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Christopher Slaughter
CEO
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Regardless of who you think won the first US Presidential debate this week, TV was certainly a big winner, with a record 84 million Americans tuning in to the political slug-fest. Online viewership rocked it, too, with some 2 million live streamers watching on YouTube.
Of course, even though it’s a domestic affair, there’s always strong global interest in the US elections, and even more so in this particular one, for fairly obvious reasons. Apparently, even the Taliban were watching the debate. One down, two to go…. |
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Kevin Jennings
Vice President, Programme
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| Meanwhile, none of those online viewers officially came from China, where authorities banned news services from providing live streams of Trump vs. Clinton. Of course, if you watched the debate, you’ll know that China was mentioned frequently; and despite the ban, there are reports that “hundreds of thousands” of Chinese did watch. And officially, the People’s Daily described the election a “lose-lose” battle. |
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John Medeiros
Chief Policy Officer
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| CASBAA participated in Interpol-sponsored IP Law Enforcement Conference in London last week, where the UK Minister for IP, Lucy Neville-Rolfe, spoke about the problem of illicit streaming set-top boxes and the harm they do to people up and down the value chain in the TV industry. “It’s crucial that we all work together to combat this growing threat, both to stop the criminals involved in IP crime, and to safeguard IP holders and innovators,” she said. Also at the conference (have a look), people were talking about a major raid on a large black-box network in Lancashire a couple of weeks earlier. It seems that when the Police Intellectual Property Crimes Unit (PIPCU) pulled the plug on that one head-end, multiple box networks all over Europe suddenly went dark. The interconnections of that industry, and other criminal enterprises – in Asia and elsewhere – should come in for much greater scrutiny. |
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Jane Buckthought
Advertising Consultant
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The news that Facebook has overestimated average viewing time for video ads on its platform—for two years—has once again highlighted the lack of transparency and third-party verification of metrics provided by the so-called “walled gardens” that companies including Facebook and Google are often described as operating. Both companies keep a tight grip on data, and only allow limited third-party tracking firms to plug into their systems. Keith Weed, chief marketing officer of Unilever, said in an interview last year, tech companies that don’t let third parties
measure their platforms is equivalent to “letting them mark their own homework.” Publicis’ response came in a note which said, “This once again illuminates the absolute need to have 3rd party tagging and verification on Facebook’s platform. Two years of reporting inflated performance numbers is unacceptable. |
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Mark Lay
Vice President, Singapore
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Discovery’s CEO, David Zaslav, told investors that Discovery-controlled Eurosport is rolling out a direct-to-consumer streaming service. “We own it all and when we go to the player and charge $8 per subscriber we’re in a whole different game,” he said at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia Conference in Manhattan. “For us, Eurosport direct-to-consumer fills the full circle of where the world is going.” |
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Christopher Slaughter
CEO
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Reports of TV’s demise always make for alarming headlines, but don’t believe everything you read — the reality of the shifting viewing patterns is more complicated than just the headlines. A recent report from
the Video Advertising Bureau highlights the relationship between TV and streaming, concluding that “TV Brands Are Well-Positioned To Keep Themselves At The Center Of The Ever-Evolving, Video Streaming Ecosystem.” Certainly TV execs like NBCU CEO Steve Burke agree with that. In his keynote at the Royal
Television Society, Burke was pretty confident about the industry, while at the same time, acknowledging the challenges: “I’m certainly not claiming our current models are not threatened. I just don’t see them collapsing as quickly as one might believe.” |
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John Medeiros
Chief Policy Officer
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Change is certainly in the air at the US cable industry’s HQ in Washington. Last week, the venerable NCTA announced a rebranding, saying it would become “NCTA – The Internet and Television Association.” And this week, the Association’s board voted to terminate its 65-year tradition of holding a major annual trade show for the cable/internet industry. As many commentators noted,
the mass-market show had declined in importance in recent years, as cable-industry consolidation meant that most decisions were in the hands of a few large MSOs. NCTA said that it didn’t see a future for “large trade show floors dotted with exhibit booths,” but industry journals reported it was considering re-inventing a different sort of event in Washington next year.
Meanwhile, CASBAA has been busily re-inventing our annual Convention (which was never a huge-trade-show-floor type of event), and this year it will showcase the diversity of Asia’s many pay-TV operators. In case you haven’t been paying attention, it’ll be in Macau, November 7-9. |
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Christopher Slaughter
CEO
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Staying with the NCTA, when John and I went to INTX in Boston earlier this year, I was struck by the contrasts between the NCTA and CASBAA. As an organisation, it serves a single ( admittedly huge) and almost fully saturated market, in which the pay TV industry has been consolidating for more than a decade; as opposed to CASBAA’s 18 diverse markets and overall continued industry growth. The NCTA has a broad membership, similar to CASBAA, but the bulk of its work is focused on operators (Comcast, Charter, and Cox dominate its five-member Executive Committee). But most importantly, the industry the NCTA represents could lose up to a billion dollars next year because of cord-cutting; and while disruption is starting to emerge in Asia, the whole cord-cutting trend is quite different. |
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Kevin Jennings
Vice President, Programme
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South Korea’s smallest mobile carrier LG Uplus has said it is looking to buy a cable TV operator to achieve “economies of scale”. The comments have attracted attention in part because LG Uplus’ bigger competitor SK Telecom failed to purchase CJ HelloVision, after opposition from the country’s anti-trust watchdog earlier in the year. U plus Vice Chairman Kwon Young-soo confirmed that once the relevant regulations are
streamlined they will work on acquiring a cable TV operator – likely to be one of the top four brands; CJ HelloVision, D’Live, Hyundai HCN or T-Broad. |
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Mark Lay
Vice President, Singapore
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| In the US, AT&T is the latest to introduce a streaming product. Later this year it will launch DirectTV Now where subscribers will be able to stream more than 100 channels, without a long-term contract or any hardware like a set-top box, through their phones, tablets and connected TV devices. This type of delivery is fantastic for individual addressability of program offerings and targeted advertising. Though it’s not so good for folks who want satellite delivery as AT&T has set a timeline to phase out satellites and set-top boxes. |
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John Medeiros
Chief Policy Officer
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| As we noted last week, the newly-named regulators on Taiwan’s NCC are re-visiting previous proposals to revise the telecoms and media legislation there. An article published by the Amcham in Taipei has some interesting takes on what’s going on. |
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Andrew Lin
Regulatory Assistant
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| After setbacks in its attempt to buy Paramount, is China’s Wanda is going to buy Sony? Nope, according to CEO Michael Lynton, he doesn’t think so. Wanda is, however, buying a controlling stake in Dick Clark Productions. And it’s worth asking, will CBS buy Viacom? Les Moonves has said no active discussions, but that hasn’t stopped all the speculation, with “informed sources” keeping the story alive. Oh, and will Disney actually buy Twitter? No official denial, but it’s hard to say, and anyway, all those rumours in the marketplace could just be a clever marketing ploy. |
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John Medeiros
Chief Policy Officer
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One of the problems with Indonesia’s approach to censorship is that vague guidelines coupled with admonitions to industry that “you have to self-censor, so be careful” combine to produce over-cautious broadcasters. That’s what happened last week when several broadcasters carried footage of a poolside interview with the winner of a national women’s swimming competition, and pixilated out her body. This “excès de zèle” produced a storm of online criticism of the country’s content regulators at KPI, who pointed out that they had not ordered the
blurring, and then helpfully suggested having such interview subjects at swimming competitions wrap up in towels before the cameras are turned on. Unreality TV, anyone? |
