 | Issue: | Asia-Pacific II 2005 |
| Article no.: | 4 | |
| Topic: | Just over the horizon: the future of Asia’s broadcasting industry | |
| Author: | Simon Twiston Davies | |
| Title: | CEO | |
| Organisation: | Cable & Satellite Broadcasting Association of Asia | |
| PDF size: | 60KB |
About author
Simon Twiston Davies is the Chief Executive Officer of the Cable & Satellite Broadcasting Association of Asia (CASBAA), a pan-regional organization representing the interests of the pay-TV industry and related telecoms and new media companies. Before taking his current post, Twiston Davies was the CEO of Kagan Asia Media, the Asian regional division of Kagan Associates. Before joining Kagan, the British-born Twiston Davies was a Hong Kong-based writer and editor. He specialised in the Asian television and telecoms industries from 1989 closely following the launch of more than 150 pay-TV channels and cable systems, as well as the increasing maturity of the terrestrial television market. Twiston Davies began his journalism career in Montreal, Canada, before moving to Asia in 1987.
Article abstract
The proliferation of technologies and content has Asian-Pacific telecom service providers trying to understand how best to meet local needs. Government regulators also wonder how best to stimulate the economy, encourage the growth of the sector and provide services for the lower classes and those who dwell in remote regions. To grow, operators must reach the region’s underserved millions by providing modern, affordable, services, with local language content and target the specific needs of the full range of users.
Full Article
Given the ever wider diversity of end-user terminals on offer to consumers of, and subscribers to, video services it’s hardly surprising that both network operators and content providers occasionally appear bemused by the business opportunities with which they are being presented as we enter the second half of the first decade of the 21st century. Less than two years ago, many traditional Asia Pacific telcos were just beginning to grapple with the implications of IPTV (Internet Protocol TV). Today, operators are trying to address the issues of HDTV – is it a product they can safely ignore or not? They also are also trying to grasp what the set-top driven PVR (Personal Video Recorder) and the WiFi-based technologies, now avidly touted by wireless and wireline operators alike, mean to the future of their businesses. Meanwhile, the Asia-Pacific’s traditional cable community and their brothers in the DTH (Direct-to-Home TV Via Satellite) market are also looking closely at IPTV and wireless platforms and assessing how they can ‘eat the lunch’ or take the business away from the Asian Telco industry by providing yet more compelling and competitively priced exclusive communications services. The next couple of years are going to be crucial, but at a far more basic level than those of the high-end and middle markets that gain so much attention from commentators. While the new horizon appears unbounded for those markets, questions still linger, nipping at the heels of those leading the way. The broadest of these questions is the growth of ‘the digital divide’, which is only another name for the traditional gulf between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots. As technology costs plunge, services become increasingly available to an apparently ever-growing middle class. Nevertheless, although the world seems inexorably to grow more prosperous, millions remain left behind; they are not included in the dreams made possible by the rapidly advancing globalisation of the economy, instant connectivity and pervasive timely communications. Just last year, India, a billion-strong nation seemingly grown prosperous and proud in the last decade, went to the polls and rejected the very politicians responsible for the country’s rising fortunes. The people casting those votes were the millions still in poverty, so far unable to join India’s flourishing middle classes. They are the hundreds of millions that still do not have the mobile telephones, the satellite televisions, PCs, ISPs and effective access to broadband services. Still, given time, perhaps within a decade, the digital divide may prove, if not illusory, at least easier to cross than initially forecast. To be sure, the divide will remain an issue, one that conscientious nations, and still hungry marketers cannot ignore, that must be addressed by communications companies, equipment manufacturers and service providers. The future, though, may surprise us all, creating its own balance by demonstrating that those on the ‘wrong’ side of the divide are exactly the individuals, the currently under-served markets upon which the future expansion of telecommunications depends. In fact, the challenge of the next few years is how to engage these underserved, often low income, millions. The challenge is to reach out to these new audiences quickly, inexpensively, and yet retain the quality and the production values that have made broadband, pay-TV services and distribution by satellite and fibre, so successful. The more practical question, the harder query, is how the future of Asian communications is to become a profitable proposition. For all of the much-vaunted 300-million strong middle classes in India and China, how does an astute marketer create a healthy business out of the proliferation of content and the technology to deliver it to the mass market? There is no doubt that the world needs plenty of content, and demand is rising rapidly. The insatiable maw of the future offers tremendous opportunities, and demands tremendous imagination, tremendous hard work and, like all entertainment before it, tremendous upfront investment. The word ‘entertainment’ is used loosely, to mean the content available to anyone using communications devices, from email and e-commerce to the Internet, to film and TV programming, to streaming video and data. Many believe that the question of content will determine what happens next. The first thing likely to happen, and is happening even now, is the disappearance of the distinction between ‘wired’ and ‘wireless’ services. Your PDA, which is also your telephone, can surf the Net, bookmark selected sites, monitor incoming information, alert you to developing events, all while maintaining remote access to your office LAN and company Ethernet. In turn, the erosion of the online/wireless distinction is likely to trigger the erosion of boundaries between audience and producer. This erosion, in fact, forms the heart of the concept of interactivity, specifically interactive television, wherein audiences create their own content using telephones to make filmed content, computers to edit and post-produce, and email, and the Web to distribute and download. This basic form of interactivity is likely to grow exponentially as the cost of hardware and bandwidth diminishes. Capital costs are likely to remain the most significant expenditure in the production chain, but per unit prices will plunge. Creation of content with digital cameras makes editing faster and cheaper, while satellite and fibre has reduced distribution costs dramatically, to approximately one-fifth their former levels. Server-driven production and archiving is further streamlining content creation, enabling greater reductions in prices of capital equipment and labour, putting professional-quality production within the range of millions of people. Lower production and capital costs, however, are unlikely to translate into cheaper or easier creativity. High-grade, consistent and enduring originality is likely to remain at a premium. Increased interactivity is also likely to spur an explosion of e-commerce. Indeed, in the age of the PVR, using equipment such as TiVo, individuals are already programming what is in effect, their own ‘channel’, and having it delivered to any communication device. Selecting from a broad menu of content available in his region, the consumer can designate the ‘broadcasts’ he wishes to receive and, the time by which they are to be delivered and their duration. Refining this further, users will create multiple customised channels dedicated to their particular interests: from golf, to music, to financial services, or to political developments. So plan for intense interest by retailers, who will try to turn every individual into a market, by advertising, for example, online gaming services, accessories and cable channels to those with an interest in sports, wars or plain good old story telling. This is already happening today. A broad internationalisation of content and those who make it is underpinning this explosion of services. While the dominant language of the Internet remains English, this is swiftly changing as developing economies burgeon, populations prosper and consumer demand spreads and grows throughout the world. While the Chinese and Hindi languages, for example, are assuming an increasingly important role throughout their regions, on a smaller scale, within particular markets, local languages and cultures dominate. Bahasa, Vietnamese, Arabic, Korean and Japanese are carving out larger and larger global roles, not only domestically, but also within significant Diasporas. English is here to stay, of course, but who knows in what format. At the same time, our global media players are seeking local partners with ever more vigour, penetrating local markets in local languages and, inevitably in a globalising economy, offloading employment, expanding local licensing and spurring local spin-off industries. This will further spark the enormous branding battle already taking shape. While programming from MTV, CNN, HBO, the BBC and Disney may not appeal to everyone everywhere, they are enormously powerful global brands. In this crowded environment, they offer credibility and a familiar name to consumers and a competitive edge to network operators and programmers. As local service providers seek global branding and form partnerships with international media organisations, the battle against piracy will no doubt escalate, becoming ever more difficult and ever more expensive. Finally, we are likely to see efforts to standardise global protocols in the face of the proliferation of communications devices and multimedia, multi-channel services. The complexity of ‘versioning’, creating special versions for every production and every content stream to make it available for use with every standard for every communications device, is already sufficiently daunting. The proliferation of content, applications and technologies will quickly render it self-defeating. As such, standardisation is both logical and obvious. Ironically, it appears to rank among the lower priorities of the digital future, largely because of competing economic and political interests, never mind the considerable financial advantages likely to accrue to the winner. To assist with facing up to these issues, an industry body such as CASBAA, the Cable & Satellite Broadcasting Association of Asia, is of assistance. Regulators in multiple markets are increasingly looking outside their immediate purview for hard information and industry perspectives on how to handle the immediate issues of convergence and general communications policy. These questions are now recognized as vital for managed economic growth and create an environment that meets society’s demands for entertainment, news and telecoms products. Clear industry voices about the many issues facing regulators, including Intellectual Property Rights protection, are increasingly vital in shaping the future. Bemusement among regulators is almost as damaging as that of the players themselves.
