An explosion of new media delivery technologies is allowing us all to participate in a powerful vision: rapidly available information and entertainment, served up on demand. However, most media and entertainment (M&E) businesses have yet to make money pursuing this vision, and some have lost their shirts in doing so. Their travails indicate that for M&E businesses, "on demand" has to mean far more than simply making content quickly accessible to consumers. The media industry's abrupt transformation -- from last century's seller's market to this century's turbulent buyer's market -- has made it critical for an M&E company to acquire a similarly transformed set of capabilities. These capabilities must include rapid response to customer needs and market changes (not just promotional expertise), and dogged focus on integrating core processes (rather than maintaining unconnected operations) -- all delivered at low fixed-investment levels by extensive use of variable cost structures (rather than "build it and they will come" approaches). M&E businesses that achieve these new capabilities will be positioned to be flexible enough to weather today's turbulent markets and enjoy the industry's next growth phase. Those that do not, simply put, risk failure. Unresponsive, fixed-cost business models are likely to lose share at an increasing rate to more responsive competitors, and disjointed portfolios of businesses may be forfeited to companies who will acquire and better integrate them. How can M&E businesses successfully meet the challenges of this on demand era? In this paper, we examine in more detail how the industry got to this point, describe what an on demand M&E business might look like, and provide a roadmap for M&E executives that can help them compete successfully in the on demand world -- without having to work 30-hour days of their own. To read the complete study, download the PDF file at the top of this page. | 
