Advanced Television

Nick Snow

Nick Snow

Nick Snow is the founder of Advanced Television Ltd and is publisher & editor-in-chief of advanced-television.com and Euromedia. In 1984 he worked on the debut issue of Cable & Satellite Europe, and over the years his companies have published many of the industry’s most highly regarded titles. He is also a screenwriter, producer and playwright.

Sky dish off menu

The satellite dish is symbolic of the television revolution that took place in un-cabled countries in the 1980s. This is particularly true here in the UK where the ‘Dish war’ between Sky’s cheap bird baths and BSB’s new-age squarials was fought out. Rupert Murdoch’s Sky was victorious but had to merge with the ‘enemy’ rather […]

September 28, 2022

IBC signals…

Being back in Amsterdam for the first global trade show since you know what, was quite something: Something good: even in a high-tech business people matter. It was noticeable that many companies saw as it important to reunite with colleagues, agents, resellers, as with customers and prospects. Whether it’s Zoom or the optimistically named Teams, […]

September 13, 2022

Birthday Streamers

When the party-planners at Netflix first began to mull its quarter century celebrations, I’m betting they didn’t think they’d coincide with authoritative leaks about the new ‘budget’ ad supported version of the service. No advertising has been part of the fundamental mandate of the founding father of streaming since it first thought of cutting back […]

August 30, 2022

Funding: What’s your bet?

The funding of TV of all kinds is under the microscope just now. For example; can public broadcasters justify collecting a tax from whole populations? Or, dare SVoDs run ads, or cut-off password sharers? Tricky. The BBC is the most-high profile of PSBs and, therefore, the alternative that does (or does not) emerge to the […]

June 8, 2022

ANGA: Comfort from cable

At times, during the lockdowns, you began to wonder if you were actually missing getting up before dawn to drive to an airport to fly to a European city in order to walk around a show floor or sit in a conference. And then you get to do it again, and the answer is: “not […]

May 10, 2022

Netflix: Watch the bonds

No regular reader will doubt that I’ve never exactly over-indulged on the Netflix Cool-Aid, so the latest news isn’t a big surprise. Price rises in a cost-of-living crisis and plateaued content offerings (both quality and quantity), matched with inflation in production, were never going to be a good mix. Add in vociferous competition and the […]

April 20, 2022

Streaming drama could be a horror show

This columnist’s conviction that Netflix’s business model is fundamentally a plate-spinning act, with the same potential mishaps, has waxed and waned as results have continued to boom, with just the odd bump in the road. But the conviction has never gone away completely, even as the company seemed to reach the status of 800lb gorilla […]

February 14, 2022

Dorries – dog whistler in chief

It goes without saying that the current British government is an embarrassment at home and abroad. With Trump, for now, off the stage, and Berlusconi, for now, in retirement, Boris Johnson has the stage to himself as a global unifier as nations the world over laugh at him, and pity us. One of the worst […]

January 17, 2022

2022 – what can go wrong?

I signed off last year’s last blog with “I make no predictions for 2021, including ‘at least it can’t be worse’”. That was a good decision. Who’d have thought we’d all be here at the end of 2021 having missed Vegas, Cologne and Amsterdam, again. Any bets on the 2022 travel itinerary? No, didn’t think […]

December 21, 2021

Streaming is an arms race, with the same morals

Disney+ has passed 100 million US subs. The gamble of going direct, cutting out the service provider middlemen, has paid off. Among its objectives now must be to make inroads internationally into the lead held by Netflix, the pioneer of D2C. The weapons in this war of attrition are: pricing, marketing and content. Disney doesn’t […]

November 29, 2021