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Policing these pointless numbers

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 […]

July 3, 2013 Nick Snow

TV future is cumulative, not replacement

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 […]

July 1, 2013 GuestBlogger

Home Gateway to the past?

Gatekeeping is a cornerstone of academic media theory – that boom industry of the Noughties. But it is a theory under strain as the idea of a few privileged outlets choosing what content is relayed and in what form, and thereby shaping cultural and political agendas, seems less convincing in the Internet driven, social media […]

May 30, 2013 Nick Snow

F@*k yeah! Don’t screw up

Hey, I know that Tumblr isn’t really aimed at me. And, goodness knows, I don’t want to needlessly relieve myself on someone else’s parade. But! But, like most of you, I have a direct interest in big international companies doing well and being well managed, it’s called my pension. Because of the business we’re all […]

May 20, 2013 Nick Snow

The pipes, the pipes are calling

It doesn’t seem that long since owning networks was the very unfashionable, potentially less profitable and, frankly, dead boring end of the business. Commoditisation of bandwidth provision and the obligations of neutrality both put pressure on pipe owners and many looked enviously at their content cousins. Some pipes bought content – Comcast and NBCU – […]

April 24, 2013 Nick Snow

Don’t twitter away the news

What is social media’s relationship to TV news? That’s the question we pose in the latest issue of Euromedia, which you can read here as a digital magazine. Is it an opportunity of a threat? The answer is that it is both. Contributors to our piece take a pretty optimistic view. That’s not surprising as […]

April 5, 2013 Nick Snow

It’s just TV, now make it pay

It’s that time of year again and the industry is gathering in London for the TV Connect event. This is the latest iteration of what was founded as the IPTV World Forum, and the more generic name reflects the maturity of the business and the increasing transparency of the barriers between once competing segments. Virgin […]

March 18, 2013 Nick Snow

You ‘f+*&ing’ View!

I remember a press conference many years ago down at MIP, the room was packed and not just with eager reporters, there was also a surfeit of testosterone. Television, then recently released from the monoculture of national broadcasters, had become the field of choice for the world’s more colourful entrepreneurs to compare appendages. Ranged before […]

March 3, 2013 Nick Snow

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