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Christopher Slaughter
CEO
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| Here’s something I bet you didn’t expect… despite all the talk of cord-cutting, Nielsen says the number of US television households has actually increased by 1.7% against this time last year. That might not sound like a huge increase, but it’s actually 2 million households, and it means the number of homes “…receiving traditional TV signals via broadcast, cable, DBS or telco, or having a broadband Internet connection…” is now at 96% penetration in the US. It’s that last bit — broadband — that accounts for the change; since 2013, Nielsen has been including in its numbers homes where TVs are connected to broadband, so now it also captures viewers watching services like Netflix, HBO Now, Hulu, or Sling TV. Which is only slightly confusing, especially since SNL Kagan just came out with an estimate that some 812,000 US pay TV subscribers cut the cord in Q2 — the biggest quarterly loss so far. |
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John Medeiros
Chief Policy Officer
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| Ominous signs in Thailand: Read all the way down in the Bangkok Post’s description of a recent disciplinary hearing by the official regulator (NBTC) for a TV channel (Voice TV). It wasn’t the first time Voice TV had been called to account, but it was “the first time an army officer sat at the head of the table.” Reminds me of the ominous closing scene in “Cabaret,” where Joel Grey departs and the camera pans to show that the tables were full of people wearing….umm….uniforms. (Cabaret is being revived in the USA – appropriate given the nature of this year’s electoral politics there……) |
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John Medeiros
Chief Policy Officer
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Meanwhile, in other censorship news, China’s bureaucrats have said they don’t want any “admiration of western lifestyles” on TV. Yawn. How do you say “laughing stock” in Mandarin? Too much singing and dancing is clearly a threat to the Communist Party. Add the latest prohibitions to the long long list of other stuff that can’t be shown, including cleavage, celebrity children, homosexuality, drinking and vengeance, time travel, South Koreans, and space aliens.
Panda shows…..that’s what China needs. Lots of panda shows. |
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Christopher Slaughter
CEO
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| Funny you should mention it, John, because Panda TV is actually a thing… but it’s not about pandas, it’s China’s answer to twitch.tv, and features clips of people playing online games (like Dota2 but that’s another story… see below). And while we’re on the subject, when you hear Chinese Communist Party officials saying things like “…the arts should be centered on the people, guided by core socialist values, based on traditional Chinese culture and fueled by innovation…” they’re actually parroting Mao Zedong’s dictums from the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art held in 1942. But those meetings were held in a cave — Long March-era Mao certainly didn’t have to deal with the exorbitant actors’ fees of today’s China. |
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Anjan Mitra
Executive Director, India
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The gorilla in the telecoms room has flexed its muscles. Reliance Industries Ltd chairman Mukesh Ambani has announced that the long awaited Reliance Jio service will launch on September 5th. During the 45 minutes it took Ambani to deliver his speech at the company’s AGM, share prices of other Indian telcos tumbled, wiping off millions of dollars. Reliance JIO’s roadmap – free voice calling, data cost at almost 1/10th of the prevalent ones, no roaming charges for JIO users and other freebies — clearly signals the battle is about to begin. Media and analysts are collating the takeaways from Ambani-speak… and still counting.
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Mark Lay
Vice President, Singapore
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| According to a Pew Research Center, 40 percent of American adults get their news from Facebook and more than 600 million people see a news story on Facebook every week. And this drove over $6 billion dollars worth of revenue last quarter. But Mark Zuckerberg insists that Facebook “Is Not a Media Company”. Recode disagrees. Facebook are very good at making money using other people’s content. But a real media company would probably be a lot better at curating it. It seems that after replacing 15 editors with an algorithm Facebook’s Trending News Is A Total Mess. Maybe there is some merit to Zuck’s comment. |
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Kevin Jennings
Vice President, Programme
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| Kim Dotcom, who is fighting extradition from New Zealand to the U.S., where he’s accused of reproducing and distributing copyrighted content on a massive scale, has successfully petitioned the Judge hearing his appeal in New Zealand to allow video streaming of the court proceedings. Dotcom is the millionaire founder of file-sharing site Megaupload, which was shut down by the U.S. government who allege that Megaupload netted more than US$175m in criminal proceeds and cost copyright owners more than US$500m by offering pirated content. After years of legal wrangling, a court ruled in December that Dotcom could be sent to the U.S., to face charges including conspiracy to commit racketeering and money laundering. Kim has hired his own cameraman to film the appeal and believes sharing the court video online on YouTube will help his case. The video is being delayed by twenty minutes and the judge has ruled that the online video cannot be replayed once the case concludes!! |
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John Medeiros
Chief Policy Officer
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| Ahahahahhahahahahahaha! I think the judge is going to get a sudden education in how the transnational internet piracy cabal works, and how much respect they have for courts in ANY country. I’m with the BBC, which points out that “The video of Kim Dotcom’s hearing will be all over the internet, in perpetuity, whether the judge wants it to be or not.” |
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John Medeiros
Chief Policy Officer
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| Related to that last, an indictment was issued against the promoters of Kickass Torrents, saying they engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the creative industries of many millions of dollars, and then laundered the proceeds. Again, like Megaupload, the group was providing incentives for people to upload pirated content, and then making millions on advertising. (You can read the full indictment here.) The group’s leader Artem Vaulin was arrested in July in Poland, where he is now being held pending extradition. |
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Mark Lay
Vice President, Singapore
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| Anyone who deals with the windowing of their own content or of purchased content will want to take a look at Matthew Ball’s latest Originals piece in REDEF. When no direct-to-consumer offerings were possible and there was a physical constraint on distribution, the old model made sense. In Letting It Go: The End Of Windowing (And What Comes Next), Ball explores how rights owners will maximize the value of their content in a post-window era. This new era may have content creators looking more at the needs of their viewers and fans than the needs of middlemen buyers. (This is also the last piece by Ball we’re likely to see, since he’s been hired by Amazon Studios as Head of strategy.) |
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Anjan Mitra
Executive Director, India
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| Touted as the biggest M&A deal in the Indian broadcast industry, Zee-owned TEN Sports’ buyout by Sony Pictures Network India for US$ 385 million should redraw the India’s broadcast map making it a two-horse (Star & Sony-ESPN) market for sports, while signalling consolidation in a fragmented market. Zee could use the money to concentrate on initiatives it wants to. Still, it must have been tough for Subhash Chandra and Zee to let go of sports business. But a commentator aptly termed it business acumen (of Chandra and family) triumphing over emotions. |
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Kevin Jennings
Vice President, Programme
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| South Korean behemoth telcom KT has launched a commerce-focused mobile video platform service “dovido”, KT started the ball rolling by concentrating on providing beauty-related commercial content to the Chinese market and expects to raise more than US$ 65 million in sales over the next four years with more than 200 million viewers globally. The dovido service will combine video content, online-to-offline (O2O) services as well as social networking services (SNS) and regard their main competitor as YouTube (which helps when you are initially launching into a market where YouTube is banned). KT plan on rolling out the service globally and are already in discussions with telecom companies in the content sector such as China Mobile and NTT DoCoMo. Dovido is, however, currently only available through Google Play and Apple-ites will have to wait a bit longer. |
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Christopher Slaughter
CEO
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| Meanwhile, that ban on South Korean content seems to be broadening. The latest high-profile casualties include director Kim Ki-duk, who has been denied a work visa for a film he was planning to shoot in China, and actress Yoo In-na, who has been dropped as the lead in Chinese soap opera that had almost finished filming its 28 episodes. Unlikely to help matters much: China’s loss to Korea in an AFC World Cup qualifying match this week. |
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Kevin Jennings
Vice President, Programme
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| New rules come into force this week in the UK, meaning for the first time all BBC iPlayer users must now own a TV licence, regardless of whether or not they watch programmes live. Previously households only needed a licence to watch broadcast TV – including through Sky and Freeview The new laws mean iPlayer users need to hold a £145.50 a year licence to watch live BBC channels, stream or download programmes on demand. The ruling is likely to particularly affect younger people, who generally consume more content on smartphones or tablets and may not necessarily be covered by their parents licence fee. It is still unclear how the new rules will be enforced, as yet no plans to ask viewers to enter licence fee details on iPlayer have been announced. |
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Christopher Slaughter
CEO
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| China might have been disappointed with its medal count at the Rio Olympics, but the nation now has a different reason to rejoice — Wings Gaming has won the Aegis of Champions at The International 2016…! (Translation: a Chinese eSports team won the top prize in gaming company Valve’s “Defense of the Ancients 2” international gaming tournament held in Seattle last week.) Along with the curiously-shaped Aegis shield, Wings are taking US$9.1 million in prize money, out of a total pool of US$20 million. The tournament is a massive production, with every match broadcast live on Sky Sports to serve a global player and fan base that is bordering on rabid. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence, but just a few days before the Chinese team emerged victorius, Valve introduced a new character to the game, The Monkey King, drawn from the Chinese classic “Journey to the West.” |
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John Medeiros
Chief Policy Officer
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| File this under “But OF COURSE They Would Say That”: Google got Nielsen to do a case study that found “…TV reach seems to drive YouTube engagement, and in turn, YouTube exposure drives TV reach.” Well, duh…..that sounds like the company line delivered by Youtube in conferences at least 3 years ago: I remember the presentations about how Disney’s Frozen had hugely benefitted from all the videos of little girls singing “Let It Go.” (whether they could sing or not.) And Google spokespeople continue to use the same example. I guess the line hasn’t changed in 3 years……. Another line-to-take is put forth in the recent “How Google Fights Piracy” report. Content ID will take the war on piracy to “unprecedented heights.” But…oh, there are naysayers. Like the British music industry, which says “Google hasn’t managed to implement a Content ID system that people can’t easily get around; of course the fact that Google refuses to remove YouTube videos that show you exactly how to circumvent Content ID doesn’t help.” |
