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Christopher Slaughter
CEO
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| Can you believe that 2016 is already over? Okay, there are still a few days left, but really, it’s basically time to stick a fork in it, 2016 is done. And with that in mind, it’s worth noting that this is the final edition of News Views for 2016. It’s been a good year — over the course of it, we’ve put together more than seven hundred items, passed on more than eight hundred Member News releases, and included about the same number of Other Links. Now, one last link for the holidays: pull up a seat by the fire. From all of us at CASBAA, Happy Holidays! (See you next year!) |
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John Medeiros
Chief Policy Officer
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| Last week, we reported it was looking like outgoing FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler would stay on as a Commission member. Nope. Apparently not looking forward to being on the losing side of the next four years of partisan battles, he’s resigned. He has come to be viewed as an advocate of full-on ISP regulation, in order to achieve net neutrality, and much of the blogosphere has forgotten that the pressure for the controversial decision to regulate ISPs came directly from the White House. (Wheeler had been pushing a less-radical solution.) The Chairman was certainly not viewed as a consumer advocate early in his tenure, when comedian John Oliver generated huge public reaction with a rant comparing Wheeler’s stewardship at the FCC to hiring a dingo as a babysitter.
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Mark Lay
Vice President, Singapore
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| The most lucrative digital ad fraud in history was reported by Internet security firm White Ops. Dubbed “Methbot” (because of references to “meth” in the code), the scam was faking views of as many as 300 million video ads per day, making advertisers believe their messages were appearing on legit websites including some of the best-known publishers in the business. Here’s how they did it; interestingly it did not duplicate previous botnets, which relied on malware-infected computers of individual consumers. In this case, the actual “bots” resided on servers in the US and Europe. White Ops said it had no doubt the management of the fraud net was in Russia. (Boy, does this “distributed architecture” sound just like an IPTV piracy network! Is that coincidental?) Cynics said the scale of this operation impressed, but it is far from unusual. The US-based Association of National Advertisers reported in January that frauds would cost US advertisers over US$7 billion this year; looks like that number might be conservative. |
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John Medeiros
Chief Policy Officer
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| In piracy news this week: Canadian cable companies continue to get legal injunctions against sellers of “black box” illicit streaming devices (ISDs). EU courts are beginning to implement last September’s EU Court of Justice decision requiring commercial website operators to check the copyright status of the links they post. A UK pirate operator found himself getting death threats from his ex-customers, after enforcement action closed him down and he couldn’t serve up their stolen content any more. In Australia, Telstra became the first ISP to start blocking the Pirate Bay and other notorious pirate websites, and was promptly ridiculed for using a DNS block, the easiest blocking technology to circumvent. (Optus, meanwhile, set its lawyers to parsing the site-block court verdict and seeing what is the maximum length of time they could delay complying – they must be seeking more effective technology, right??) And the helpful folks at Torrentfreak note that pirate service Popcorn Time now comes with multi-language dubbing to make it easier to consume pirated content. Torrentfreak says this will be particularly helpful for children’s programming……ah yes, what we teach our children. |
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Jane Buckthought
Advertising Consultant
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| Coca-Cola’s global chief marketing officer just said some things about television and digital marketing that should have anyone deep in the faux social media marketing revolution scrambling for cover. Marco de Quinto declared that TV advertising for Coke was still the undisputable heavyweight for delivering the highest return-on-investment from advertising across any media channel – US$2.13 for every dollar spent on TV versus $1.26 for digital. He also opined that ads in social media were a very poor proxy for any digital marketing strategy.
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John Medeiros
Chief Policy Officer
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| Thailand’s TV industry finally united on one thing: urging a court not to accept the proposed “rehabilitation plan” for shut-down pay-TV operator CTH. The restructuring proposal would have had CTH become operator of a biomass-fueled power plant, and the other TV operators (many of whom are creditors) implied this was just a scheme to further delay paying CTH’s debts. Meanwhile, here’s something else that (ahem) smells like biomass: the Kingdom’s digital terrestrial operators were given a huge financial break by the ruling military junta, which issued a fiat decision stretching out payments for their extremely high license auction bids, and also decided to subsidize DTT retransmission costs. (Such is the state of policy-making in Bangkok that the NBTC commissioners would never dare make such a decision, even if they thought it right, for fear of being personally sued for giving away public benefits. The generals don’t need to worry about that. ) |
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Kevin Jennings
Vice President, Programme
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| Samsung Electronics has announced it has started offering the YouTube high dynamic range (HDR) service via a software update to their latest SUHD and UHD televisions. This is reportedly the first time the HDR service has been made available for watching on television. The move comes at a time when global content streaming giants YouTube, Netflix and Amazon are slowly releasing HDR content – as yet there is still not a lot of general content available but the technology is slowly gaining traction, as it can express the darkest and brightest parts of an image in more detail. It’s notable that Samsung should be the first to feature HDR – Not only does its home country South Korea boast the world’s fastest internet but Netflix, Amazon and YouTube are in a tight race to capture a larger market share, with consumers seemingly reluctant to adopt a subscription –based model.
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Andrew Lin
Regulatory Assistant
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| The Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has declared that broadband internet should be a “basic telecommunications service” for all citizens across Canada. This action will be supported by a government investment package of up to $750 million in order to ensure that rural areas will be connected and wired up. ISPs will also be required to contribute to a universal service fund to support rural build-out. In addition, the CRTC has also set new targets for download and upload speeds for fixed broadband services.
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Mark Lay
Vice President, Singapore
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| It’s been about a week since Amazon Prime Video launched worldwide and, oddly, there hasn’t been too much noise about it in the mainstream or any press. I believe the significant aspect of this launch, for our business, is not just the Prime Video programming but the over 100 channels that Amazon offers through its “Streaming Partners Program.” Amazon is slowly setting themselves up to be the world’s platform for OTT delivered video. And having a prime seat in delivering the main source of video entertainment (and possibly news and sports) worldwide is hugely significant. But what’s even more significant is that this all could just be a means for building a billing relationship for every other product sold through Amazon. Bezos is playing the long game.
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Anjan Mitra
Executive Director, India
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| Détente in the South Asian cinema world? Pakistan’s cinema owners have decided to lift the ban on Indian films. The motivation for the change seems rather commercial: it was costing cinema owners dearly. But a spokesman said it was also done because the Pakistani cinema owners wanted to support the Indian industry, and hoped for reciprocal support, too. Indian filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt praised the Pakistan industry for recognizing it had made a mistake, and said “civil society must not give up its cultural space and become a part of the war hysteria.”
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Kevin Jennings
Vice President, Programme
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| Throughout December we’ve seen the bouncy John Lewis boxer TVC as well as a couple of very timely and funny parody ads but as to be expected at this time of year its mostly been heartwarming and schmaltzy – with even the UK’s Gogglebox getting in on the act …And so we come to the final TVC of the season, minus the cute and sentimental – It’s the only festive advert we’ve seen that acknowledges the true family festive horror of Christmas, albeit tongue in cheek. Bah humbug til next year…
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