We are all headed to an IP driven multi-screen world. The irony is that this enables more and better services – and therefore the opportunity for providers to monetise subscribers in more and better ways – and yet these services are delivered by a process that is intrinsically ‘best efforts’. Because of variable bandwidths in […]
The City of London was in two minds about the BT Sport Champions League deal when markets opened for the first time after the deal. BT was marked down and so was BSkyB, with the established broadcaster losing a sizeable nine per cent of its value. So, on balance, the market thought it was a […]
Netflix is an emblematic company; emblematic of the starkly simple fact that ubiquitous fast access is rewriting the rules of pay-TV. The California company does what ‘traditional’ players like Showtime and HBO do, but does it with an aggressive price and complete control of its marketing and – in most respects – its distribution. This […]
3D is the dog that didn’t bark. Bringing pictures ‘to life’ was to bring (another) renaissance to movie theatres and provide another whole new replacement market for big screen TVs. Avatar, James Anderson’s 2009 blockbuster about persecuted blue humanoid alien forest dwellers, was to be the start of something big and game changing. It turned […]
Here in the UK we have just closed the football transfer window. This is an artificial period of time in which all buying and selling of players has to take place. The idea is to remove the destabilisation of players coming and going throughout the season. Now we just have the destabilisation of the deadline […]
Will DNA that doesn’t adapt kill a company? The chemistry of corporations and their leaders is endlessly fascinating to us ‘industry watchers.’ To what extent are companies reflections of their leaders or, conversely, do some companies suck the personality out of managers, demanding everything is done the ‘XYZ’ way? Can you take the DNA of […]
Harsh? I don’t think so. Forget everything else, if a provider can’t do better than a voice loop telling you a lie about when the broadband service will be restored, it has no business pretending to be a TV service provider. There are, of course, plenty of question marks over a strategy that sees a […]
Jeff Bezos has bought The Washington Post. At $250 million it is a snip – when viewed as a fraction of his personal fortune – for one of the great remaining ego trips. That is what owning a big newspaper is all about; always has been, always will be. That doesn’t make it a bad […]
A recent report informed us that the City of London Police are, along with the Intellectual Property Office, setting up a special unit to tackle digital piracy and counterfeiting. The IPO is going to provide £2.5 million over two years for the unit. Not exactly the FBI is it? I’m guessing that sum is less […]
Larry Gerbrandt finds parallels between the development of the aviation and television industries. I spent several summers working my way through college in a fruit-canning plant where my grandfather was a manager. During one of our evening conversations, it dawned on me that he had witnessed the entire evolution of aviation, from the Wright Brothers […]