John Medeiros
Chief Policy Officer
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Let’s have a debate: Just how much responsibility should internet firms take, for preventing use of their networks for piracy? It’s clear they have to do SOMETHING to qualify for “safe harbor” treatment (and avoid being sued themselves), but just how much? Kim Dotcom claims he did all the necessary by disabling some links to pirated content (leaving the content “up” to be re-linked later). His lawyer told the NZ court hearing his extradition case that there should be no criminal liability for the owners of Megaupload based on the illegal actions of its users. The 10-week long extradition hearing just closed; within a few weeks we should find out if he’ll have to go to the USA and face the music, so to speak. Dotcom professed to be optimistic because the judge is the same one who granted him bail. |
John Medeiros
Chief Policy Officer
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Meanwhile, there’s another very interesting “safe harbor” case: a U.S. judge has ruled that Cox Communications cannot benefit from the safe harbor provisions of U.S. law, because the ISP did not have a meaningful program to deter repeat offenders. Most US ISPs have a “Copyright Alert System” which passes infringement notices to pirate downloaders, and eventually throttles the access for recidivists. But Cox refused to pass on notices from music company BMG, saying it didn’t like that the company was asking downloaders to pay settlement fees to avoid being sued themselves. BMG says that for several years Cox “had an ‘under the table’ policy of purporting to terminate repeat infringers while actually retaining them as high speed internet customers.“ |
Christopher Slaughter
CEO
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Backstage at the Convention a few weeks ago, I asked Space X’s COO Gwynne Shotwell what was going on with one of her company’s competitors, the Blue Origin private space launch company founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. As it turns out, plenty is going on: Blue Origin just blindsided everyone by successfully launching its New Shepard spacecraft 100 km above Earth, and then landing it again almost perfectly — Bezos called it “the Holy Grail of rocketry.” Now, as we’ve previously posted, Space X has put its own reusable Grasshopper rocket through test launch-and-landings, and it wasn’t long before Elon Musk took to the Twittersphere to both congratulate Bezos, and to point out that 100 km is NOT the same as reaching orbit. Although headline writers might not agree, the best conclusion to this story I’ve seen is that “…regardless of who wins the reusable launch market, we all win in the end.” |
Christopher Slaughter
CEO
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Meanwhile, in the world of old-school rocketry, Japan’s Mistubishi Heavy Industries has successfully launched its 29th H2A rocket, for the first time carrying a commercial payload, for Canadian operator Telesat. Previously, MHI’s launches were entirely government contracts, but there are plenty of questions about how competitve the company will be in the global market, especially given the comparatively high cost of its launches. |
Mark Lay
Vice President, Singapore
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Last week at the Paley International Council Summit in New York, the heavy hitters of media got together to share their insights and visions of the future. James Murdoch believes that video ads like Facebook’s are “Not Really Earning Anybody’s Attention” and that “cable and satellite companies haven’t really innovated enough over the last 20 years”. Hulu CEO Mike Hopkins shared that the company’s revenue is about 50:50 advertising and subscriptions and calls the company’s dual revenue streams “a powerful advantage.” Disney’s Andy Bird and Claudio Chiaromonte discussed their approach to bringing Disney magic to international territories without a cookie cutter approach. |
Kevin Jennings
Programme Director
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Chinese video-on-demand service provider YOU On Demand (YOD) has announced it will supply Hollywood films to Ai Shang Media (China IPTV). China IPTV, a joint venture between China Network Television (CNTV) and Shanghai Media Group, is the only integrated for-profit IPTV platform operating across the country under the authority of public broadcaster CNTV. After initially licensing several IPTV providers, the Chinese authorities decided that a single provider was easier to control, so CNTV itself now controls all of China’s IPTV platforms across all 31 provinces, with potentially 40+ million IPTV users. |
Anjan Mitra
Executive Director, India
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A corporate circle joke in India runs that whatever Reliance Industries does, does it big sans any belief in small measures. So Mukesh Ambani’s USD 16 billion 4G bet via Reliance JIO is being positioned as a digital content company to distinguish it from competing telcos. Bundled voice and data services, with the latter being almost free, can cause bloodbath, something akin to what a united Reliance group did over a decade back with GSM and CDMA services. Will the consumer be king again? Specially since most telcos presently take their customers for granted. |
Jane Buckthought
Advertising Consultant
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Young people’s viewing seems to dominate the headlines with several reports released suggesting YouTube is more popular or as another points out is it TV commissioned by PEPPTV, the Platform for European Promotion of TV. However, a report from Sony concludes that as we watch television for many reasons, one way or another we will still be watching television for many years to come. |
Yegee Chun
Regulatory Assistant
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YouTube is soon to come to the defense of its citizen creators in the USA against unreasonable copyright claims. It will now offer legal support to “a handful of videos” which Google believes represent “clear fair uses” under US law. YouTube hopes to help prevent the abuse of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to demand the takedown of works the copyright holder has no legal authority over. One example of such an abuse occurred after the recent Ashley Madison data leak, where the discreet dating site issued takedown notices to developers offering a tool to check if the leak contained users’ private information. |
Christopher Slaughter
CEO
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No question about it, the jury is still out on the “best” business model for digital services; ad-supported, freemium, subscription, transactional, what-have-you. But increasingly, there are a lot of people pushing subscription as the future, with some even going so far as to declare that The Subscription Wars Are Here. And while the debate about ad-blocking and its potential effect on media business models is getting increasingly strident (with even South Park weighing in), don’t expect a verdict any time soon. |
John Medeiros
Chief Policy Officer
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In Thailand, the digitization of broadcast TV has turned into a massive legal mess. Digital TV licensee (and newspaper publisher) The Nation Group has sued the NBTC regulators, saying they have been “negligent” in facilitating the transition from analogue to digital TV. Among other things, the suit asks for delay in the very large license payments due from channel owners who made huge bets in the licensing auction – bets that don’t look so good now. The Nation channels also want the regulator to more energetically force pay-TV operators to put the digital FTA channels at the head of the line-up, but meanwhile True Visions and a group of satellite TV operators have also sued, asking a court to block NBTC renumbering rules. Sounds to me like a commercial tug-of-war disguised as a legal struggle, with the regulator playing the role of rope, being pulled back and forth. More suits seem likely. (I’m not sure if any TV companies will benefit, but the lawyers will make out like bandits…..) |
Anjan Mitra
Executive Director, India
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This is really interesting for the industry, betting big on digital distribution, and the Indian government that’s grappling with norms for OTT services. Netflix, having hinted at a 2016 Indian entry, plans to stream globally Hindi film ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’ as an eight-part series. The film is set in the north Indian States’ badlands of coal mining and is replete with local cuss words and steamy sex scenes. The movie is planned to be streamed with English, Spanish, French, Arabic and Chinese subtitles. Indian media majors are actively seeking global markets; this week Star-TV upped the ante and went global with Hindi content via its successful Hotstar OTT platform. |
John Medeiros
Chief Policy Officer
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The numbers are always huge in India (and China, too), but sometimes you have to look at what’s behind the numbers. TRAI has just made known that almost 50% of the DTH boxes in the country are “inactive,” i.e. not being paid. There are an estimated 78.7 satellite antennas and STBs in the market. |
Kevin Jennings
Programme Director
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It would be remiss for us not to mention the formal declaration for launching the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) which could someday be similar to European Union (EU)-style regional economic bloc. Proponents believe that — with certain caveats and national interests notwithstanding — the signing of the AEC declaration this week can transform ASEAN into a region with free movement of goods, services, investment, skilled labour, and freer flow of capital. The AEC officially comes into being on December 31st but in case you’re wondering, a unified market with consensus on regulatory and broadcast issues is still a very long way off – just look at Europe, which has had a lot more political will than the ASEAN governments. |
John Medeiros
Chief Policy Officer
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It seems reports that Taiwan might actually reform its media regulation were premature. Reform proposals have gone nowhere since 2012; now the press tells us there won’t be a vote this year, either. |
