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You are a Product Manager for a Premium OTT Service and are gearing up for the launch of a much awaited series. A week before the release of the series, the show gets leaked. How do you respond and mitigate this scenario?

  • Related to Product Strategy
  • For Enterprise PM
  Netflix
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Answers (2)

Assumptions

  1. It’s an original production (and not old content being released on OTT for the first time)
  2. Post production is complete and the final cut of this series was the one that got leaked
  3. The release model mimics Netflix’s “release all episodes at once” strategy
Response Structure
  1. Immediate reponse
  2. Identify risks posed and their mitigation
  3. Future proofing the system
Immediate Response
  1. Legal action
    1. Track platforms where leaked content is available, and take appropriate legal action to take down the content
    2. Work with ISP to block downloads of pirated content
  2. PR statement
    1. Acknowledge the faux pas, and provide a brief summary of the mitigatino steps that the platform is taking in the short and long run
Risks and Mitigation
  1. Loss of revenue from potential new signups
    1. Estimate loss in revenue: virality of the downloaded content vs inital estimate of new paid subscribers post this release
    2. Unintended benefit: natural marketing for the series, and can potentially cut down on marketing costs
    3. Long term: create additional content (behind the scenes, making of the series, etc.) that is only available to platform’s users to capitalize on the series’ popularity
  2. Spoilers for platform subscribers
    1. Pull back the release date, so the content is available on the OTT platform simultaneously
Future Proofing the System
  1. Root cause analysis of why this happened
    1. Where: identify the source of the leak
    2. What: identify technical / functional glitch that enabled this to happen
    3. How: plan for fixing the errors

Situation – The web series scheduled for launch one week from today has gotten leaked.

Problem Statement – Devise and execute a plan to mitigate the impact on launch as well as performance of the web series in question without affecting/minimally affecting the revenue and brand imagery.

Action

A. Identify the mode of leak – my first effort of all the parallel efforts that I would be doing is to identify the mode/medium of the leak. It may be through a temp vlog/blog, open source codes, third party weblinks or open source sharing platforms e.g – Torrents.

B.I will get the same down with copyright infringements issue.

C. Once I have identified the mode and got it down, I can estimate the traffic it has received, no. Of downloads etc.

D. Doing  a quick check with projected/targetted viewer metric would give me an estimate of the extent of the damage.

E. Let’s, assume both the scenarios of damage :-

1. It has been leaked for a long time and has received whopping response from the prospective viewers.

My first response would be to check the producer if there are a set of other climaxes he/she had ready but was shelved due to any no of reasons.

Now either this set would be worth it or not. In case it is good and I can use it, I would tweak the marketing efforts and future communications to the tune of “Now that you have seen the *climax* how about holding your horses till you get to see the real one?” And aim to discredit the earlier leaked ending. This would ensure that despite, most of web series being already watched, still I would have ensured all my prospective viewers coming on to my platform and hit the series watch button out of curiosity to see whats the real climax.

2. Let’s say we got lucky and have managed to keep the downloads and views low on this leaked link by the time we get it down.

In that case, I would curtail the marketing expenses scheduled for the webseries and since there is a whole week of improvised marketing efforts remaining, hope to be optimally effective and cost saving both at the same time.

Also would look to pre-launch the web series andband mitigate the risk of available leaked series being quietly circulated via torrents and other sharing mediums amongst the viewers.