Nick Snow is the founder and publisher of advanced-television as well as Euromedia and IP Television magazines. In 1984 he worked in the debut issue of Cable & Satellite Europe and over the years his companies have published many of the industry’s most highly regarded titles. So, an academic study has suggested that the closure of Megaupload may have harmed legitimate box office takings for some movies. To some this kind of declaration is the media equivalent of being a climate change ‘denier’. I have said here before that the phalanx of content rights representation bodies – there are many of them – do themselves no [...]
There has been a consensus since the hapless George Entwistle was assisted onto his sword point a couple of weeks ago that the BBC should appoint an outsider as the new DG. All senior insiders were, to some extent or other, either tainted by the events that brought poor George down, or had no editorial or creative credentials for the [...]
Remember Corporate Raiders? The very name sounds so 90s, doesn’t it? These swashbucklers of the corporate stock markets believed in a kind of financial engineering that, by the lights of the more modern and esoteric techniques of debt packaging and trading, seem both simple and benign. It didn’t always seem that way back then. The classic approach was to find [...]
As slip-ups go, hitting the button that let out Google’s quarterlies early was expensive – try 9 per cent of the value of one of the world’s most valuable companies. It was a printer’s mistake – how ironic an old world communicator should undermine such a cutting edge outfit. The market was spooked by the unexpected announcement but the real [...]
It’s American election time again. A few elections ago, Bill Clinton, then running for his first term, pinned up a notice in campaign HQ that read: “It’s the Economy, stupid!” The sign was to remind all there that whatever the hue and cry of the election, ultimately voters would pick who they thought was competent to heal the economy. Plus [...]
Content piracy is often cited as the biggest threat to pay-TV and, by extension, the creative industries. Stopping it is the job of content security technologists and law enforcement. Comparisons are sometimes drawn with the drug trade – indeed, rights organisations sometimes claim the same organised criminals are involved and that by infringing an owner’s copyright an individual supports drugs [...]
The top men at News Corporation have had their ‘qualitative bonuses’ cut by half because of the phone hacking scandal in the UK. The quantitative element remained intact, though, as the share price has risen 23 per cent. The businesses have certainly done well but, clearly, the main spur to the stock boost was the announcement that the Corp is [...]
In the latest issue of IP Television International (available at IBC) we take a broad look at the Smart TV market. A report from TDG, quoted in the article, chastises TV makers for failing to make the most of their pivotal position in the fast growing Smart TV segment, though it does allow they have some real challenges in maximising [...]
The privately owned New York Times has appointed BBC DG Mark Thompson as the President and CEO to lead them to the digital age. It is the kind of ‘outside the box’ thinking only a private company can try; no public company would reach so far from ‘the norm’. For, while Thompson may come from ‘the box’, he is the [...]
IHS Research reports that US pay-TV subs are being lost to Netflix users and other OTT providers. This is always an eye catching headline in our sector, and I confidently predict it will rise close to the top of our most-read parade in coming days. However, like a lot of similar reports, it is a bit of a “Small Earthquake [...]
