16 December, 2016

Welcome to News Views, CASBAA’s news round-up culled from sources across the industry for the week ending Dec 16th. Curated by CASBAA, News Views keeps you in the loop. We always value your feedback, so tell us what you think!

Mark Lay Vice President, Singapore It was supposed to be only India, but Amazon Prime Video just “did a Netflix” and launched in almost every country around the world. Amazon’s video streaming service, previously limited to the United States, UK, Germany, Austria, and Japan, is now available in over 200 countries. (The full list is included in Amazon’s official news release.) At $2.99 per month (introductory offer for 6 months) this is almost a giveaway, which would make sense as it may just be a “foothold to expand its core retail business in foreign markets”. A quick look at the app reveals a fairly thin catalogue — for the time being, anyway. As they say in the TV business, stay tuned. Christopher Slaughter CEO Okay, so that’s not going to happen… the Viacom-CBS merger talks are off.  And after all the drama and suspense of recent months, Bob Bakish has been formally named CEO of Viacom, with the board dropping the “acting” from his title, and endorsing “…the forward-looking thinking and strategic plan being pursued under (his) leadership.”  It’s very much being seen as a call made by the Redstones, although it’s certainly true that CBS CEO Les Moonves would have had a view.  And of course, now that the Viacom deal is off, speculation about CBS and another “V” word has been revived; let’s see whether Verizon steps out of the wings.

 

John Medeiros Chief Policy Officer

It’s been obvious to everybody that the complexion of the FCC (and its approach to “net neutrality” issues) is going to change when the Trump Administration takes the reins.   But partisan wrangling has beset the nomination process for months already, and now there is a benchmark pair of developments:  Republicans refused to approve reappointment of Democratic Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel.  And Tom Wheeler, who will step down as Chairman, apparently plans to stay on as a member of the Commission.  So now there are 2 donkeys and 2 elephants, and any tie-breaking vote will have to await Trump’s nominee for Chairman  – months in the future. 

 

 

Kevin Jennings Vice President, Programme

After announcing its development a couple of months ago, Apple’s new TV app with unified video search finally went “live” in the US this week.  In theory the app brings all the TV shows and movies from across all your apps and services in one place – with the notable excepton of Netflix who were not included, apparently by choice.  There’s a few kinks that need to be fixed and the jury is still out to its effectiveness but one reviewer says “Apple’s new TV app is a smoking hot pile of garbage”.   A little unfair maybe – perhaps our expectations are too high of what can be done across multi-platform streaming systems, despite all the hype.

 

 

Mark Lay Vice President, Singapore

With the British pound down 16% since the Brexit vote, UK assets are on sale. Perfect timing for the Murdoch family’s 21st Century Fox to make another run at buying the rest of Sky PLC the U.K.-based pay-TV giant, serving 22 million households in Britain, Ireland, Austria, Germany, and Italy. 21st Century Fox will pay £11.7 billion for the 61 percent of the company it doesn’t own, a 40 percent premium over its pre-bid price. Fox is expected to use a “scheme
of arrangement” method for the purchase which would help to “squeeze out opponents.” “AT&T’s successful $85 billion bid for Time Warner in October was one of the triggers pushing Murdoch to grow by bidding for Sky, said one of the sources adding that the two companies started talks shortly after the U.S.
election.”

Anjan Mitra Executive Director, India

Audience measurement organisation BARC India’s unprecedented moves, like temporarily suspending ratings review of three news channels for alleged malpractices, sent ripples in the broadcast industry. Though two of the news channels got interim reprieve from a Mumbai court and BARC, in deference to the court, deciding to release data of the third one too, pending final legal outcome, the move could mean that stakeholders now are serious about data. While BARC has vowed to fight the case, it augurs well for transparency and credibility of the ratings organisation.

 

 

Kevin Jennings Vice President, Programme

In what may be seen as a game changer, Facebook has confirmed it is in discussion with video producers to commission shows specifically for Facebook’s mobile-first video environment. The effort is being led by Ricky Van Veen, the CollegeHumor co-founder who moved to Facebook over the summer to become head of global creative strategy. The project intends to create high-quality content for Facebook’s new video tab, which appears right
next to the newsfeed tab on the mobile app. A range of content is being considered, from scripted to unscripted and sports.

Mark Lay Vice President, Singapore

Following on from Kevin’s piece, it’s best to keep an eye on Facebook as, according to Rich Raddon of recode, “2017 will be the year the networks (and media companies) realize they are being disrupted by the very distributors of their content — the platforms.” I linked to this a couple weeks back with BTIG’s must-see presentation, “Has Content Been Dethroned by Distribution?” Recent players in this space are Sky and Cisco who have teamed up to develop an app-based international OTT project called OnPrime TV. According to Mark Cuban, “Facebook is without question in a dominant position, if not the dominant position, for content delivery.”

 

 

Christopher Slaughter CEO

Anybody else remember the idea of “The Long Tail”, which described an Internet filled with infinite niches?  Back in the day, Chris Anderson cited Netflix as an example of that, but it turns out that lately, when it comes to movies in particular, the Netflix tail isn’t quite so long any more.  Which comes as very little surprise, given the service’s huge investment in original content and acquiring rights to TV series; the movie part of its library is 40% smaller than it was just four years ago.  And while it is entirely possible that Netflix doesn’t actually care, users have definitely noticed that the movie libraries kind of suck.  None of which has stopped Netflix from becoming the top-grossing iOS app in the US for the first time, by the way.

 

 

John Medeiros Chief Policy Officer

Rumors flow like water around our industry in Southeast Asia – and frequently they’re about who is not paying their bills.   One such case burst into the limelight this week, as Fox sued Bangkok Bank for US$71 million for defaulting on guarantees written to underpin multi-year, multi-channel carriage contracts with Thai pay-TV companies wrapped up in the collapse of Cable Thai Holdings (CTH) earlier this year.   Bangkok Bank responded they were ready to pay the guarantee, but their client (CTH) insisted Fox was at fault.  (You can make up your own mind, but after spending years in Thailand I know who I believe……)  It seems CTH’s bankruptcy hearing will be later this month.  In any case, the bank said, they were holding enough collateral that if they have to pay up it won’t hurt their bottom line.   (Hope that’s true…a “surge” in their other bad debts got a lot of press earlier in the year.)  Anyway, this has the potential to be the biggest finTV spectator sport since the 10-year-long Lippo/Astro arbitration battle, which – despite big headlines every now and then – still drags on.

 

 

Mark Lay Vice President, Singapore

How can this not get its own piece…three CASBAA members partnering!!  BBC, ITV and AMC (taking a non-voting minority stake) are teaming up to offer BritBox, an ad-free streaming service for the US market. “BritBox will offer a streaming experience like no other, with thousands of hours of programs across a wide variety of genres”, said Ann Sarnoff, president, BBC Worldwide North America. BritBox will launch in the first quarter of 2017 in the U.S.; details about price will be revealed then.

 

 

Andrew Lin Regulatory Assistant

YouTube recently blocked the North Korean state television channel — not
because of the content it produces, but because it was earning money from
Google advertising in violation of U.S. sanctions against Pyongyang.  Analysts researching North Korea are understandably disappointed with the decision, as it has closed a window into one of the world’s most “impenetrable” states.

John Medeiros Chief Policy Officer

Irdeto’s new report on the piracy landscape makes the very telling point that piracy businesses are now well past the start-up phase; they are sophisticated multinational enterprises quite successful at enticing customers away from the pay-TV industry.   If you don’t like reading reports, just have a look at the infographic. 

Andrew Lin Regulatory Assistant

A
landmark decision was handed down in the UK, as a court sent a seller
of ISD “black boxes” to jail for four years.   Interestingly, the conviction came on a “conspiracy to defraud” charge (and not copyright charges.)  This points up the urgent need for governments everywhere to find ways to reform copyright law to meet the growth of the “massive black market” in piracy devices.

Christopher Slaughter CEO

Last week, we predicted there would be more Best Of lists this week, and sure enough, take your pick: The 25 Best Returning Shows, shows with the Best
Nielsen Ratings, the Ten Best Shows, the best of New TV Shows, the twenty Best Comedy Sketches (most of which are geo-blocked), and the biggest Billion-Dollar Entertainment Deals.  And did someone say predictions? Because those are starting to roll out too: looks like 2017 will be the Year
of Programmatic TV,  or the Year Media Companies Wake Up, or possibly the Year of No Rest For The Weary In Media.

Anjan Mitra Executive Director, India

The Delhi High Court has finally removed all legal hurdles to the implementation of Phase III of digitisation in India and paved the way for completion of last and Phase IV too. TRAI chairman RS Sharma has promised to further smoothen the road ahead by reiterating the regulator would come out with its final recommendations on broadcast tariff, QoS and interconnect issues by month end. It’s to be seen whether MIB can push stakeholders to stick to the original schedule of December 31, 2016

 

 

Christopher Slaughter CEO

And so it begins… awards season is upon us, with the Golden Globe nominations first out of the gate.  And depending on who you ask, the real shocker is that the TV nominees are actually great this year.  As usual, there were plenty of snubs and surprises in the list; among the biggest, though, is how few series from Netflix and Amazon made the cut.  But on trend was HBO as the most-nominated network, with fourteen shows in contention.  The awards show will be hosted by Jimmy Fallon on January 8th.

 

 

John Medeiros Chief Policy Officer

Governments around the world continue to grapple with finding the right mix of policies on internet TV.   In the UK, they’re trying to ban online ads that promote junk food to kids.   (As the ad industry’s self-regulatory body is behind the initiative, it may even work, sort of.)   Local content quotas are the focus in other countries: In Oz, the content producers’ lobby came out to urge taxation of foreign SVOD services to support Aussie content creation.  The Liberal government in Canada is also mulling new taxes on online content to support local content.  (Last year, the CRTC regulatory commission looked at the issued and decided – mirabile dictu – not to institute new taxes and instead it actually reduced (well, a little bit) the quotas and other constraints on existing TV suppliers, to allow them to confront the online competition.)

Christopher Slaughter CEO

Oh, that cheeky YouTube rascal PewDiePie, what a scampy little trickster!  Turns out when he said if he reached 50 million subscribers he’d delete his YouTube channel, it was all just a joke!  After hitting his mark, he actually deleted a fake channel he had set up, adorably naughty Swede that he is!  You decide…. was his prank an act of marketing genius, or a valuable lesson about not trusting the media?