Twenty-First Century Fox CFO John Nallen probably won’t be invited to Netflix’s holiday party after remarks he made Tuesday at the 43rd Annual Global Media and Communications Conference. Hulu’s Yuletide event? Maybe.
“The experience right now is not great for [a] consumer,” Nallen opined when the conversation turned to Netflix, which Fox maintains a licensing deal with over the next couple years.
The executive’s beef isn’t solely with the Reed Hastings- and Ted Sarandos-run company, though — it’s more about the bigger matter of SVOD service fragmentation.
“To interact with our product, particularly if they want to go and deal with prior seasons or [a] library, they have to leave the environment they’re in and go to a different [one],” Nallen said of the current landscape.
The Fox exec looks to the British Sky TV for what he called “a model for how to have a great consumer experience inside of one environment.”
After all, Sky offers prior seasons, stacks, a full library, etc. — and all in one place, he explained.
“That’s probably the way U.S. MVPDs and the U.S. cable and satellite system is going to head,” Nallen guessed. “As a result, brand owners like ourselves are going to have a discussion with them around how we license that kind of product — not the currents, but how we license the prior product.”
Hulu, which Fox partly owns, is a bit closer to the Sky model than Netflix is, something Nallen seems to appreciate more as a consumer service. It also has better down-the-road potential to offer the “complete experience” that he seeks.
While the senior executive vice president wants all of his content to be in one place, Nallen doesn’t necessarily want a big investment made to keep it all under Fox’s own solo umbrella, and he’s in no rush.
“I don’t think [the industry is] headed to where single brands can have direct-to-consumer experiences that are meaningful,” Nallen said. “It’s too clumsy an experience,” he added, citing password fumbling between a ton of individual services as one potential problem, and the pure frustration of subscribing all over the place as another.
That said, the Nallen knows he and everyone else will eventually offer such a standalone service, but it won’t be where the money is — and it certainly isn’t currently where the “action will be,” he said. Those “will still be in the bundle.”