Media companies need to build sustainable business models to encourage new talent to create professional content for new media distribution channels, as the current linear television model is likely to disappear within a decade, according to Egor Yakovlev, founder and CEO of Tvigle Media, Russia’s leading online broadcaster.

Yakovlev told TechCrunch Moscow: “The challenge for the industry is to build new business models that allow young people to shoot a new ‘House, M.D.’ or a new ‘Game of Thrones’, not for classical linear TV channels but for new distribution models, and in a way that would compensate the expenses that they incur.”

Traditional television models have been disrupted by the explosive growth of on-demand services online. Previously TV and online were two separate worlds, but there are no longer any borders between the two, Yakovlev said.

“In 10 years there will be no linear TV except for a few things, like football, which people will watch online, the inauguration of the president and the next royal wedding. Everything else will be VoD,” Yakovlev said. “From a content point of view, 80 per cent of content currently being produced for classical TV channels will completely disappear.”

Tvigle is ready to invest “hundreds of thousands” of dollars in producing new content, Yakovlev said. Yet while online broadcasters enjoy much lower production costs than their traditional TV counterparts, one of their biggest challenges is finding talented people to produce content that engages online audiences.

“Just because the cost of producing books is currently zero, that doesn’t mean there are more Tolstoys or Dostoevskys around,” Yakovlev said.

Other posts by :

1. Laser terminals to operate at 100x faster
2. Starlink success in Spain, but South Africa proves difficult
3. RocketLab doubts over Mynaric bid
4. IRIS2 free for government usage?
5. Bank: AST SpaceMobile will orbit 356 satellites by 2030
6. SpaceX launches 600th rocket
7. Starlink: 10m customers and counting
8. SES predicts end of ‘big’ Geo satellites
9. Amazon Leo gets approval for 4,504 extra satellites

Categories: Articles, Broadcast, Business, OTT, People