8 September, 2017

Welcome to News Views, CASBAA’s news round-up culled from sources across the industry for the week ending September 8th. Curated by CASBAA, News Views keeps you in the loop. We always value your feedback, so tell us what you think!

Brought to you by:

John Medeiros

Chief Policy Officer

In the world of digital piracy, it’s simply not possible to stop every scoundrel in every part of the world from stealing files (or streams) created by others and reselling them. The goal of fighting piracy has to be a mass-market focus: to raise the cost and hassle of obtaining pirate feeds to the point where the mass of people decide it’s really easier and more cost-effective to subscribe for legal content supply. The guys at Torrentfreak (who know something about piracy) did an interesting little study of the UK economics of “free” Premier League games, and they came to the conclusion that paying Sky, Virgin, or BT was “the only truly reliable solution.” That’s where we need to get to, in Asia.

Anjan Mitra

Executive Director, India

People are fast running out of adjectives — audacious, mind-boggling, `most expensive ball in IPL’ are few of them — to describe Star India’s US$ 2.55 billion bid to bag the consolidated global media rights for IPL cricket that may create a monopoly. However, two commentators actually observed Star’s moves may be expensive but not outrageous and if Star can find synergies between its various content delivery ops given its clout, it’s not difficult to recover investments. And, the man of the moment, Star India chief Uday Shankar justifies the winning bid was the “right” one. Though, he joked with colleagues that now he cannot take them out for coffee having gone on a spending spree. Confidence or pragmatism?

Kevin Jennings

Vice President

An Industry research piece in South Korea suggests that consumers viewing video on mobile devices are still favouring platforms such as YouTube.

According to data from mobile market tracker WiseApp, YouTube had a 73 percent share of the Korean market as of May this year in terms of the time that users have spent watching video content. Among Korean services, Afreeca TV settled at 5 percent and Naver TV had 3 percent.Pooq, which is the sole provider of live terrestrial channels, had only 2 percent. Despite SK Broadband and KT’s relative dominance of the telecom market their own services recorded 2 percent and 1 percent share respectively. The market tracker said it surveyed over 22,000 people who use Google Android based smartphones.

Mark Lay

Vice President, Singapore

Some top stories in the world of OTT this week include Disney, where CEO Robert Iger told conference-goers in New York that, “we’re going to launch big, and we’re going to launch hot.” He also confirmed that the ESPN service will arrive sooner, “sometime this spring.” This story quoting BBC Director General Tony Hall goes right to the heart of how OTT services easily cross all borders, maybe too easily for some. And this point wasn’t missed by Carlo Katigbak, President and CEO of ABS-CBN during his keynote at the recent CASBAA Philippines in View in Manila last week when he said, “…OTT providers are subject to very little or no regulation. It is time to think about whether regulations for pay TV are out-of-date and need to be revised ” And to finish off a Q&A with Globo’s CEO on How the Latin American Media Giant Is Competing With Netflix. These stories and many more, continually updated on the CASBAA TT Group Newsfeed.

Kevin Jennings

Vice President

Bangladesh’s second undersea cable will finally start functioning commercially from Sunday after a one year delay. The state-run Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company Ltd (BSCCL) could not start the commercial operations because of the failure of another state-run company, Bangladesh Telecommunications Company Ltd to install an uninterrupted inland link from the landing point in Kuakata to Dhaka. Now the cable is up and running Bangladesh will no longer need to import bandwidth from India. Meanwhile in not unrelated news, Australia-to-Asia cable traffic has been affected as the recent typhoons have cut or damaged submarine cables, with operators saying they won’t be back at full capacity until October.

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