Viewpoints: acquisitions strategies

Robin Truchy
Director, Xbox LIVE Europe
Microsoft
EMEA

What are your acquisition strategies?

Entertainment devices such as Xbox 360 are expected to drive video-on-demand services and Xbox LIVE's Video Store is in a leading position within the UK, Canada, Germany, France, US and Ireland. To our knowledge this is the only VOD service operating across six markets. Our content licensing strategy reflects our desire to maintain this lead.  Partnerships in Europe with leading film studios such as Warner Bros, Paramount and EuropaCorp allow us to offer the latest movie content, as soon as possible after DVD release, as well as classic movies via a great library of films. 

Our goal is to work with every studio to make a broad range of High-Definition and Standard-Definition content available to a broad audience.  From our core audience of hardcore gamers, to their families, children, partners and friends.  We believe there is great potential in reducing the release windows to see VOD releases come online as close to the DVD release as possible. Consumers want choice and regardless of which one they make, downloading or buying the physical format, they can view both on the Xbox 360. Beyond pure movie rentals we also offer more than 100 Arcade games and over 100 music videos on a download-to-own basis.   This opens up opportunities to most of the entertainment industry!

What products are you looking for?

The console's place is often in the living room and this could be at the heart of a family home, a bachelor or bachelorette pad, a student flat-share - the list goes on!  Our content has to cater for a broad range of tastes whether that's the latest movies, comedy programmes, sporting events or music videos.  Again it's important that we offer consumers choice from global content (from the US studios and Major record labels) to local market content (from European studios, major labels or independent labels).

What are your key acquisition deals in 2007?

Xbox LIVE Marketplace Video Store launched in Canada, Germany, Ireland and the UK in December 2007 following a successful launch in the US in 2006.  Since expanding into Europe last year we have cemented partnerships with Paramount to offer films such as "Transformers" and "300" from Warner Bros.  In the Spring we'll see a great catalogue of movies both old and new from "Disturbia" and "A Mighty Heart to Fatal Attraction" and "Ghost".  We are really going to see our film catalogue grow across Europe in 2008.

On the Music side, we have great digital distribution partnerships with Sony BMG, VidZone and Ministry of Sound.

What are your plans on MIPTV? (Is this plans at the show?)

Talk about our digital distribution plans, meet European and Global movie studios with our licensing teams and explore new forms of interactivity on Xbox 360 and LIVE. Peter Jackson for instance is working with us on the convergence between movies and video games, this is fascinating !