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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 Nick Snow

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 Nick Snow

MENA and The Magpies

As the organisers hope many will gather for the CABSAT 21 expo in Dubai, in the latest issue of Euromedia Chris Forrester offers a reflection on the progress, or otherwise, of TV propositions across the MENA region. Of course, in many ways, MENA is not a region from which any wider conclusions or pointers can […]

October 20, 2021 Nick Snow

Hooray for the human touch

Broadband networks and all that comes with them – CDNs, nodes, edge servers etc – were expected to fall over in the pandemic. The forecast of friction points, and outright failure, as traffic caused by WFH and more time to use entertainment, was so solid that the big streamers voluntarily cut their data intensity, trading […]

October 8, 2021 Nick Snow

The Orwellian Ofcom appointment

George Orwell’s dystopian future world of a sinister, mind-controlling dictatorship is often called upon as an analogy for political shenanigans in ‘the real world’. Usually, the comparison is overblown and inaccurate, and I’m not going to break with that tradition. However, the UK government’s manipulation of the ‘independent’ appointment of the chair of the media […]

August 31, 2021 Nick Snow

Netflix – breaking bad?

Netflix seemed relaxed about raining on HBO Max’s parade (for achieving impressive subscriber growth) by telling markets: “HBO doesn’t bother us at all”. Fair enough – though the contrast between HBOs North America growth and Netflix shedding of 400,000 subs is marked. But more worrying for them is the worldwide growth and share gains of […]

July 22, 2021 Nick Snow

Can Tim Davie save the BBC?

The reputation of the BBC matters. It wants to be seen as the gold-standard of public service broadcasting, and that matters not just for the BBC and, by extension, the UK but for the whole world because, historically, the BBC has successfully projected itself as a beacon of broadcasting service that all democratic nations should […]

June 15, 2021 Nick Snow

AT&T: Must all telco TV end in tears?

This blog replaces one about BT trying to sell its expensively fashioned TV assets. AT&T is also bailing from TV, and its entanglement with entertainment makes BT’s foray look cheap and well-managed. While AT&T keeps a big stake, the maths isn’t appetising from their stockholder’s point of view. The new company has a proforma enterprise […]

May 17, 2021 Nick Snow

BT chose sport over speed and service

So, BT Sport is for sale. Or is looking for strategic partners, etc, etc – all code for “up for sale”. No real surprise. Does it ever work when telcos, or other technology driven organisations, try and run TV companies? Not often. Why did it get in to sport, or indeed TV of any kind? […]

April 30, 2021 Nick Snow

Pay-TV, RIP?

In this new edition of Euromedia we asked if pay-TV was on its deathbed. A trifle morbid perhaps, especially in a pandemic, but it seemed important. Certainly, pay-TV in some markets – the Americas in particular – is in decline, and the absence of some live sports events has not helped. Broadly speaking, contributors think […]

March 30, 2021 Nick Snow