new era, including the major networks, digital branding is key. Just as consumers manage to make their way in 30 seconds through a 100-foot aisle jammed with hundreds of boxes of cereal by reaching for a box of whatever name brand product they know and love, viewers will also navigate through the vast wasteland of content by returning to their favorite digital brand.

This book provides detailed historical data, financial models, and informed discussion of profitability trends in the industry. It offers a framework for understanding and predicting profitability and describes the nature of branding as it applies to the television industry. It shows how a handful of dominant brands will emerge as sought-after organizers of content. Investors, industry consultants and executives, policy makers, students and academics will all find this book fascinating and informative.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1567202721
• ISBN13: 9781567202724
• Release Date: August 1999
• Publisher: Praeger
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

A must for understanding the future of television

Having spent much of my career in the television industry I found this book fascinating. I would be surprised if it did not, over time, become a secret playbook for those in the industry interested in getting a leg up on their competition -- or at least in understanding what the future holds. My only minor complaint is that some of the forays into high-level MBA-type analysis were hard to follow for someone without a background in economics. Yet those occasions were rare (two actually) and did not detract much from this otherwise thought provoking and well written book.

A concise and clearly-written analysis.

Mr. Todreas brilliantly slices through the mountain of speculative bunk written about convergent media. The author concisely argues that value in the Digital Television Era will shift from distributors to certain branded content creators and established packagers. Supported by easy to read tables and a relaxed writing style, Mr. Todreas scores solid hits up and down his analysis.I recommend that all television and media professionals, as well as consultants, read VALUE CREATION to better understand their opportunities as we begin to break free of the distribution bottlenecks of the Cable Era.

Explosive! This guy knows what's going on!

I normally choose books written by well-known authors. Timothy M. Todreas is not one of them.What made me buy this book was the title, and its content: Just as mp3 and the Internet have revolutionized music and information, digital television will revolutionize the whole TV experience as well as the industry. This book held me captive from page one to the end, because it holds the answers to so many questions in my line of work, which is a consultancy services for digital television! I recommend it to anyone who is interested in where television is coming from, where it's going and what the h_ll you should do about it!