Nick Snow is the founder of Advanced Television Ltd and is publisher & editor-in-chief of advanced-television.com and Euromedia. In 1984 he worked on the debut issue of Cable & Satellite Europe, and over the years his companies have published many of the industry’s most highly regarded titles. He is also a screenwriter, producer and playwright.
There used to be an entire industry devoted to Kremlin watching during the Cold War, it’s a pastime that’s enjoying – if that’s the right word – a revival just now. The BBC bureaucracy has sometimes been compared to the Kremlin and defining, deducing or second guessing its next move sometimes seems as fraught. Lord […]
The first ever closing of a BBC channel has been done to pave the way for the first ever tax imposed for receiving content over the Internet. The BBC, in the person of its Director General Lord Tony Hall, says the BBC is taking difficult and necessary decisions in the face of real term cuts […]
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, so the saying goes. Charter and John Malone must be reflecting on that now. Comcast had – reportedly – been in detailed discussions with Charter as to which bits of Time Warner it would buy if the former’s bid for the latter was successful. Then, after a […]
I get the feeling we will soon see some seismic moves in M&A, the kind that will make the weather for some time to come. A look at Vodafone’s results reflects a lack of lustre; revenues down and an absence of bright spots. The odds on a shape-shifting deal, using the ammunition of the $135 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]