26 August, 2016

Now that Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman has resigned, the company is moving forward with a new CEO (who is actually a 30+ year company veteran), with five new directors on its board, and what feels like not column inches, but column MILES of speculation about its future.  Certainly, there are lessons to be learned from the highly dramatic boardroom battle that led to this; but what really matters is that the company can now move beyond the often-tawdry headlines and get down to business.

A year ago, the New Zealand government really ballyhooed its launch of a study on how to update the country’s TV regulations for the digital era.   There were green papers, and discussion papers and lots and lots of issues raised, including about “Content Regulation in A Converged World.”  Now the results of the exercise are apparent, and the Government has announced (drumroll, please)……a few minor changes in the Broadcasting Act.   (OTT content, including VOD but not YouTube, will be covered by content guidelines, and some tiny steps were taken to allow a bit more Sunday advertising on TV, to push broadcasters a tiny tiny tiny bit toward a more even footing with OTT competitors.   But given all the attention, and the raised expectations, the industry thought the final outcome was pretty thin gruel:  “timid, too late and disappointing.” 

Shane Smith of Vice Media is never one to mince words. This week he gave the MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival where had a lot to say about Big Media.  “Baby boomers have had a stranglehold on media and advertising for a generation. That stranglehold is finally being broken by a highly educated, ethnically diverse, global-thinking, hard-to-reach generation, and media is having a hard time adapting to this rapid change.”  “We all know what we have to do. Three screens, one screen with OTT and innovative monetization. That’s the Holy Grail. Everyone knows that, but are we going towards that? The hour-long lecture can found here. And if you still need some more wisdom from the “self declared spokesman for the no-bulls#!t generation” you may enjoy the post-lecture interview.

The signs have been all over the US the past couple weeks, and now it’s confirmed: Rio Olympics viewing on TV was down by 18%, but streaming exploded. Part of the explanation for that is the “m” word (millenials), although advertisers seem to be satisfied with the results, which still kept NBC on top of the network ratings during the 17 days of broadcasting, and delivered the most profitable Olympics in history.  Nonetheless, there is still plenty of post-mortem hand-wringing being done, and even network executives acknowledge “…we have a lot to learn about consumer behaviour.”  They’ve got two years to study, before the Winter Olympics descend on Pyeong Chang, South Korea; but at this rate, by 2018, everything might have changed again.

Mukesh Ambani’s hunt for 100 million Reliance Jio subscribers is making telecom firms edgy. An edgy headline certainly that could be dubbed biased towards Reliance, but there’s no denying India’s telecoms sector is readying for some bloodbath. The war of words between incumbent telcos and Reliance JIO has not only reached regulator TRAI, but is also knocking on PM’s door for likely intervention. This soap opera has just begun and promises more twists and turns than fictional ones airing on Indian telly.

Although we follow industry news from overseas quite closely, we also like to make the point that not all trends are created equal; now a new study from pollsters YouGov confirms that, showing that almost half of Asia Pacific viewers aren’t aware of Netflix’s launch in their market.  The study also shows that while locally-grown Asian streaming services are making inroads, the most-watched streamer is still YouTube.  Best news? There’s still a dance in the old dame yet — 83% of respondents still watch TV via broadcast TV channels.

It’s always nice to be noticed.   The UK Minister for Intellectual Property, Baroness Neville-Rolfe, passed through HK this week on her way to some heavy-lifting policy stuff, in China.   While here she gave a speech on IP enforcement, and one of the aspects of close UK-HK cooperation was work together to deal with the problem of “black box” streaming media STBs.  And she paid tribute to CASBAA by name because of our work on black boxes!    

It was the pull-quote from a Variety article about CNN boss Jeff Zucker a couple weeks ago that set the cat amongst the pigeons: “I don’t think Vice and BuzzFeed are legitimate news organizations. They are native advertising shops. We crush both of them.”  You can’t talk smack like that and not have it be noticed.  Whether it “…ignited a fight for the future of news” is another matter, although it did ignite a sarcastic Twitter stream from BuzzFeed in response.  Now the web service (“…better known for listicles and cat videos…”) is reorganising into two divisions, BuzzFeed News and BuzzFeed Entertainment, a none-too-subtle statement that it is serious about news — serious enough to ring-fence it away from the listicles-and-cat-videos stuff.

Have we mentioned lately that voting is underway for the 2016 Emmy Awards?  We’ve definitely mentioned that there are a crazy number of categories and nominees, so many that it’s sort of crazy to think any one person can have watched them all.  But as usual, there’s a lot of handicapping going on in the run-up to the September 18 awards show; of particular interest is the new “Best Limited Series” category.  And if you haven’t seen it, the latest from the “Honest Trailers” guys (who were also nominated for an Emmy…?) is full of Emmys LOLs.