Outgoing ITV (LSE: ITV) executive chairman Michael Grade is using his last droplets of power to rally the broadcaster toward a micropayment future…
Grade, who last year called YouTube a “parasite”, told Five Live’s Simon Mayo about Susan Boyle’s unmentioned success: “All of us are struggling with this. In the UK, our advertising was sold out on ITV.com, we did okay. YouTube I think lost a lot of money, because it costs money to serve video streaming. The offer they made to us was derisory so we didn’t take it..”
“We are working on it and watch this space, but we’re all going to crack it, either when the advertising market recovers or a combination of advertising and micropayments which is 50p a time or 25p a time to watch it. We may move in time, in the medium term, to micropayments, the same way you pay for stuff on your mobile phone. I think we can make that work extremely well.
“We’ll crack it, we’re on our way to cracking it; there’s stuff I can’t talk about because it’s market-sensitive.” Will it be in place for next year’s Britain’s Got Talent? “I hope so, yes.”
We reported ITV’s micropayment interest last week; but, in lieu of Kangaroo, ITV doesn’t appear yet to have a micropayment technology, let alone a pricing strategy. Perhaps it should work with the Technology Strategy Board, which is due to explore experimental micropayment solutions together with content makers at Digital Britain’s Behest.
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