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My enemy’s enemy is my friend?

What do companies do when they are very powerful in a particular field but that power becomes threatened because technology means the battleground shifts to an area where they are weak? You can’t organically become strong in a new sector quickly enough to avert the danger. You can’t even do with it with lots of […]

January 20, 2014 Nick Snow

BBC and BT: New leaders, what direction?

Two great British institutions have relatively new chiefs at the helm. And these aren’t just corporate suits from central casting but leaders, who, according to them, will redefine the direction of their organisations. At the British Broadcasting Corporation, Lord Tony Hall has returned to repair a corporate reputation battered by many recent events. But he […]

December 16, 2013 Nick Snow

Best Efforts and Miracles

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 […]

November 29, 2013 Nick Snow

BT and BSkyB both lose soccer gamble?

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 […]

November 11, 2013 Nick Snow

Netflix: Stick or twist?

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 […]

October 24, 2013 Nick Snow

RIP 3D, you won’t be missed

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 […]

October 10, 2013 Nick Snow

Voda treasure opens bid window

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 […]

September 3, 2013 Nick Snow

Can a company’s DNA kill it?

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 […]

August 19, 2013 Nick Snow

BT Vision will fail

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 […]

August 15, 2013 Nick Snow

Bezos: New dog, new tricks?

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 […]

August 7, 2013 Nick Snow