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Christopher Slaughter
CEO
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| Disney is getting serious about streaming, buying a 33% stake in Major League Baseball’s BAM Tech, and announcing plans to set up an OTT version of ESPN “…probably by the end of the year.” We’ve talked a lot about BAM Tech, which the MLB recently spun off as a separate company. Rumours of Disney’s interest had been circulating for a while, too, almost certainly because they are the platform that launched HBO Now in three months, among their other massive live-streaming successes. Oh, and repeated mentions in CASBAA’s News Views probably didn’t hurt, either. |
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Mark Lay
Vice President, Singapore
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| For those thinking that Disney is planning on offering ESPN as a standalone service, don’t get your hopes up. Further to the announcement, ESPN clarified things by saying that “Our linear ESPN networks content will NOT be part of the service. We see it as a complementary service to WatchESPN”. FierceCable clarified further: “the new platform will, however, be available direct-to-consumer, without a pay-TV subscription.” What it looks like is that ESPN will continue with their existing B2B linear services (including the OTT authenticated WatchESPN), and use the new BAMTech services to build a D2C business. |
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Kevin Jennings
Vice President, Programme
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John Medeiros
Chief Policy Officer
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| Dish TV in the USA has been the most active industry player anywhere in the world in going after “black box” streaming media box piracy. Dish and its partners from TVB, CCTV and Korean broadcasters filed suit a year ago in California against the TVPad piracy syndicate, and won a couple of very hefty judgements. In April Dish, TVB and CCTV again filed suit, this time in New York against the promoters of the h.tv box. And last week Dish and Arabic content providers went after the promoters of the “loolbox,” which specializes in piracy of Middle Eastern content. The action was welcomed by a coalition of ethnic content broadcasters in the USA (which includes a number of CASBAA member affiliates). |
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John Medeiros
Chief Policy Officer
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| Sometimes the print media is not exactly a defender of IP rights. Magazines (and websites), delight in telling people how to find the latest pirate devices and services. (In Canada, even the CBC joins in. I guess if your iron rice bowl comes from the government, you don’t have to worry about monetizing your creations.) But this week in Singapore the Straits Times actually had an insightful opinion piece. The writer observes that sports rights costs are now too high for Singapore media distributors to monetize, drawing on a customer base that is shrinking because so many people are watching pirate black boxes that are openly flaunted in Singapore. The article quotes Aravind Venugopal as saying the government “…should be able to act against these manufacturers and providers (of black boxes).” Yeah. It should. Why doesn’t it? |
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Christopher Slaughter
CEO
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The Olympics still have another week to go, and if the 20% drop in US ratings are anything to go by, the Games “…are not immune to the tectonic changes in consumer media behavior.” Still, there remains an argument in favour of good old-fashioned TV: “…regular people don’t actually want a river of raw video.” But either way, Comcast’s cross-platform experiments with its X1 cable box could lead to further innovations in monetisation, providing a chance to capture more of the ad-spend from the many advertisers who are already using multiple channels for their Olympic campaigns.
Elsewhere, there’s a lot of other experimentation going on, especially in digital coverage of the Rio Games, at least some of which is being driven by the need to avoid infringing on copyrighted images. However, even with thousands of hours of competition being streamed, it’s worth bearing in mind that the audiences watching eSports are still bigger. |
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Andrew Lin
Regulatory Assistant
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| Just a day before the Rio Olympics’ opening ceremony, MediaCorp was able to negotiate and clinch a deal with Dentsu Inc. for live coverage of the Olympic games in Singapore. Events will be broadcasted through MediaCorp’s sports channel, Okto, and its OTT platform, Toggle. The two companies were unable to reach a deal earlier, as both groups could not settle with an agreeable price. The Singapore government has also made it clear that no additional funding will be provided for live broadcast rights. |
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Kevin Jennings
Vice President, Programme
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| With the Rio Olympics in full swing there’s reports of an online spreadsheet being kept by netizens in South Korea recording all the sexist remarks made by Korean commentators during the competition; and there’s a lot! Perhaps predictably, most of the comments come from male presenters describing female athletes. The Korean blogger who started the spreadsheet has announced plans to make an official complaint to broadcasters once the offending remarks have been collated. Korean commentators aren’t the only ones being called out for sexist or inappropriate comments from presenters, and sadly sexist language is not a new phenomenon at the Olympic Games. |
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Christopher Slaughter
CEO
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| In these troubled times of digital shift in ad spend, it’s comforting to know that the FMCG behemoth Procter & Gamble is scaling back its targeted Facebook ads: “…we targeted too much, and we went too narrow.” Read a bit more closely to discover that P&G isn’t actually cutting its spend on Facebook, just re-focusing it; but at the same time, it’s also increasing its TV ad budgets as part of a broader strategic shift. Meanwhile, Facebook is shifting its own advertising strategy, developing ways to get its ads past ad-blocking software. At the same time, however, it’s also overhauling its ad preferences tool, to let users opt out of certain types of ads: “We want people to help us do a better job with ads, rather than to fundamentally alter the way the service is rendered.” |
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Jane Buckthought
Advertising Consultant
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It’s time agencies and advertisers asked themselves serious questions about the media world they are creating through their investment decisions, writes Tess Alps, The chair of Thinkbox. The internet was supposed to be ‘for everyone’ but the idealism of an open web has mutated into an increasingly closed and unpoliced world of apps, and a world dominated by a very few quasi-monopolies.
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Mark Lay
Vice President, Singapore
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| For those News Views readers who don’t often get to sit around a table and chat about the TV business with leaders of the industry, The Hollywood Reporter has put together a TV Titans Roundtable video where you can be a fly on the wall. Ted Sarandos talks about Netflix’s “one-on-one relationship with our subscribers.” NBCUniversal’s Bonnie Hammer tells us that “The crap is going to fail.” A+E’s Nancy Dubuc, commenting on ratings to Sarandos says, “I’ll tell you mine if you’ll tell me yours!” Lots of great stuff in this fifty minute video. |
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John Medeiros
Chief Policy Officer
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| Back when CASBAA had a Council of Governors, Time Warner’s Hugh Stephens was one of the leading lights. Now retired home in Canada, Hugh writes an occasional blog on copyright matters. This week’s entry talks about how technology is a two-edged sword…..solving some piracy problems and creating others, using the Indian cable industry as an example. In that connection, another article highlighted this week that India now has 160 million broadband connections. Wow, a really big number. But 142 million of those are wireless connections, and how dysfunctional they are (for watching TV) is a much-discussed topic. (BTW, if you’re a data junkie, the TRAI press releases giving Indian telecom data are a mine of interesting snippets.) |
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Christopher Slaughter
CEO
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| Don’t even get me started about certain US Presidential candidates — really, don’t. But every four years, US television networks have been used to getting a fairly hefty chunk of change from both parties in the form of campaign ads; this year, not so much. In fact, so far, Donald Trump’s campaign has spent exactly US$0.00 on TV spots. Part of the reason, of course, is that every time he opens his mouth, there are cameras nearby; even five months ago, he was estimated to have “earned” US$2 billion worth of free air time. Add to that the value of lost productivity in offices all over the world as people ponder what a Trump Presidency would actually mean, and we’re talking trillions… seriously, YUGE numbers. |
