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Christopher Slaughter
CEO
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It’s official: the US has a new #2 broadband provider and #3 video provider, now that the Charter/TimeWarner Cable merger has overcome its final regulatory hurdle. The California Public Utility Commission gave the greenlight this week, after the FCC approved the deal earlier. That’s only a year after the deal was first announced, and it still came with conditions that Republican FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai described as “extortion.”
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John Medeiros
Chief Policy Officer
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Meanwhile, here in the region, the big merger proposed between SK Telecom and CJ Hellovision has not been making rapid progress. (It requires approval from three different South Korean government agencies.) The agencies, led by the KCC, are saying the matter has to be taken seriously, and approval – if it comes – will take time. SK Telecom not surprisingly is pushing the deal, saying it will result in healthy competition and give consumers more content choices. Both sides are citing parallel foreign decisions as supporting their point of view: SK likes the FCC’s approval of the Charter/Time Warner cable merger. The KCC cites the UK regulator’s seeking to block a merger between mobile firms O2 and 3UK. (Bloomberg reports that deal may be going belly up.) To sum up: lots of precedent-citing, but no clarity yet, in Korea.
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Christopher Slaughter
CEO
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It’s nice to see the industry warming to a theme, especially when it’s calling bullshit on digital ad metrics. Some fairly spurious claims have been made at the Digital Content Newfronts, and it's good to see that the ratings jigger-pokery is eliciting a proper backlash. (Of course, the original disinformation will still continue to be soberly passed along as The Truth, but then again, the Internet.)
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Jane Buckthought
Advertising Consultant
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Indeed, the REAL truth must come out. TV researchers have been campaigning to redress the oversell of digital, and although it is not quite the “epic battle" that Campaign would have it be, the head of Thinkbox, the UK’s marketing body for commercial TV, made the case very cogently last week. But back to that Gawker piece; among its best lines: “The conflation of digital and traditional viewership metrics has gotten under the skin of TV people, and for good reason. If advertisers can be hoodwinked into believing that a sizable number of people are actually watching things on Facebook Live, they will direct their money online, where the ad rates are much, much lower than they are on TV. The thing here is that the TV people are right—even serious online video hits deliver numbers that would barely register if measured the same way TV programming is."
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Mark Lay
Vice President, Singapore
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Redef’s Matthew Ball has penned another “Original” this week where he looks forward in time to “Disney as a Service”. Ball believes that "Disney's future (is) bright, it's closer than ever to fulfilling Walt's own vision for the storied 'House of Mouse’.” Jason Hirschhorn adds, "It’s not only one of the few media brands that audiences actually care for, they were able to forge direct-to-consumer relationships decades before “D2C” entertainment became an imperative.” Also, Disney’s earnings were released this week with $12.97 billion in revenue for its fiscal 2016 second quarter.
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John Medeiros
Chief Policy Officer
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Veterans of the policy wars will recall that back in 2007, CASBAA was urging India’s TRAI to loosen the reins of cable regulation, to allow the industry to generate enough revenue and become a modern digital broadband powerhouse. Here we are almost a decade later and the current Chairman of TRAI is saying it’s really too bad that India has not ”been able to leverage the 100 million cable TV homes in India to deliver broadband, which would have given us very fast internet.” Nice to have our concepts acknowledged, even 9 years late. But unfortunately TRAI still hasn’t learned the “light-touch” lesson and it is proposing to substantially INCREASE the burden of its controls on contracts between media industry players, under its “Interconnect” rules (which are a legacy of telephone regulation it is seeking to transfer into the media industry.) I fear for the future.
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Christopher Slaughter
CEO
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In these troubled times of ubiquitous social media chatter, it seems like it’s almost impossible to avoid spoilers. And while it turns out that quite a few people don’t think spoilers are necessarily a bad thing, the complicated co-existence of linear and on-demand programming means sometimes content owners have just got to take a stand. Meanwhile, spoiler-hating fans can always download a Google Chrome extension, or go to more ridiculous extremes to avoid harshing their buzz. Likewise, for those who love spoilers, there are plenty of options online, including this handy service provided by none other than Netflix.
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Kevin Jennings
Vice President, Programme
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To mark the 90th birthday of the iconic broadcaster Sir David Attenborough, the BBC has announced it plans to launch an app called The Story of Life. The free mobile app will be available globally and offer the largest digital release of Attenborough’s work with around 1,000 clips encompassing over 60 years of natural history film making with the BBC. The “Attenborough App” is scheduled to be released in the Autumn and is aimed at re-engaging with an audience more familiar with using smart devices to watch video. Perhaps wisely, the powers that be did not let the public vote for a name for the app, after the UK's new polar research ship was named RRS Sir David Attenborough, despite the voting public choosing something …different.
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Mark Lay
Vice President, Singapore
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I’m starting to think that Shane Smith, Vice CEO, was extremely well behaved in Bali at APOS earlier this month. He didn’t seem to have had a “few ales” before his talk on stage and there were no claims of Vice being “the fastest-growing network in the f—ing history of TV.” He saved this for Vice’s Digital Content NewFront presentation in New York last week where he announced that Vice would launch 20 TV channels worldwide this year, some being in Asia. In Bali, maybe he was just saving himself for the HBO party where he was seen at the bar doing tequila shots with a number of CASBAA members. You know who you are.
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John Medeiros
Chief Policy Officer
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The pernicious role of politics in the Indian cable industry was highlighted by a Times of India report that there are more than 50 unauthorized cable channels being aired in the city of Puducherry alone. Such channels, says the Times “are often run by politicians or their supporters” and they are used to unfairly tout the candidate’s achievements.
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