John Medeiros
Chief Policy Officer
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War of Words on Copyright: Efforts in the USA last week to promote voluntary cooperation among industry groups to fight online piracy raised the hackles of the “Internet Profits Must Be Free” crowd. Slate magazine published a pair of commentaries that are worth reading. The first one, by a Google-employed lawyer, denounces voluntary agreements to fight piracy, and engages in familiar scare tactics that intentionally confuse pirate websites with the entire Internet. “With these voluntary agreements, copyright holders can starve websites of their funding, strip them of their domain names, and remove them from search.” (Well yuh…..if they’re sites dedicated to piracy!)And then Slate published a riposte, from the writer who created the “Sons of Anarchy” TV series. (He makes his money from paid content, unlike the lawyer who makes his from free content.) The Internet lobby, he says, has clear motivations. “Do they do this because they hate artists? No. They do it because they love money.” The writer says their interest is to “create more traffic and more data streams. Unfortunately, those streams are now pristine, digital ones of our work, which all flow into a huge watershed of semi-dirty cash.” |
Jill Grinda
Executive Vice President
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We knew that there was huge room for growth in Asian pay TV penetration and new research confirms it. According to a new report from Digital TV Research, the Asia-Pacific region is going through a period of rapid digital conversion, with penetration increasing from 28.9% of TV households in 2010 to 51.7% in 2013 and 61.2% by the end of this year. China will provide 225 million of the extra digital TV homes, with India adding a further 118 million. |
Desmond Chung
Associate Director, PR & Communications
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“Parting is such sweet sorrow”, opined Juliet, but apparently potential cord-cutters in America are having a hard time saying good-bye to their beloved cable TV. According to the Leichtman Research Group, the total subscriber losses for the TV industry last year were 104,521 — about 0.1% of customers. But nearly 17% of a Morgan Stanley survey said they would “definitely” or “probably” cut the cord. Something’s not adding up here! |
Jill Grinda
Executive Vice President
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The Ukraine crisis has been the major focus of news this week and UN chief Ban Ki-moon visits Moscow to urge a diplomatic solution to the crisis. So we were quite curious to learn via the satirical Borowitz Report in the New Yorker that there has been a major ramping up of sanctions, with John Kerry announcing last Tuesday that the United States had frozen Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Netflix account, effective immediately. Hhhhmmm…fact or fiction… |
John Medeiros
Chief Policy Officer
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CASBAA has been in the thick of preparations for Asian consideration of how to respond to likely attempts at the 2015 ITU WRC meeting to grab the C-band spectrum that is so important to the Asian broadcasting industry (among others.) Now the preparatory process (and the debates that are already ongoing) have broken into the global press. For those who might want to know more about the current debate, see this article written by one of the leading members of CASBAA’s Wireless Action Group. And a template letter to regulators plus other materials can be found here. |
Jane Buckthought
Advertising Consultant
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An interesting article on how brands deal with crisis situations, in the wake of the Malaysian airline disappearance and how Malaysia Airlines is dealing with it too. |
Mandy Wu
Regulatory Assistant
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“Dancing Round the Maypole of Deregulation” seems to be the latest sport in Canberra, once the politicians get finished fighting over which channel to watch in the Parliamentary gym. What fun! |
