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Sport’s mad!

There’s a lot to do with sport that is linked in some way to insanity. This is because the definition of insanity is to continue to repeat the same behaviour and yet expect a different outcome. Any of us that support a football team (or any other variety of team) year in, year out, knowing […]

February 18, 2013 Nick Snow

Malone and Murdoch, best of enemies

John Malone’s Liberty Global is making a bid for Virgin Media and the press somehow manages to work it up as a Malone versus Murdoch showdown. The notion of two aged Titans facing off in one of the world’s most developed media markets is tantalising, but is far from the reality. The world’s most experienced […]

February 5, 2013 Nick Snow

Middle East needs broadcasting

One year ago in Euromedia, we reported on the immediate aftermath of the Arab Spring, its affect on broadcasters in the region and the part they had played in what seemed, at the time, the largely positive overthrow of dictators. Even then, the risk of the joy of demonstrators in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and beyond […]

January 21, 2013 Nick Snow

My Ah-Ha moment on content portability

An overly generous Santa Claus left a very nice gift for me under the tree this year, a shiny new Apple iPad Mini with both WiFi and 4G access. Considering I already own a first generation full size iPad, an iTouch, two Apple iPhone 4s, the latest Apple MacBookPro, a MacMini, a MacPro tower and […]

January 16, 2013 GuestBlogger

Safe pair of hands wins Moto

The STB business of Motorola has gone to Arris as they beat out Pace and others with a winning $2.35 billion bid. Arris is one of those billion dollar (in fact currently about $1.75 billion market cap) that no one not in its sector has ever heard of. They are so low profile the deal […]

December 21, 2012 Nick Snow

Pace – Moto, really?

Being a shareholder in Pace has sometimes been profitable – but mostly not – and it has rarely been dull. Now the Yorkshire-based STB maker is bidding for the Motorola STB business that Google would like to offload following its buy of the mobile business. For a company that was earlier this year on its […]

December 11, 2012 Nick Snow

Heresy: Piracy is good for you!

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 […]

December 3, 2012 Nick Snow

BBC the Big British Compromise

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 […]

November 22, 2012 Nick Snow

RIP for Relative Valuations, please…

Larry Gerbrandt in Los Angeles raises the spectre of the unwelcome return of relative valuation Like a bad horror movie franchise, some valuation concepts seem to keep coming back for another sequel in hopes that this time they’ve got it right. I’m talking about the biggest financial sink-hole ever created: ‘relative valuation’. The technique rose […]

November 14, 2012 GuestBlogger

Corporate raider will optimise OTT. Simples.

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 […]

November 1, 2012 Nick Snow