Find Your Niches: A Guide for Managing Intermedia Effects Among Content Distribution Channels

Content providers such as movie studios that embrace the Internet as an additional distribution channel are encountering the issue of measuring and managing intermedia effects. In multichannel distribution arrangements, content owners and distributors must know whether channels will cannibalize or complement one another and the circumstances under which such behavior will occur. With this knowledge, content providers can depart from merely describing cross-media effects and move toward managing cross-media. The authors present a five-step guide for measuring and managing cross-media effects on media content in multichannel distribution environments. The analytical framework builds on the ecological theory of the niche, which states that the intensity of intermedia competition depends on the degree of differentiation among channels. This framework is the first attempt to combine niche theory with conjoint analysis to develop a method of data collection and analysis. The use of the five-step guide is demonstrated with preference data from a quantitative survey of 552 potential consumers of digital movies.