Managing exclusivity and windowing in digital content value chain

The web streaming's ease of content search, on-demand access, and wide viewing device options have helped create a distribution channel that complements and competes with cable. From the cable operator's perspective, not only there are long-Term concerns on the erosion of subscribership with the emergence of "cord cutters" and "cord nevers," the shift to streaming during the online pay-Tv window also diminishes the cable's advertising revenue that depends on content popularity. By using Hotelling model with multihoming and Nash bargaining solution, we capture provider and subscriber heterogeneities and optimize payments among service providers along the content value chain. By deriving the equilibrium windowing delays under three contract negotiation settings, we also show how content quality and quantity would cause the title catalogs stay exclusive, shown syndicated, or redistributed with windowing delays.