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Christopher Slaughter
CEO
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| Winter is here again; the penultimate season of Game of Thrones has started, in case you’ve been living in a cave. The premiere crashed Foxtel’s IPTV service in Australia, crushed its previous ratings record in the US, all par for the course with the first global television blockbuster. If you’ve forgotten what happened in Season 6, Littlefinger can catch you up; if you’re confused by the whole thing, that’s apparently kind of the point; if you want to know more about the Targaryen family tree, you’re covered; don’t even ask about Ed Sheeran. But if you are tempted to dismiss it all as just a bunch of hype, pause and consider the vast Game of Thrones Media Industrial Complex. |
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John Medeiros
Chief Policy Officer
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| In Bangkok, tongues are still wagging about the policy U-turn that saw the NBTC’s planned framework for OTT regulation suddenly withdrawn. A new policy is now being drafted, but in the interim the NBTC continues to press for action on nearly 3,000 pages on the Facebook and Youtube websites that it says contain “illegal” content. OTT policy is also getting a bit of news in the UK, where the government is requiring porn OTT sites to set up mandatory age verification procedures. You can be sure that not all offshore porn sites will go along, and it will be interesting to see if site blocks are instituted against non-compliant operators. |
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Kevin Jennings
Vice President
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| India’s Reliance Industries has bought a stake in Balaji Telefilms to the tune of Rs4 billion (in excess of US$60 million). Balaji is one on India’s premier content producers and has also recently launched its own OTT service, ALT Balaji. Reliance also provides the largest Data & 4G network in India through its subsdiary, Jio. The Reliance injection of capital secures a 25% interest in Balaji and will help drive the growth of OTT and mobile / “on the go” viewing as well as help ALT compete in the OTT space, both domestically and overseas. |
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Kevin Jennings
Vice President
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| What a week it’s been for TV in Britain. A new Dr Who was revealed to the TV audience after the (male) finals at Wimbledon, a new CEO was announced at ITV and the Advertising Standards Authority are introducing tougher rules on sexist TVCs . All this in a week where the BBC published their annual data on their top On Air Talent salaries. (Hint: If you’re still not understanding, it’s all about gender imbalance) |
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John Medeiros
Chief Policy Officer
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| The 27-year old operator of a pirate app store in the USA has been sentenced to 16 months in jail, after a long multinational investigation and trial. Meanwhile, in the UK, there’s a bit of saber-rattling going on, with representatives of the content industry warning that individual end-users could face legal action over use of so-called “Kodi” box illicit streaming devices. Adopting its best tones of outrage, TorrentFreak says our industry is fear-mongering, to scare users off using ISDs. Well, duh….why would we want to do that? |
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Mark Lay
Vice President, Singapore
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| Netflix reported their quarterly earnings this week. They really nailed it on their top-line numbers: overall subscribers crossed 100 million (to 104 million) gaining a record 5.2 mil subs for Q2 and revenues hit $2.7 billion. These results brought out the lovers, “the company absolutely killed it this quarter” and the haters, “one cannot just burn cash into eternity” (referring to forecast of negative free cash flow of $2.0 billion to $2.5 billion for the full year 2017). “Spending $6 billion a year on content, Netflix admits each show now needs an actual audience” but one of their worst shows doesn’t even air on the Netflix. |
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Cathryn Chase
Regulatory Assistant
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| Here are some numbers for you. Released earlier this summer, the annual Cisco Virtual Networking Index (VNI) has forecast dramatic increases in global IP traffic and online video viewing over the next 5 years. Globally, total IP traffic is expected to increase three-fold by 2021, with the Asia Pacific region boasting the steepest growth rate. Over the same period, online video will continue to claim the largest share of IP traffic, growing from 73% of total traffic in 2016 to 82% of total traffic in 2021. Other significant trends for the TV and Broadcasting industry revolve around emerging entertainment mediums, such as live internet video, which is forecast to compromise 13% of internet video traffic by 2021. New technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) will also contribute to the industry’s changing landscape – VR and AR’s share of internet traffic is set to increase 20-fold by 2021. For more facts and figures, you can check out the full report here. |
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Christopher Slaughter
CEO
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| Time again for “one of the biggest cultural gatherings in the world…”, you got it, Comic-Con is underway in San Diego. More than 130,000 fans will descend on the city throughout the weekend, dressed in full cos-play splendour, trying desperately to get into “the most important room in Hollywood”, aka, Hall H in the San Diego Convention Center. In keeping with the trend of recent years, TV will again be front and center, with more space on the schedule than ever. And despite questions about the relevance of the event given the absence of many Hollywood studios, there will still be wall-to-wall coverage throughout the weekend. |
