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During the streaming boom, Sony was one of the few major entertainment companies that refrained from creating its own platform. And now that the market is going through a cooling period, Ravi Ahujapresident of Sony’s Global Television Studios, sees this as an immense advantage.
During a keynote conference at London Content On Wednesday, Ahuja said that what attracted him to Sony in the first place was because while working at Disney and Fox, he “saw firsthand the complexity of operating in that type of environment.”
“Here it’s not just a very large, independent studio, with the benefit of a lot of resources… but it has a very focused mission: make great shows, find the right home,” Ahuja said. “That’s it. It’s not too complicated trying to meet the demands of the platform, trying to balance different things.”
Now that the strikes are over, Ahuja said “things are getting back to normal” in the manufacturing world. “But it doesn’t seem normal, because it’s a crazy fight to get everything working again,” he added. “This is an interesting inflection point in our industry with COVID, labor issues, streaming restarts… there is so much going on. “It’s a new normal.”
Ahuja said the market had reached a point where it was “too hot” and was now in a “cooling period”.
“In terms of overall deals in the United States and investment in shows… There were a huge amount of inefficiencies,” he said. “Deals that didn’t make sense, but also production processes that became really extravagant, television started to look like cinema, projects emerged when they weren’t really ready. So many problems. I think now that the industry is cooling down a little bit because of that fast pace, I think there’s a lot of opportunity to get some efficiencies. So the consumer, the viewer, can still get a good, solid slate of shows, but the streaming services can ration their resources a little better.”
As for what streaming will look like in the future, Ahuja predicted that technology companies will begin to consolidate different services.
“At the end of this decade, I don’t think there will be subscribers who will subscribe to individual platforms and build their television experience a la carte,” he said. “I think the big tech platforms will start to consolidate that (YouTube, Apple, Google) and you’ll get five services for £50. And you will have, potentially, a single interface.”
