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Christopher Slaughter
CEO
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| Various CASBAA members took part in a roundtable discussion recently with Singapore’s Ministry of Law as part of its public consultation on proposed changes to the copyright regime, and we had quite a few more questions than MinLaw had answers. The consultation document runs to 53 pages (and is available here, if you’re so inclined), and covers a lot of areas that don’t immediately pertain to our business. However, part of the review deals with ways of circumventing “technological protection methods”, which means that like it or not, the matter of using VPNs to get around geo-blocks is going to come up. Not that anybody in Singapore is doing that, right? Of course, the VPN debate will certainly continue up to the consultation period’s October 24 deadline, and likely beyond — but CASBAA will also be bringing the subject of black boxes into the mix, rest assured.
Meanwhile, it doesn’t help when former TV executives say things like “I’m going to put it out there. I love piracy.” (Maybe there’s a reason behind the use of the adjective “former” there?) Fortunately, that particular Digital Matters panel also had Lin Shufen as a voice of reason, and even though she’s reportedly leaving Starhub, she pointed out that piracy “…is the biggest thing that keeps us awake at night.”
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John Medeiros
Chief Policy Officer
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| Meanwhile, the newly-appointed NCC Commissioners have said they will re-write existing convergence legislative proposals. The incoming chairperson said she found the previous NCC’s five bills difficult to understand. As he left office, the outgoing NCC chair, Howard Shyr, opined that proposed bills to deal with “media monopoly” should be dropped, as they dealt only with traditional media, and the real problems in today’s world with “media monopolization” have “already shifted to global players, such as YouTube, Facebook and Google.”
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Christopher Slaughter
CEO
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Also at Digital Matters, I had a chance to sit down with Discovery Networks Asia Pacific head Arthur Bastings for a discussion centered around the company’s digital strategy: “Big data, monetisation, and content creation. All our partnerships and acquisitions in these spaces include some or all of those elements.” And that emphasis on partnerships, Bastings says, is a neccessary strategic shift at Discovery: “If we look at the branded experiences that we now want to offer consumers today, whether that’s augmented reality, or VR, or some of the other things we may want to talk about; they’re much more complex experiences, and require a lot more partners for us to deliver that in a seamless and good way.” |
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John Medeiros
Chief Policy Officer
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| It seems like there has been no time in the last decade when the Taiwan government wasn’t “reviewing” (i.e. blocking) the sale of one or another cable MSO. Now it’s the turn of China Network Systems, again. The CNS sale by a South Korea-based private equity group to telco FarEastTone has been under review by various government bodies for a year. Now, the Ministry of Economic Affairs refused to approve it, and passed the buck back to the National Communications Commission (which already approved the sale last January). The root of the problem is that government agencies own 2.89 percent of FarEastTone, and the law says the government can’t own shares in media companies – except, of course, for its controlling ownership in legacy telco Chung Hwa Telecom, with its quite successful IPTV service!! Go figure. But the explanation probably has more to do with politics than rational regulatory policy – the DPP party took over the government in May, and has just appointed new commissioners to the NCC, and DPP legislators have been critical of the sale.
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Mark Lay
Vice President, Singapore
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| A whole lot of interesting streaming news. RBC Capital Markets finds that Netflix Earns Less Per Hour Viewed Than Most TV Networks, an EBITDA of 5 cents per hour. Lush Cosmetics thinks it can launch its own TV channel. The Netflix Backlash: Why Hollywood Fears a Content Monopoly, is a good read on the programming side of the company. My favorite line, “The first rule of Netflix: You do not talk about Netflix”. And next week, if you are out of the house for the US election debate, you can now catch it on Facebook as ABC News will live stream it.
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Christopher Slaughter
CEO
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The most surprising thing about this year’s Emmy Awards show, depending on who you ask, was that it actually didn’t suck. (Call me old-fashioned, but while I expect banality from Rolling Stone headlines, I always thought the Guardian had a slightly classier style. Oh well.) HBO’s mega-blockbuster “Game of Thrones” became the most-awarded show in TV history, not just white people won awards (although pretty much everyone was cisgender), and in general, everybody was loving the TV industry, which is always nice. The complete list of nominees and winners is here, go nuts. |
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Kevin Jennings
Vice President, Programme
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| …and staying with the Emmies, an interesting observation from THR that (with one or two obvious exceptions) this year’s list of deserved winners left audiences in some overseas markets struggling to recognise who the actors were and what programmes were winning. A result, they claim, of more of the winning content being shown on streaming or digital distribution sites. The Emmys will undoubtedly raise the global profile of these shows but don’t be surprised if the main impact is a spike in more illegal torrents.
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Jane Buckthought
Advertising Consultant
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Almost a year after taking the wraps off its multiplatform total audience measurement tool, Nielsen USA said it has set a release schedule and will complete the rollout of its total content ratings, or TCR, by March 1. Currently, access to the data—which includes apples-to-apples measurement of all viewing across linear TV, DVR, VOD, connected TV devices (Roku, Apple TV and Xbox), mobile, PC and tablets—to the participating TV and digital media brands that have been involved in the evaluation process. Until August those networks and brands only had access to their own data only. On Jan. 1, the full total content ratings data will also become available to agencies, while the media will continue to only receive the select data. |
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Mark Lay
Vice President, Singapore
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| Twitter just broadcast their first NFL game and pulled in 243,000 Average Per-Minute Viewers. Sure, this doesn’t sound huge but Twitter’s stream was almost exactly the same as what was being shown live on CBS. Yahoo Finance goes through a more worthwhile comparison of the numbers. There is more to come with sports from streaming companies as Amazon is apparently ramping up to distribute tennis and rugby. One could think these are not prime sports properties but “by investing in the French Open or rugby, Amazon effectively is going all Moneyball on the rest of the industry.”
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Kevin Jennings
Vice President, Programme
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| Fresh on the heels of Netflix partnering with Liberty Global for European carriage last week, Netflix has launched a fully localised Polish user interface, with over 80% of its content being dubbed or subtitled and will include local Polish content. Netflix has also said it intends to launch a localized Turkish service later in the year. No word on when we might see more localized services in Asia just yet and distribution in China remains stymied. Meanwhile threats to Netflix dominance continue to emerge in the growing global SVOD market, despite analysts predicting revenue is set to double while Netflix’s last quarterly results suggested underwhelming growth prospects for international subscriber numbers.
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John Medeiros
Chief Policy Officer
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In the US, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler isn’t home free yet, with his proposals to do away with set-top boxes and hand control of user relationships to internet companies (e.g. Google) instead of cable companies (e.g. Comcast.) This week, he backtracked away from proposals to establish an independent board to enforce some sort of “must-provide” mandate on content distribution. (Whew…..sounds like India is taking over Washington.) That proposal was denounced by the creative industry as “an unacceptable and unworkable de facto compulsory licensing scheme.”
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Andrew Lin
Regulatory Assistant
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| With an increase in active social media users in Southeast Asian countries, online social revolution takes place more frequently, giving Southeast Asian governments a difficult time to cope with these events. “This social revolution is not new, but it is a gathering storm.” Now that many social media platforms such as Facebook, Whatsapp, and WeChat, just to name a few, are becoming more accessible to the Southeast Asian population, people are using it to communicate and share collective ideas, interests, frustrations, and much more.
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Christopher Slaughter
CEO
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| And finally, a little something guaranteed to fill your weekend with all sorts of arguments: Rolling Stone magazine has just put out its “definitive” list of the 100 Greatest TV Shows of All Time. Probably a disproportionate number of shows from the New Golden Age of TV (now) made the list, but there are plenty from the original Golden Age, and several others from TV’s… errr… Bronze Age? I won’t spoil it for you, but I think we should all just agree to disagree right now. (I mean, seriously… Downton Abbey ranks below Happy Days?)
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