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Silver Edition
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Years Wow! 25 years of World Screen. A drop in the bucket in the larger context of history, but in the television industry, these past 25 years have represented a sea change. Let’s look back for a moment to 1985: That was the year that Intel introduced a microchip that featured a 32-bit processor, the most powerful computer chip up to that time. AOL was just starting up. GE acquired RCA and its NBC network. EastEnders launched on the BBC. The Cosby Show, Cheers and The Golden Girls were among the ten toprated shows in the U.S. Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, marking the beginning of the end of the Cold War. British scientists reported a huge hole in the Earth’s ozone layer above Antarctica. A 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit Mexico, killing some 10,000 people. And the We Are the World single was released. How much has really changed? At first glance you might say not much. NBC is in the process of changing ownership again, global warming marches on at a scary pace, massive earthquakes have hit Haiti and Chile, and a new version of We Are the World has been recorded. In fact, though, the changes since 1985 have been enormous. Rupert Murdoch launched a fourth broadcast network in the U.S. and was then the force behind pay-TV platforms in Europe, Asia and Latin America. Deregulation changed the television landscape in Europe, allowing commercial stations to compete with complacent public broadcasters in countries such as Germany, Italy, France and Spain—all of this to the delight of the Hollywood studios, which were able to sell enormous numbers of films and series, giving birth to output and volume deals. That wave of deregulation moved through Central and Eastern Europe during the ’90s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and for the first time viewers there were introduced to independent news reporting and large quantities of Western programming. In Latin America and Asia, the advent of cable television spurred an incredible proliferation of channels.
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During the ’90s we saw an escalation of merger mania that changed the media landscape. As the journalist Ben Bagdikian wrote in The Media Monopoly, “in 1983, 50 corporations dominated most of every mass medium and the biggest media merger in history was a $340 million deal.” In 1997, the biggest media companies numbered ten and included the $19-billion Disney-ABC deal, only to be surpassed in 2000 by the AOL Time Warner deal for a mind-boggling $182 billion in stock. And of course the pace of change has accelerated feverishly since 2000, the year “old media” was proclaimed a dinosaur because the meteor of “new media” was about to annihilate it. We lived through the dot-com boom and bust and witnessed the arrival of on demand, download-toown, TiVo, iTunes, catch-up TV, DTT, HD channels and flat-screen TVs. So let’s take a closer look at today: we are watching video on laptops and mobile phones with the same ease as when we are ensconced on our couches watching traditional TV sets. Some of the best shows are on cable or payTV services and not on broadcast networks. Dramas and comedies still fill schedules, but reality and competition shows are consistently among the highest-rated programs in countries around the world. Throughout the last quarter century, World Screen has constantly attempted to put all these events into perspective, give them context and discern their impact on the international media’s core business of buying and selling content. We have been fortunate to have had access to the CEOs and top executives at all the major media conglomerates, middle size and niche companies, and a wide range of filmmakers, directors, creators, writers and showrunners. It’s been an incredible 25 years. I hope you enjoy this Silver Edition— and the bit of history it represents—and join us in celebrating this important anniversary. ■ Anna Carugati, Group Editorial Director
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April, 1985
October, 1988
Don Taffner
William Saunders
Founder/President, D.L.Taffner “There may be an avenue for participation in programming, but you’ve got to avoid getting into a position in which ownership is the reason for a program’s getting on. The quality of the program should be the reason.”
President,Twentieth Century Fox International Television “We speak to all the buyers in October at MIPCOM, then we go to NATPE, and a few international buyers appear there.Then we go to Monte Carlo in February, and we talk about the same product again to the same clients.Then we go again in April to MIP; I mean, what more is there to talk about?”
October, 1986
Michael Jay Solomon Founder,Telepictures; President,Warner Bros. International Television “When the state is in control of television, the economics don’t run the business. In private television, the economics do run the business.... I think it’s progress. Some Europeans will not call it progress; they will think that it’s going backwards. I happen to totally disagree.” April, 1989
Ted Turner Founder/Chairman/President, Turner Broadcasting “I know [Rupert Murdoch, Robert Maxwell and Silvio Berlusconi], but I don’t compare myself to anyone… I’d feel very lonely if I were the only one in international distribution. Competition is the spice of life and it’s really good to have a multiplicity of voices out there.”
April, 1987
Donald Wear Senior VP/General Manager, CBS Broadcast International “On our original productions… we try to keep the capital that we have at risk as low as possible, and we hedge our bets. If we can presell, we presell. If we can beg, borrow or steal on the production side, we do that.We’ll ask someone for a contribution in facilities, let’s say, in order to keep production costs low.”
April, 1990
Henry Schleiff Senior VP/Chairman, Viacom International; Chairman/CEO,Viacom Broadcast and Entertainment Group “On network television, it’s the independents that have provided the breakthrough programming, not the studios. It’s the Norman Lears that said, ‘Hey, let’s go with this English show that no one seems to understand,’ and that became All in the Family. It’s the Carsey-Werners that said, ‘Let’s take a black family and put it in a slightly different light,’ and that became The Cosby Show. So the independents have served as the R&D arm of network television. Now if the regulatory [climate] changes and becomes detrimental to the independents, some of that innovation could disappear from network television.”
distribution seems to make sense on the motion-picture side.” July, 1992
Geraldine Laybourne President, Nickelodeon “The big U.S. companies—Warner Bros., Disney—have created toprate animation that travels very well. So they will have a tendency to dominate the international marketplace for a while and that will have an impact. But I do believe that our Nick toons are probably closer to a European sensibility…[and] the fact that our animation looks very European will help us quite a lot in the international market.”
February, 1991
Jim McNamara
February, 1993
President/CEO, New World Entertainment “Vertical integration sounds great on paper, it’s a nice buzz phrase… Being a television broadcaster doesn’t mean you’re a producer… [But] for the studios it obviously makes sense to be vertically integrated. I don’t know if that means that Time and Columbia should own their own networks, but I do believe that some vertical integration helps. Certainly the notion of producing motion pictures, releasing in the theaters, exhibiting on videocassette and then controlling your subsequent
Jim Gianopulos
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President,Twentieth Century Fox International Television “As the market becomes increasingly competitive—as specialization increases—the ability of any one program to be financially viable becomes even more difficult.... So the further we can spread the cost of development and production, and the more ways we can find to ensure the product gets sold and performs well worldwide, the more likely it is that the product will be a success.”
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April, 1993
Jeff Sagansky President, CBS Entertainment “It used to be that co-production was just about money.We would produce and they would finance. Those days are over. Foreign partners don’t want to be that sort of passive financial partner anymore, and they shouldn’t be.They’re putting up too much of the budget to take a backseat to anybody.” July, 1991
Haim Saban Chairman/CEO, Saban Entertainment “The hell with what the critics say. Let’s be realistic. Nobody’s in business to please the critics.” December, 1994
Gary Davey CEO, Star TV “[Star TV’s Asia] market represents two-thirds of the earth’s population, so you can assume it’s a priority, particularly given the fact that you’re talking about the fastest-growing economies in the world.... It’s estimated that over the next 15 years the number of people in China, Indonesia and India alone with earnings of over $15,000 a year will rise
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Ricardo, Anna and the World Screen family
CONGRATULATIONS on
spectacular years! From all at Fireworks International
www.contentfilm.com
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to 700 million.That is about three times the population of the United States.” April, 1995
Bruce Gordon President, Paramount Television International “Our business depends on people like myself being able to get to people who matter—whether it’s Rupert Murdoch, Kerry Packer, Silvio Berlusconi or Leo Kirch. If you want to make a deal for millions of dollars, having that access is essential.”
October, 1995
Brandon Tartikoff Chairman, New World Entertainment “Television viewers don’t care where something comes from. Sometimes they care about accents, but if something is entertaining, it will work.They care about the show, not the logo at the end. So I don’t think there is a prejudice on the part of the viewers. It just comes down to the capability of the producers.” April, 1996
Michael Grindon June, 1995
Gustavo Cisneros Chairman/CEO, Cisneros Group of Companies “I think the new generation of computer users will naturally try to do everything with the computer…they are going to do their shopping with this technology. Their phones, their banking and many other services will soon be converged.”
President, Columbia TriStar International Television “Pay-per-view is still a relatively new business. Everyone is trying to figure the right formula and approach.… One of the issues that makes people reluctant to commit all the expensive programming to pay-per-view platforms is that we don’t know what the returns are going to
be.… We don’t want all the risk to be on one partner—the studios. We need a new way to approach the business.”
want to choose the end of a show and that interactivity will be extremely popular.” February, 1998
October, 1996
Georg Kofler
Herb Granath
Chairman/CEO, ProSieben Media “To succeed, a television station does not have to be a great production company.The management of a television channel has to select the best production companies to produce programs.… Our job is to create a schedule and to market the channel to the audiences and the advertising community.”
Chairman, Disney/ABC International Television “Going into the cable business as a network representative, I was greeted with open hostility, and when I got into the elevator with some of my network friends, there would be boos and hisses from the back because we were losing money just about as fast as the network was making it. It was not an easy time. Of course, most of those folks are now my best friends.” October, 1996
Helmut Thoma Managing Director, RTL Television “In Germany…there is not a lot of need for new channels. Just look at DF1’s bouquet—most of the shows are approximately 30 years old. People don’t want to watch these programs on free TV. Why should they spend money to watch them on pay TV?... I’ve always been very skeptical of digital.”
October, 1997
Sumner Redstone Chairman/CEO,Viacom “In order to expand all over the world, you have to have the financial wherewithal… you really have to be one of the big companies. But just being big is not enough. When we were fighting for Paramount, I would say it is not enough that two and two make four. It has to make five.”
June, 1998
Jeffrey Schlesinger April, 1997
Ted Turner Vice Chairman,Time Warner “I don’t want to make [Rupert] Murdoch stronger and I don’t want him distributing our programming. I don’t trust him. He is not a good partner.” April, 1997
Greg Dyke Chairman/Chief Executive, Pearson Television; Chairman, Channel 5 “I take a very simple view of the future. I don’t understand it. If anyone sits here today and tells you what the world will be like in 15 years, the only certainty is that they are wrong.… The one thing I’m certain of is that people will continue to want entertainment programming.… I’m not a great believer in the theory that people 124
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President, Warner Bros. International Television “As production increases, output deals may also take on new forms. For a company like ours, which produces a lot of product, you might end up splitting the production between several different buyers.… Keep in mind that there are risks for the distributor as well in a multiyear output deal.… You are locked into a pricing structure that will not let you take advantage of a market that is heating up with more competition. Sometimes you can be making more money if you are working in an open market.” October, 1998
Pierre Lescure Chairman/CEO, Canal+ “Television is the most impressive example of localization in the entertainment industry.You have
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to think globally when you are considering investments, finance and distribution. But when you are talking about programming, both the content of a show and how it is scheduled, you have to think locally.” October, 1998
Robert Altman Director “I know that for some reason the feature-film world sees television as a kind of step down. I don’t see it that way. Quite the opposite. I think there is better stuff on television than 98 percent of the films out there.… There is a lot more you can do in television than in features.You can take on more interesting settings, stories, actors and scripts because you don’t have to try to create things [for film executives] that are only interested in special effects.”
tent because they are skewed badly in the direction of entertainment—what has been called the docu-soap.”
Down the road, we will be able to go to a few central sites and download all the entertainment and information we need.”
April, 1999
October, 1999
John Hendricks
John Wells
Founder/Chairman/CEO, Discovery Communications “You can view digital as a threat or an opportunity. If you ignore digital television, it can ultimately contribute to the demise of your business.Viewership will continue to fragment. Rather than being threatened by that, our strategy is to embrace it and see digital TV as an additional way for our products to reach viewers.”
Executive Producer/Writer “I’m one of those people that gets really upset when I’m not invited to a party. So when I hear that someone else did something that I wish I’d done, then I get all of my juices revved up. It’s not my best quality.”
October, 1999
Tom Freston
Chairman, King World “Some analysts have projected that in the next three to five years there will be 180 new networks in Europe.We want to be part of that growth.The global market is a growth market for us.”
Chairman/CEO, MTV Networks “Our goal is to move from being a TV-centric company to being a true multimedia company that has the leading web destinations for kids and music fans worldwide…[which we can use] to drive them back to television.That makes it possible to create a whole new hybrid kind of programming that is interactive and can air both on the web and on TV.”
April, 1999
October, 1999
Harry Evans Sloan
Christie Hefner
Chairman/CEO, Scandinavian Broadcasting System “The U.S. networks have their problems today, but you shouldn’t forget they had a golden run of decades of growth.The value of networks and their affiliates appreciated consistently in the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s.… I don’t want to miss out on that same growth that we’re now seeing in Europe.”
Chairman/CEO, Playboy Enterprises “The advent of the VCR and cable television gave us an opportunity to create branded television programming.That is different than most product because, with the exception of Disney, most people do not go to a movie or watch a television program because it was produced by a particular studio.”
April, 1999
October, 1999
Jeremy Isaacs
Michael R. Bloomberg
Documentary Producer “At the moment, television documentaries in Britain are being properly criticized for dishonesty and invention and pretense in the supposed reality of [their] con-
CEO, Bloomberg “The wave of the future that is just unstoppable, I think, is that all television programming is going to be on demand.... Things like DVD discs are interim technologies.
January, 1999
Roger King
Barry Diller Chairman/CEO, InterActive Corp. “Everybody has challenges today that they didn’t have before this radical revolution of living in a digital world.The people who produce, finance and distribute theatrical motion pictures have a wonderful business.…The issues all come about in terms of how those movies will be sub-distributed once they leave theaters.” January, 2001
Marcy Carsey October, 1999
Leonard Asper President/CEO, CanWest Global Communications “I think for us being a global company is axiomatic, and I think for most of the players in the media industry who have any ambitions to stay in the media industry, being a global company is absolutely essential. People have to grow or they should sell.” December, 1999
Hisashi Hieda President/CEO, Fuji Television “The future will bring the convergence of broadcasting, communications and computers. Television will adapt to the interactive world and offer various types of services. Digitalization will bring increased picture quality and enhanced sound.… Eventually viewers may customize their own programming by choosing the programs they want to see when they want to see them, and we must be able to meet those needs.” April, 2000
Marjorie Scardino
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January, 2001
CEO, Pearson Television “Everybody in this whole digital age is working on having streaming video. But we already have streaming video—it’s television, and it streams video brilliantly. So television fits incredibly well with our future.”
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Co-founder/Partner, Carsey-Werner “We really don’t look over our shoulders at what the competition is doing. We don’t care about the information we always get [regarding] what the networks are looking for.”
January, 2001
Howard Stringer Chairman/CEO, Sony Corporation of America “I doubt we’ll be downloading movies over cellular phones any time soon. But five years or ten years out, the chances of looking at your PDA and watching a movie will be relatively easy and rather popular.… Broadband will be well under way by then and I think segmentation [of the market] will continue, but will be defined by true demand.”
April, 2001
Ken Burns Documentary Filmmaker “Our whole field is being distracted by the pernicious so-called realitybased television, which is not in any way reality-based. [Instead of ‘realitybased’] they should call it just cheaper production than a drama.” April, 2001
Jean-Marie Messier Chairman/CEO, Vivendi Universal “The larger the company, the less you can manage it in a centralized
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way.You have to rely on a fully centralized reporting system, but a fully decentralized management system, which I think is the key to Vivendi Universal’s management.” April, 2001
Pat Mitchell President/CEO, PBS “I think it’s really imperative in a democratic society that we have at least one public-media enterprise that is not driven and determined by marketplace factors alone… something goes on the air based [not just on the fact that] it will deliver a certain number of eyeballs to an advertiser.”
when I do the next feature I’ll be able to use [television] techniques.” April, 2001
as choice broadens, it will take very savvy marketers with clear and defined brands [to] stand out and cut through the clutter.”
Marc Tessier CEO, France Télévisions “The main challenge is the same for all the major generalentertainment channels.…They have to adjust to a completely different way of using TV, one that is more selective, more personal and more flexible in terms of scheduling.That means that we have to become a group that offers both general-entertainment channels and specialized digital channels.”
October, 2001
Hans-Holger Albrecht President/CEO, Modern Times Group “Russia is a big, big market. It is the only remaining huge market in Europe, with 120 million people just in European Russia and $1 billion in TV advertising. We strongly believe in Russia and [in its potential]. If you look to the payback potential for investment, Russia is the place to go.”
June, 2001
October, 2001
April, 2001
Michael MacMillan
Patrick Le Lay
Sidney Lumet
Chairman/CEO, Alliance Atlantis Communications “[Marketing our programs and channels] is going to become increasingly important as highspeed broadband becomes available everywhere and there’s theoretical unlimited choice— which of course is impossible. But
Chairman/CEO,TF1 “Most European countries, including France, will continue to operate in a lopsided economic environment where commercial broadcasters compete against subsidized networks that offer comparable programming but are under no obligation to deliver financial performance.”
Director/Producer/Writer “One of the reasons why I was so interested in [television is that] the pace of moviemaking is so slow. Generally, within [the movie world] I’m very fast. I seldom go over 30 days, unless the production is quite complicated. I’m hoping
Brian Lapping Documentary Filmmaker “Fiction can be justified—I don’t object to fiction. I actually believe that nobody ever tells the whole story about anything.We are frightfully honest, proper and pompous journalists trying to tell the truth. But what is the difference between my truth and somebody else’s fiction?” October, 2001
Michael Eisner Chairman/CEO, The Walt Disney Company “The real mark of success 50 years from now would be that I was unknown and irrelevant, but that the Disney name was still the most powerful and loved name around the world in family entertainment. To be a footnote would be fine… . I’m a caretaker right now of that institution and that culture.”
October, 2001
October, 2001
Leslie Moonves
Peter Falk
President/CEO, CBS Television “For the first time, the American television audiences, producers, production companies and networks have looked abroad to say, ‘You know, there are creative things going on in the rest of the world that we should be more aware of.’ And this is a major sea change.”
Actor (a.k.a Lieutenant Columbo) “There seems to be such an obsession with superficial, sensational [material]. Everything has to move so fast now.You can’t solve these kinds of murders with sound bites. And that’s really what they want today. Columbo has a cerebral quality.That’s not really in fashion today, but I think it’s one of the reasons why it’s so appealing in countries like France, Germany, Italy, Britain.”
October, 2001
John Cassaday President/CEO, Corus Entertainment “Digital will create a sort of magazine stand for television viewers, where the same depth and breadth that you get on a magazine stand will be available to you on your set-top box. But all that breadth is still about specificity, where a viewer can choose exactly what they want to see. Segmentation will serve the audience much better.” 128
October, 2001
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Ivan Fecan President/CEO, Bell Globemedia “It would be very difficult to just be a free-to-air TV organization. In this day and age, you do need some kind of diversification, whether it’s through a different form of media or some combination of conventional television and specialty [channels].We think that, certainly
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for a country the size of Canada, it’s important to offer as wide a range of platforms as possible.” January, 2002
Emilio Azcárraga Chairman of the Board/President/CEO, Grupo Televisa “We believe that free TV should entertain and inform. Critics always say that the media should play a role in education—even more in our continent. I don’t believe so. I believe that every company in every country has to contribute to education, not only media companies. Every big Mexican company has to help create a better Mexico.” April, 2002
Anne Wood Founder, Ragdoll Productions “Inevitably, what makes children smile in one country will make them smile in another.” October, 2002
Christiane Amanpour Chief International Correspondent, CNN “One of the casualties of the proliferation of media and outlets is that real journalism has been lost in the mix. Now [TV news] is too much of a shout-fair, opinion-athon—a personality contest. And real journalism, in my view, can be fascinating, entertaining, informative and really watchable. A lot of what’s on right now is just eye candy. We do have a responsibility, we are the self-appointed guardians of the public’s right to know.... And if anything was an example and the clarion call for that, it was September 11.”
shows on the FOX Broadcasting Company that just come from Twentieth Century Fox.We want to be able to depend on Twentieth Century Fox, but we would also like to be able to depend on Warner Bros., Paramount, CarseyWerner, etc.That being said, I think it is very difficult for a non-aligned television studio that doesn’t have a network outlet to be as successful as they would like.” April, 2002
Robert Bennett President/CEO, Liberty Media “At different points in time and in different markets, different assets are attractive. Right now, we’re seeing the European cable assets as being attractive, partly because they’ve fallen so far out of favor in the investment community. If we had looked at that three years ago, they were far too expensive, and we would not have been interested.” May, 2002
Barry Meyer Chairman/CEO,Warner Bros. “In order for us to do highquality, multidimensional dramas, we need the revenue from overseas. We rarely greenlight a television series unless Jeff Schlesinger [Warner Bros. International Television’s president] ‘promises’ us a number we feel we can live with.” May, 2002
Herb Scannell President, Nickelodeon “In the animation business, The Simpsons plus Nickelodeon helped fuel a revolution in animation. It brought back the thought that animation could be fun and funny, and was not necessarily just a vehicle for derivatives.” October, 2002
April, 2002
Greg Dyke
Peter Chernin
Director-General, BBC “This is the only job in the world where you get criticized if you win and criticized if you lose! I
President/COO, News Corporation “Certainly, from our network’s perspective, we don’t want to have
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think most American media executives would struggle to understand the pressures of winning! Here there are real pressures if you start winning! Everybody starts complaining! When it got reported that we had overtaken ITV, I got lots of notes from friends in America saying, ‘Really well done.’ Everybody here saw it as a problem.” October, 2002
Jeff Zucker President, NBC Entertainment “I think HBO’s series have been an overblown story in the media.The media is fascinated with HBO.The fact is they’ve had two successful series one night a week for 13 weeks a year.Those series…deserve all the plaudits they get [but] it’s an entirely different game that has nothing to do with the network television business.” October, 2002
Ken Auletta Best-selling Author/Media Critic “When you are a guest on a cable news network, you feel this imperative to rush, hurry up, make the point, make it sharper. You feel this level of impatience in the studio that is quite extraordinary.And there is the assumption that the world is divided into left and right. It is just preposterous. It’s silly.”
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October, 2002
Shashi Tharoor Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information, United Nations “News has to earn its keep. News has been a profit-making venture for all of the networks, but it doesn’t necessarily make as much profit as some alternatives. As long as that bottom line is there, people are going to keep guessing what the public wants to see, and it may be far more soft news stories about the latest trends in the kitchen than about a war that’s claiming 1,000 lives a day in Angola.” October, 2002
George Bodenheimer President, ESPN “The cost of sports rights is governed by the marketplace. Prices rarely go down, [although it has happened] that packages have been restructured….We would certainly love to pay less. But we look to buy rights that add value for our fans and our distribution partners.” October, 2002
Dick Wolf Creator, Law & Order “In many instances, the only way people are exposed to issues is through dramatic television. Most people get most of their news from TV today. And in terms of
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real in-depth discussion of ideas, shows like Law & Order or ER or The Practice, in many instances offer the only time people have heard of these problems. I do think television drama has a strong influence on people’s thinking.” October, 2002
David Attenborough Documentary Filmmaker “I have never met a child who was not interested in animals. I certainly was…. Most children, I suppose, have had to drift away from such interests in order to follow their careers. I was lucky to find my way to a job that allowed me to stick with them.” January, 2003
Chris Albrecht Chairman/CEO, Home Box Office “The work that has been done at HBO has changed the way people look at television, think about television and think about what’s possible on television. The broadcast networks that are in the daily, minute-by-minute business of attracting eyeballs through the use of television programs are obviously going to be affected by that.” February, 2003
Jack Valenti President/CEO, Motion Picture Association of America “Whatever a country wants to do, it has the sovereign right to do it. But I think that some countries—not all, but some— believe that if they can exile, bar or restrict the American movie, their own movie industry will leap forward like Athena springing full blown from the forehead of Zeus. But it doesn’t happen that way. No prime minister can force somebody in his country to see a movie they don’t want to see.”
April, 2003
Nickolas Davatzes President/CEO, A&E Television Networks “In the last quarter of 2000, almost 10 percent of the advertising dollars spent on cable- or satellite-delivered television were directly related to the Internet companies.And so many of them were spending money like drunken sailors.We are just beginning to adjust to that.” April, 2003
Herbert Kloiber Managing Director/Owner, Tele München Group “Many American TV movies aren’t selling the way they used to.And many other [elaborate] mini-series don’t sell anymore at top prices. But features, by and large, still get sold and you still have 500 Germans flocking to the American Film Market in search of those two available independent movies!” April, 2003
Aaron Spelling Chairman/CEO, Spelling Television “I hate to talk about that, but, boy, where some of the shows are going today, it’s amazing. I’m ashamed of my wife seeing some of these shows, much less making them.”
“In places like Britain, cable often out-performs the terrestrial commercial broadcasters. That has not gone unnoticed by advertising agencies.”
and all that stuff. It’s really about making good TV....You put a high-quality production on, you focus on it, you drive it, you market the hell out of it.”
October, 2003
October, 2003
Bob Wright
Mark Thompson
Chairman/CEO, NBC; Vice Chairman, General Electric “When a show doesn’t have some initial positive response, you know that it will take a very long time for it to become successful.And often you take a show off the air, not because you think it won’t become successful, but because you just don’t want to produce it for two years before it becomes successful. It’s just that these shows are very expensive.”
Chief Executive, Channel 4 “The main thing is to make individual commissioners feel that they are in a climate that supports and rewards bravery, including when bravery doesn’t work.…You need a posture that is sufficiently relaxed, that allows what are quite sensitive, creative people to feel they can stick their necks out.”
Markus Schächter October, 2003
Judith McHale President/COO, Discovery Communications “We think HD television is a huge opportunity for us. Our product translates really well into that.... If you look at multichannel-television history, the first to launch in a particular category or genre is the one that ultimately succeeds.You don’t have 42 MTVs,VH1s or Discoveries.There is a great advantage [to] being the first one out of the box.”
May, 2003
Laurie Younger
October, 2003
President, Buena Vista Worldwide Television Distribution “I hate the statement,‘American product is not selling.’ It’s just not true. I’m sure Fox isn’t having much trouble selling 24, and may not be having trouble selling The Simpsons.And CSI is doing well all over the world. It’s an easy generalization for people to make, to explain that broadcasters are a bit more selective. I think that’s really what it is, but the flip side to that is that there are more buyers. Series are now being sold to basic cable.”
Gerhard Zeiler CEO, RTL Group “The key is decentralization and cooperation:TV and radio are local businesses.The RTL Group has never tried to influence programming or scheduling of its operations. Rather than try to interfere, we prefer to have the best possible management in place, and to encourage our businesses to talk to each other and to share information and experience.” October, 2003
James Murdoch October, 2003
Philip Kent Chairman/CEO, Turner Broadcasting System 132
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Chairman/CEO, STAR Group “Making television for people isn’t about grand strategies and lots of business plans and politics World Screen
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Director-General, ZDF “We are not afraid to offer popular and entertaining programming. These often provide the essential pull needed to lead the audience to more serious TV programs.” April, 2003
John de Mol Chairman/Chief Creative Officer, Endemol “Even when I talk to the cleaning ladies in my house, I want to know, ‘What did you watch yesterday? And what did you like about that program?’ Directly or indirectly, I’m always working. I don’t see it as work because it doesn’t make me tired.” March, 2004
Mel Karmazin President/COO,Viacom “Product placement will always be a small piece of the business.You don’t want to clutter up programs or think that it will replace traditional advertising. But we’ve done it interestingly in Survivor.You don’t want to put a Coca-Cola can in Everybody Loves Raymond, because when you are syndicating it you’re not going to be able to sell [the show] to Pepsi because they are not going to like that there’s a CocaCola can in there.”
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days. I don’t want to deal with reality. I want to escape a little bit into literature, and into another world, so I create my own monsters!”
world, and they have to do with literacy, numeracy, respect, understanding and tolerance.”
Managing Director, Sky Networks “The sophisticated interactivity on the Sky platform is open to everybody and offers a range of functions: you can vote to evict a Big Brother housemate; you can watch eight different news screens behind Sky News; you can express an opinion on whatever question we pose each day; you can place a bet on a live football match; or you can press the red button to access live streaming of I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!”
President, Organizações Globo “There is no competition with video games or the Internet. My son is able to use three different media at the same time. He’s able to pay attention to all of them, and if I ask him what happened in a particular TV program, he can tell me exactly what it was about.”
March, 2004
October, 2004
Mark Burnett
Richard Parsons
December, 2004
Mark Burnett Productions “America gave me an opportunity I never would have had back in England.Americans are willing to give almost anybody a chance, and that’s what makes this country such a great place. I thought an unscripted drama in which someone gets to learn from a master would be a great idea, because I always learned so much from certain people.”
Chairman/CEO,Time Warner “[If there’s a blurring line between news and entertainment, it’s because] there is proliferation of competing news purveyors.You’ve got to have something that gives you a competitive edge.… People who are entering a marketplace are trying to find a way to grab a share and make some money.You can challenge the capitalistic motivations, but that’s what comes with capitalism.The fault, if there is a fault, lies not in the consolidation of media…[but] in the nature of our free-market economy…where people compete to make money to justify the capital that is invested.”
Michelle Guthrie
October, 2003
Anne Sweeney President, ABC Cable Networks Group and Disney Channel Worldwide “Kids today are using technology. They are multitasking. They are communicating with a number of friends at the same time. That’s really not so different from when we had pajama parties and we’d call a friend on the phone who couldn’t make it.”
October, 2004
Steve Hillenburg Creator, SpongeBob SquarePants “You can’t start making a show about a sponge and think it will be a huge hit. I thought it would have a cult audience but no broad appeal.”
October, 2004 May, 2004
Michael Garin
Roberto Irineu Marinho
CEO, Central European Media Enterprises “I don’t think scale has been a friend to anything but the owners of companies.You hear people in the industry talk about how much money they make.They don’t talk about how much fun they are having. It’s a business where, except for one or two people at the top, individuals cannot make a difference.”
April, 2005
Ted Turner Founder,Turner Broadcasting System “Today there are already hundreds of channels. Remember, when I started there were very few channels. Right now, six companies own 95 percent of all the channels, and the first two companies own over half of them. And they are not going to let an independent network get started. If they put a network on, it’s going to be one that they control.”
CEO, STAR Group “I do expect that in five to ten years there is going to be a mass rollout of digital set-top boxes [in China and India]. They’re not going to bother with analogue, they’re just going straight to digital.”
THE MAGAZIN E OF INTERN ATIONAL TEL EVISION • MARCH 200 4
October, 2004
Scheduling Wiz
Stan Lee
Interactive Tele
Founder/Chairman/Chief Creative Officer, POW! Entertainment “Thirty years ago, there were one or two styles of animation.Today, anyone with any imagination can come up with a whole new style. There are so many ways to animate.You don’t have to be in the same rut.”
NBC’s Jeff Zuck
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MIPTV Edition
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March, 2004
Robert Halmi, Sr.
October, 2004
Chairman, Hallmark Entertainment “I like to go into fantasy worlds, mythology and dreams, because those let you be free and let you do anything you want to do. Real life is a pretty sad thing, especially if you read the newspapers these
Gary Knell President/CEO, Sesame Workshop “We like to think that the Muppets are saving the world! But kidding aside, I think there are certain universal lessons that need to be taught to children around the 134
World Screen
A Conversati on with
Karmazin An Inside Look
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Tom Freston Co-president/Co-COO,Viacom “MTV has changed the visual vocabulary of television and has given people more of a sense of what was possible in terms of editing and the style of promotion. It introduced the era of nonlinear programming to television. It’s had a big impact on the music world in the sense that it took music and put it right smack in the middle of people’s living rooms.That was a very big boost for the music business, and I believe that music and the stars of the music business have become much more central in the pop-culture landscape. MTV has also been a place that has made continued innovation.The first reality show was on MTV, with The Real World.We brought a lot of adult animation out with shows like Beavis & Butt-Head. It’s a network that tries to actively reinvent itself every several years.” April, 2005
Rupert Murdoch Chairman/CEO, News Corporation “A long time ago, the British always thought in terms of their empire and were pretty patronizing toward us Australians, pat you on your head and say, ‘You’ll do well,’ and when you do well they kick you to death. It was impossible to be accepted as a competitor there. We learned a lot there and reached a critical size to be able to think about coming here [to the U.S.], which has always been open to everybody.” April, 2005
John de Mol Co-founder, Endemol “Before Big Brother, viewers watched television from a distance.They watched what was offered, without ever having a feeling of being part of the show. Nor were they able to
influence the show. Big Brother, which started reality television, changed that.With reality TV, television has come a lot closer to the viewer in terms of recognition, in terms of being able to influence what happens on a show.Viewers can decide which contestants they like and which they don’t and have to [be eliminated]. Reality TV brought the medium closer to the viewer.” April, 2005
Jerry Bruckheimer Producer, Jerry Bruckheimer Films “I love process. I love getting inside worlds you know nothing about and to show you how they actually work, and CSI is the ultimate process show.They take you inside the world of forensics, which very few people know anything about, and really expose the brilliance of these individuals who do it for a living every day to solve crimes. If you look at the New York Times bestseller list, I’ll bet you’ll find between six and eight of the Top 10 books are mysteries. People love great mysteries.We took an approach that is different, that you hadn’t seen on television before, by actually taking you inside the forensics, and we designed the show differently.And then we hired really talented people to do the work.” April, 2005
Helmut Thoma Founder/Original Managing Director, RTL Television “In October of 1983, I began preparations, and I got some people from RTL radio, whose director I was at the time.We started the network with 25 people and a budget of DM25 million.We were working in a small space, a garage that had been converted into a studio. The strategy was simple, but it worked. RTL had to be refreshingly different. It had to be different from the public broadcasters. It also had to differentiate itself from the commercial station that the KirchGruppe was launching at the same time, Sat.1, which launched with a library of 15,000 feature 136
films and 50,000 hours of television programming. RTL began with 12 feature films.” April, 2005
Don Hewitt Creator/Former Executive Producer, 60 Minutes; Producer of the first televised presidential debate “Jack Kennedy was Cary Grant. That night, he walked into that room, he looked like a Harvard undergrad, perfectly tailored, he was tan, he was in command, he looked like he owned the world. Nixon had a staph infection. He looked green. He had banged his knee on the car. He looked like death warmed over. So it was no contest. That night, incidentally a historic night, we got the right guy for the wrong reason.You shouldn’t pick a president according to who’s the better looking of the two.You should pick Mr.America that way, but not your president. But we did and we got the right guy.You know what was wrong about that night? That was the first night that politicians looked at us in television and said,‘That’s the only way to run for office.’And we looked at them and said,‘That’s a bottomless pit of advertising dollars.’ From that day on, no one can even think about running for office in the greatest democracy on Earth unless they’ve got money for television time.And you can’t get money for television time unless you are doing something with a lobbyist you shouldn’t be doing.A word was born that night called ‘fundraising.’ I had never heard about fundraising before. In politics it’s called fundraising, in business it’s called bribery.You’re giving money at a fundraiser to get someone to do what you want them to do. Politics in America has been ruined by television because it’s become a money game. If you don’t have the money, don’t even think about it.” April, 2005
Steven Bochco President, Steven Bochco Productions
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“In the early years of NYPD Blue, I was really getting thousands of letters, of all kinds. One of the letters that I would get [often] said,‘Your show is so wonderful, the stories are so terrific, the characters are so great, why do you have to use that language? Why do we have to be exposed, no pun intended, to all those butts? Is that really necessary?’ I answered every one of those letters, and my answer to that essentially was, it’s not necessary, there’s no rationale for that language or those butts. It’s a creative choice, which in its entirety, contributes to the full impact of what this show chooses to be as a creative entity.” April, 2005
John Hendricks Founder/Chairman, Discovery Communications “It was in the spring of 1982 that I first began to seriously think about the Discovery Channel. It came about because I had signed up for cable and it was offering these very valuable but simple concepts—an entire category of content, like movies, were put together into a dependable channel. The first was Home Box Office. And ESPN came out in 1979, so there was a sports channel. Ted Turner started CNN in 1980. It was around the time that MTV was starting as a concept. I thought these were very simple concepts, but very valuable to the consumer. My favorite kind of television was documentary entertainment, and it just seemed to me so logical that the world needed a documentary channel.” April, 2005
Jeffrey Bewkes Chairman of Entertainment & Networks Group,Time Warner “One thing about [The Sopranos], besides the excellence of the writing and the acting, is that it strikes a true note with the viewers because it doesn’t have that much of what we’ve come to think of as the genre stylis-
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Š Classic Media 2010
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Showcasing exciting new and classic brands at MIPTV 2010 Visit us on Stand 06.24 Contact us at intprogramsales@classicmedia.tv
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The Future of Te levision Mobile Conten t Euro Buyers RTL Group’s Ge rhard Zeiler
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tics that come from The Godfather. It’s grittier, it’s more real-life. It’s not as operatic in that sense. But in a way it is—if you follow the plot and the relationships, it does have that large feel to it, and yet it’s very funny. So you have this show that at one point can be extremely hard to watch, with very tough scenes and very strong acting in the way of conflict, anger and violence. But on the other hand, you may catch a scene that is really funny and very normal and everyday that you yourself recognize.” October, 2005
Gustavo Cisneros Chairman/CEO, Cisneros Group of Companies “Let us not mince words on this important matter. There are two types of societies in the world today: on the one hand, those societies in which people are essentially free, under the rule of law, where the rights of minorities are protected and human rights are respected; and on the other hand, those where freedom does not exist or is arbitrarily restricted and persecuted. The second type of society may be totalitarian, or autocratic and authoritarian, but the differences between these two modes of life are clear. I believe liberty is indivisible, but freedom of the press occupies a particularly important place in a free society. The reason is simple: the press, and the communications media in general, are the routes and outlets through which people express their views, their ideas and opinions about how they are governed. Without freedom of the press there is no free society. This is why autocratic and totalitarian regimes always try to eliminate or at any rate restrict press freedom, for those regimes cannot accept criticism. They are averse to freedom.”
MIPCOM Edition
April, 2005
Peter Orton Founder/Chairman, HIT Entertainment “One of the things that happened after the third or fourth year after starting HIT, we’re talking about 1992 or 1993, is that I was very aware, since I was in America all of the time, that Nickelodeon had started, MTV was exploding, as were CNN and cable television. I felt that the fin-syn rule would be revoked.That meant that we needed to get into the ownership of programming. So, in early 1995, we started to acquire the rights to some of the exquisite literary properties in the U.K. One of the wonderful things about being based in Britain is that we tell wonderful stories and illustrate them beautifully in books.”
bles: NFC football and sports contracts.The cost of everything has skyrocketed.”
April, 2005
October, 2005
Rupert Murdoch
Marc Cherry
Chairman/CEO, News Corporation “When we came to the U.S. we were still relatively small.We had established in one sense a large presence in Britain, with newspapers, but we were a company that came here in the ’70s as a fraction of what we are today. I had been here 11 years before I had the opportunity to acquire the first half of Twentieth Century Fox. My partner and I were offered a small bunch of important independent stations. I was keen to buy and he was not, and our chief executive, Barry Diller, was insistent that we buy.To cut a long story short, we bought the whole of Twentieth Century Fox. Fox turned out to be extraordinarily cheap, the last of the sensibly priced studios. And of course the stations were expensive and so was starting a network.We started it very modestly, first one night, then two nights, then three nights, and made little impact for quite a while. And although we were still operating on very limited resources, in today’s terms it was not a heavy investment. Now we take much bigger gam-
Creator, Desperate Housewives “When you’re a gay guy you have a lot of female friends, and there is no agenda. When I sit with women I don’t want anything other than their company and their humor and their input. There are a lot of guys out there who, when they spend time with women, they’re trying to get something from them. It helps when you really look at women as companions. Also, I don’t tolerate dumb women. If a woman is going to be my friend, she’d better be smart and fun and funny. I’ve actually gone out with straight men who have the most beautiful girlfriends, but they’re idiots. I just look at the straight men and have such a lack of respect: ‘If you can spend time with this, then, wow— more power to you, because I just can’t!’”
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Mark Kaner President,Twentieth Century Fox Television Distribution “A very good show will get a better slot.There’s no question about
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that. Having said that (and I have said this so many times), our biggest competitor is not the other studios. Our biggest competitor by far is quality local programming. The television business has grown up all over the world.” October, 2005
Nancy Tellem President, CBS Paramount Network Television Entertainment Group “When we first got here, they kept calling us the geezer network, and they said, ‘You know what? You shouldn’t even aspire to claim the 18-to-49 demo.’ And we won last year in 18 to 49 among regularly scheduled programs for the first time in 30 years.We accomplished all of that with a schedule that had more Top 20 shows than any other network. But again, it was very much a building process that took many years.” October, 2005
Stephen McPherson President, ABC Primetime Entertainment “I can tell you, when you have this job, your sole objective is to put the best show on the air, and you really don’t care where it comes from because you are a licensor. Where the show comes from doesn’t affect
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your bottom line, it doesn’t affect the success or failure of the show. The only thing that counts is how good the show is. It literally doesn’t even cross your mind.” October, 2005
Bob Wright Vice Chairman/Executive Officer, General Electric; Chairman/CEO, NBC Universal “I didn’t know [Jean-Marie Messier] personally that well. I think he was just too smart by half and he was blindly ambitious. And that’s not a good combination. He thought he could just make these things happen. There was no particular evidence that he was a skillful operator as opposed to a puttertogether. He went beyond the level of appropriate risk into something that was quite difficult. His board was with him to a point, and then he just bypassed them. He did things without giving them enough insight to make good decisions. When we came along, the board was very unhappy and very angry. They felt they had been betrayed. Messier was a star of the French business, social and political system, so it was very unnerving. The people I’ve met that are with Vivendi Universal have been quite good.” October, 2005
Chang Long Jong Deputy Group CEO of Television, MediaCorp “I call it the three ‘E’s.’ We need to continue to make TV programs very engaging, and engaging in today’s context is not just being entertaining.You engage by getting the viewers to become part of the whole TV experience, by voting, interacting, and being emotionally attached to the show.The second ‘E’ is really about how we can enrich the audience.And, finally, we hope
to be encompassing.We aim to serve every community as well as possible and as much as possible. In the whole range of programs, whether you are young or elderly, whichever age group, whichever class you belong to, there’s a place for your TV experience here.” October, 2005
Emmanuel Priou Co-founder, Bonne Pioche “The only way to produce [The March of the Penguins] was to release it theatrically.There was not enough money in television.We knew no one from the cinema business at all, so we attended meetings with Gaumont and Pathé and others, and explained the story of the penguins for 20 minutes. Everybody was interested in the story. It was more difficult to convince them to put money on the table and be part of the adventure. Buena Vista International France was one of the first companies we met and one of the first that was interested.We signed with them one year after we met. Before that, people would say,‘It’s a story [about] penguins—we won’t touch it.’”
sumers can view via the Internet. Therefore, a niche service, instead of being just a niche channel in the U.S., can become a niche channel with global distribution and appeal to, perhaps, 30, 40 or 50 million viewers.Technology will also help these niche channels be better managed than they are today because it will be more economically viable to launch and maintain them. Compared to a worldwide population of 6 billion people, 50 million viewers is not very much, but having a channel reach 50 million viewers can be a very interesting business proposition.” April, 2006
Roger Ailes Chairman/CEO, FOX News; Chairman, FOX Television Stations “Bias is not what you say; it’s what you eliminate.We don’t eliminate anybody. Everybody gets equal time.They do eliminate a conservative voice at many of these other networks, therefore we appear to be more conservative, because we treat the conservative point of view with as much respect as we treat the liberal point of view.”
October, 2005
April, 2006
Morgan Spurlock
Richard Sambrook
Filmmaker “We had just submitted Super Size Me to the Sundance Film Festival. After the screening, we went down to the front of the room to have a little Q&A session, and in the middle of it people started arguing with one another and yelling,‘You don’t know what the film’s about at all.’‘You’re stupid.You don’t know what you mean.’‘What are you talking about? You’re an idiot.’ It got really heated and it was exciting.This is exactly what you want to evoke in people—a real visceral, emotional response.”
Director of the Global News Division, BBC “With the explosion of blogs and podcasts and opinion news, the value of a news service that works very hard to be impartial and objective is going to increase. Now, you can have a philosophical discussion and ask whether you can really be impartial and so on, but the very fact that being impartial is the target you are setting for yourself raises standards.And having a news service that sets out to be objective, based on evidence, and tries to validate facts and sets that at the heart of its mission is going to be increasingly valuable. Because in the future, one of the roles of a major news organization is going to be validating information as well as facilitating the discussion [of topics] that are in the general swirl of everything.”
January, 2006
Emilio Azcárraga Chairman of the Board/President/ CEO, Grupo Televisa “We are seeing that broadband is increasing the quality of video con140
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James Murdoch Chief Executive, BSkyB “I grew up around the business my whole life, so I can’t tell what it would be otherwise. I have to say, just objectively, and my colleagues, who maybe didn’t grow up around the media, would say this as well— it is the most exciting industry in the world. It’s the business of ideas, of developing customer habits, of macrosocietal change, of technological change—it’s just fascinating. Being able to actually go out and make a difference in families’ lives and give them something that they value, and that they can be enriched by, or entertained by, to be able to provide that choice to them, is just enormously exciting. It’s a great business for anybody.”
April, 2006
Werner Herzog Director “It’s basically an ongoing argument about nature. I argue with my brothers but I love them.There’s an argument about a basic view of nature and the universe. It is not harmonious and it is not like Walt Disney films, good and friendly and anthropomorphic. It’s very hostile and very chaotic, so I do have an ongoing argument.” April, 2006
Christiane Amanpour Chief International Correspondent, CNN “One of the most powerful effects of global 24-hour news has been in countries in which there is no such thing as freedom of the press, and [news consists] mostly of government mouthpieces or propaganda. Being able to watch something like CNN in these countries has given [people] a whole new view on life and on the world and on the information that they were being told. Another major effect of global
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24-hour television news is that things just simply don’t happen in a vacuum anymore. Let’s say there is a maniac as the head of a country [conducting] a terrible genocide. Well, he may be able to do that, but he can’t do it with impunity. He can’t do it in a vacuum, he can’t do it without fearing the eventual consequences—because now everybody is watching.”
always make an effort to put our news reports in context.We think that it is essential that the news be understood by our audience and that they can relate to it.We know from viewer polls that a large part of the audience thinks that our journalists are especially competent and independent.” April, 2006
Kevin Lygo April, 2006
Ken Auletta Best-selling Author/Media Critic “Journalism is inherently wasteful and expensive. Many times the people who are running these giant companies do not come from the world of journalism. So they don’t appreciate how inefficient journalism is and how much time and investment it takes. At the same time, there is also corporate pressure on journalism divisions to be more team players. Why don’t you put some of our sitcom stars on our morning show? Why can’t we do Good Morning America from Disney World? Oftentimes the business people prattle on and on about brand, but they don’t understand that the brand is about credibility. And to have credibility, you have to do serious news, you have to be accurate, and you’ve got to do international reporting.”
April, 2006
Markus Schächter Director-General, ZDF “The news operations in Germany have been strongly influenced by the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Credibility and reliability are very important and that is always foremost in our minds. Our Heute newscast is highly appreciated by our viewers.We differ from our competitors in many ways.We offer accurate, well-researched and independent reporting and we
Director of Television, Channel 4 “Going home, I like doing that! [Laughs] I do like watching telly. I thoroughly enjoy the week in Los Angeles at the Screenings where I am treated like some Russian billionaire arriving in a limo.They take you to the theater and about eight people greet you,‘Are you ready to see our programming now?’ and you answer,‘Naw, I think I’ll have another latte.’You sit there not believing you are being paid for watching the wonderful new dramas and comedies coming up on American telly.And then you go to some gorgeous hotel poolside—that’s a tough job.”
those viewers to go off and watch ITV2 or ITV3 or ITV4 or, going forward, we’ve launched ITV Play, where people can play along with our shows, or play games.We have the ability to create new revenues outside our core business.As everyone moves from analogue to digital it gets more competitive, as there are more and more channels.”
April, 2006
Michael Apted
April, 2006
Filmmaker/Director “Without being dismissive or offensive, the whole problem with reality is that it’s contrived—you make a contrivance and then people play it out. Sometimes it’s amusing and insightful, but basically it’s a contrived situation, and that’s the antithesis of a documentary. And I just worry that as people get tired of reality television [because] it’s cheap entertainment, and as it disappears down the bathtub, that documentaries might disappear with it in the public eye.”
Rich Ross
April, 2006
Charles Allen Executive Chairman, ITV plc “I see ITV1 growing, but I see the other parts of ITV growing even faster.The way to see it is ITV1 is the engine room.When we’ve got 12 million people watching our top shows, then we can basically get 142
President, Disney Channel Worldwide “I always say our programs are like decoder rings for kids and tweens that help them decipher the crazy world they live in—a world that is ever more complex. It’s a great thing to be able to sit down and learn about everything including ethics and morals in a world that is not that cut and dried anymore.” April, 2006
Ben Silverman Founder/CEO, Reveille “Docu-soaps are still working everywhere.What are not working as well are the derivative competition shows. But then you see something like Dancing with the Stars and The Biggest Loser and those are two huge global hits. So I don’t know how much the genre is waning. I just think it’s looking for fresh ideas, always.”
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Navin Kumar Director-General, Doordarshan “It’s difficult to arrive at a balance. India has millions of people living in poverty.A large number of our programs on health, agriculture, welfare and minority issues target this cross section of the public. Not all public-health programs need to be boring. Kalyani, a woman’s health program, airs from 18 of our regional centers. It has such a loyal fan [base] that 1,500 Kalyani clubs are functioning on a voluntary basis. But we also need to come up with an effective entertainment mix, and in prime time we have a very loyal viewership.” October, 2006
Bill Carter Reporter,The New York Times “What I have found, when I go to speaking engagements, is that television has been a tremendous connective tissue in the culture. You can say, He’s like a Kramer, and everybody would know what that means because they have seen Seinfeld. But that’s becoming more difficult to do as time goes on.You realize there is not as much connective tissue out there because there is so much available and the audience is very, very stratified. That is one of the things that have
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changed, and it’s a bad thing, in a way, because, even though it’s great to have choice, it’s also interesting that we don’t have as much shared experience.” October, 2006
Peter Roth President,Warner Bros.Television “Isn’t it Shakespeare who said, ‘The play’s the thing?’That must always be the most fundamental truth: when the play is great, it can be exploited in many, many different fashions. And never should it be done otherwise.To me it’s an anti-creative process to say, ‘OK what can we do now to exploit the digital opportunities that exist?’ No, the question is, ‘What’s the show? What’s the play? What are we trying to communicate? Who are the characters? What’s the story? Who are the writers? Who is executing the property?’That’s what we concentrate on, and then there are others who can exploit that and do it very effectively.”
October, 2006
David Ellender Managing Director, Fremantle International Distribution “We’ll see new-media demands on programming encroaching on some of the old-media demands for exclusivity. Still, old media, or traditional media, will remain a major revenue source for the next three to four years, and obviously that needs to be protected. But new media will become the major revenue source in three to four years—there will be a tipping point. Understanding that symbiotic relationship is the key to success in the new era.”
gut and be about something that they really understand and are so passionate about that they can dig deep enough to get to the essence of the relationships and the essence of the stories. We think this is a key ingredient to making shows resonate for an audience. So there’s nothing that makes us happier than when a pitch starts off ‘I base this pitch on my family,’ or ‘I base this pitch on my first job,’ or some such thing. We find these always seem to have much deeper emotional cores, and we’re fans of that.” October, 2006
October, 2006
Jonathan Littman
Gary Newman
President, Jerry Bruckheimer Television “We have very good relations with all the networks we work for. They pay the bills. They’re putting the show on their air. So when you go into the process, you have to be an adult about it and say, ‘Wait a minute, we’re on their network, they really get to call the shots.’ A good note is a good note, no matter where it comes from. We’re there with our showrunners to help guide them through all those voices, to really interpret the notes that are being given. But you know what? It’s the network’s dime, and we respect that. We work within their process.”
Co-president, Twentieth Century Fox Television “We really believe in the theory that most of these shows start with a great idea from a writer and we don’t really believe in giving writers assignments.The shows need to come from their
October, 2006
Carolyn Strauss President, HBO Entertainment “The difference between the networks and us is the fact that we don’t license our shows, we own them. We probably spend more in...production values. This all goes into who we are as a network. We are not about selling soap, we are about selling ourselves. People come to expect a certain amount from the production value of HBO shows, and so, this is something we pay a lot of money for.” 144
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Mark Thompson Director-General, BBC “One of the biggest dangers for a media organization is to accept a glib, stereotyped, patronizing perspective on what young people are interested in, and to underestimate who this audience is. There isn’t one block of young people. There are people in this demographic who are in very, very different life stages, with very different aspirations. There are some people in their late teens and early twenties who are parents of two, three or four children, and others who are still in full-time education, with very different socioeconomic and cultural perspectives.” October, 2006
Joel Surnow & Robert Cochran Creators, 24 SURNOW: “I keep hearing that most of [the serialized dramas] over the past couple of years have not been successful.There’s not a lot of people who know how to do this.This is a very specific type of writing.What I keep hearing now as we’re going out into the development season is that [the networks] want more stand-alone shows because they’ve been having lots of problems with the serialized format.” COCHRAN: “There are people who say, I don’t want to get caught up in something where if I miss an episode or two, I’ll get lost. Generally speaking, despite that one exception, people watch the series because it entertains them every time they turn it on, and not because of the format. So some of these shows will work, some won’t. People may draw big grand lessons from that, but I think the only lesson you can draw is that if a show works, people will watch it.”
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October, 2006
Steven Spielberg Director “Television is entertaining us and informing us in ways that were unimaginable a decade ago. It goes without saying that the news has given us bigger windows on the world, but TV is pushing the envelope like never before with series like Lost and 24 and The Sopranos, that involve us up to our eyeballs and make us angry when our hour is up. When I was a kid I thought I would never laugh as loud as I did when I watched with my family Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, and later on, Ernie Kovacs and I Love Lucy. But I have to admit, I’m laughing a little louder when I watch Curb Your Enthusiasm and My Name Is Earl and The Office. TV is truly better than ever before.” October, 2006
Anthony Zuiker Creator, CSI “If there’s a negative about the show it’s the fact that it sometimes gives people false expectations in terms of crime solving and the time frame of a crime being solved. I don’t think that America sometimes understands that the technology we have on the show isn’t the same technology that most labs have in the country.” October, 2006
David Shore Creator, House “I had done some cop shows and what makes them interesting is the motives for why people do things, and I realized that was what was missing. If the germs are the bad guys, germs don’t have motives. Germs don’t kill somebody and then hide the knife under the bed of another germ, so it seems the other germ did it, because the other germ is having an affair with the first germ’s wife! That’s not the way
it works in the human body.And to a great extent, that’s what makes these cop shows interesting. So I realized we had to invert it.We had to find a way to get at human interaction and motives and what makes people tick. So we put this guy at the center of it and it’s about what makes him tick, but also what makes people tick.We solve so many of our cases not based on medical tests, but based on some deduction about the patient and what they are hiding—often from themselves.” October, 2006
Paula Kerger President/CEO, PBS “Well, I think that the reason that the Ken Burnses and the David Grubins and even some of the young filmmakers come to us is that we give people the freedom to develop their projects.Young Ken Burns came to public broadcasting and had this idea that at the time just seemed so crazy—to do a tenhour documentary on the Civil War, and by the way, with no video clips. He will tell you that the reason he stayed in public broadcasting is that he knows that we will give him the ability to build out a documentary series.” October, 2006
Ricky Gervais Comedian “Monty Python was amazing in many ways. It gave me an inherent need to deconstruct and to look at context. There was a naughtiness to it, there was an anti-establishment edge to it. The laughingstocks were judges and police and politicians.And also the acting was very natural.As mad as everything was, there was always a normal one who said,‘What are you doing?,’ which I liked, and not everyone was mad at the same time. That teaches a certain context, really, that you have to have an everyman in there.You have to have Tim next to David [in The Office]. You have to have an Ollie next to Stan.And the films were great.What Terry Gilliam did was never done before.And John Cleese came out 146
with Fawlty Towers, still considered the best sitcom from England.” October, 2006
Bill Borden Creator/Executive Producer, High School Musical “Some of the criticisms of HSM have been,‘Well, this is a Disney high school, the kids aren’t drinking and smoking, they are not getting in trouble, et cetera.’Yes, that is one experience in high school, but the experience of being in cliques is one that I see as universal. In high school you have to fit into your clique.You have to feel like you belong.And that is something that affects all kids, including my own. They have that social pressure every day in their school.” October, 2006
Mike Darnell Executive VP of Specials,Alternative and Late-Night Programming, FOX Broadcasting Company “Lots of different things serve as inspiration. Sometimes it’s a pitch, but if you get 100 pitches, maybe one or two are interesting enough to produce.You know what it is about pitches? I have heard some really, really bad pitches, but I don’t get enough of those, because at least those are funny. Generally, pitches are just kind of mediocre, and you feel apathetic about them.They’re
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October, 2006
Richard Parsons Chairman/CEO,Time Warner “When I became CEO we intentionally turned the dial down on the rhetoric and the hyping of the future, because we’d done too much of that before, and it also happens to be my personal style. A new thing comes along and it’s like nirvana, this is going to be the salvation of everybody. China is a super-tough market. Nobody is making money in China, except the Chinese. In India, the government isn’t as involved in the media. And they do have a rule of law. But they have no infrastructure. So, for example, how do we sell DVDs? We sell DVDs to 1,000 Wal-Mart or Best Buy stores. They don’t have those in India. So how do you get them out? It takes time for these things to develop, and just because you have some headline-grabbing numbers— 20 percent of all humanity is in India—it doesn’t mean you can translate it into dollars. You don’t hear them talking that much about it anymore, right? Because it’s a slow build.”
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just the next generation of the same idea.A lot of times if something hits big, you get the same idea ten times, like when the movie Hitch came out, ten people in a row came in pitching,“This is the real-life Hitch, where a guy will teach someone else how to pick up women.” November, 2006
Jon Feltheimer CEO, Lionsgate “Obviously, there are a lot of new players, Amazon, Apple and Blockbuster.com, who are all turning into online retailers. We’re going to be in business with them, as are the other studios. It’s clear that we are at the beginning of what is going to be a pretty steep revenue spike from digitally delivered content. And I have said publicly that I believe it’s going to be added highmargin revenue and not solely replacement revenue. It will be additive and incremental.”
April, 2007
Mark Cuban President/CEO, HDNet “I think handheld devices will be a source of a lot of excitement.We will be able to carry our lives around in our pockets.All our pictures, home movies, favorite movies,TV shows, even the voicemail message your girlfriend left you when you asked her out for the first time, can be saved.We are no longer an analogue country.We live a digital lifestyle, and the future will bring more ways to take our lives with us wherever we go.”
music for free. But in the end it’s stealing! We have to change this mind-set. That is not only up to Sony BMG or Bertelsmann or the music industry—it’s a huge challenge. I guess we all agree that it is wrong to take a product and not pay for it. On the other hand, I think music companies have to change their business model. At the end of the day, it’s very convenient to download music from the web. It will be the distribution channel of the future— there is no doubt about it.” April, 2007
Steven Levy Senior Editor/Writer, Newsweek “Steve Jobs works by setting the bar very high, sometimes even impossibly high, and by doing that people try to play above their game. It’s like a sports team knowing they are playing the best team in the league. Even though they are not up to the best team, they prepare for it and play over their heads. I don’t think there is anyone as good as Jobs is in having talented people exceeding what they can do. Sometimes, even capriciously, he’ll reject things knowing that people will come back and try to top themselves. It’s rare in life to have a manager who will take your A- work and say, ‘That’s not good enough, I want an A+.’That is the standard he sets. And that is why Apple is consistently able to deliver products that give people a ‘Wow!’ experience when other companies very seldom do that.”
a very scary legal situation, where lots of people were predicting we’d be sued into oblivion and I’d be thrown into jail. Now we’re working with Hollywood and bringing a lot of their content online and really preparing them for the inevitable shift of everything to being done online.The traditional television model is going away as Internet capacity increases and the limitations of the old medium [are eliminated].” April, 2007
April, 2007
Blake Krikorian
Ridley Scott
Co-founder/CEO, Sling Media “What we all want as consumers is a seamless and familiar livingroom television experience regardless of what display we happen to be looking at and regardless of what location we happen to be in.The other trend is that more and more people are getting DVRs, so more and more of the content that they want to watch is stored on a hard drive in their liv-
Director “In the last few years, there has been a rise in standards of television. I’m seeing creative work, and creative thinking, and looking at things in a different way, [to the point] where you are getting really progressive thinking in the best level of television today. Which I think would compete with feature films.”
April, 2007
Bram Cohen April, 2007
Gunter Thielen CEO, Bertelsmann “I think the most important issue in this area is that lots of people using the Internet feel that everything on the web is for free. Therefore they don’t feel like they are doing anything wrong when they download
Co-founder/CEO, BitTorrent “The initial thing I did was that there was this very difficult logistical problem of how do you use the bandwidth of peers who don’t trust each other and might go away at any time? It wasn’t even clear if that was a solvable problem, but I solved it. More recently, we got out of what was 148
ing room and all these displays are connected via the Internet, right? So there’s got to be a way—as long as we’re connected to the Internet—that we can access our living-room TV programming on any device in any location. And that’s really how the idea of the Slingbox and place-shifting came about.Then we started creating prototypes and one thing led to another, and here we are today.”
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October, 2007
Brian Roberts Chairman/CEO, Comcast Corporation “We reached our five billionth on-demand order this year. It’s been very popular. In July alone, we had 245 million orders through on demand. Pay-per-view revenue has also increased about 20 percent per quarter since we’ve launched free ondemand. Consumers have also gotten used to not just changing channels, but are now surfing on demand, clicking, watching, fastforwarding and rewinding TV programs. They have become more comfortable paying for movies on demand and are now looking for more HD ondemand content. That has led the movie studios to be more interested in experimenting with shortening the windows of when movies will be made available on demand to consumers in their homes. On-demand really is the most convenient way to rent movies—it is instantaneous gratification for the consumer. Customers love it. It’s adding value to content companies, keeping television ahead of the Internet—and it’s more secure, and it is an economically stable business model.”
April, 2007
Hans-Holger Albrecht President/CEO, Modern Times Group “We have a philosophy that we launch products, not plans.The good thing is that we have a longterm view, so we would not jeopardize our potential for growth for the next three, four or five years.We also have a long-term Board and shareholders, which give us the possibility of thinking long-term and to evaluate various options and to build the business.We have to
deliver returns to our shareholders, but if it takes investments because we see an opportunity, we will do it, because long-term growth is very important to us.” April, 2007
Ken Burns Documentary Filmmaker “Let’s not even call it reality television, because it’s the last thing from reality. Nobody proposes [to his girlfriend] in front of 30 million people. Nobody eats bugs in front of 30 million people.This is not reality; this is unreality.We’ve just found a more inexpensive way to promote consumer products and lifestyle decisions. It has nothing to do with documentary.That of course is the horrible news.What you are seeing parallel to this is that [reality television] makes everybody want to be famous for 15 minutes and sends them into—are you aware of Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust [a novel about Hollywood and its corrupting touch]?—a collective day of the locust.We’re supposed to be a democracy, but we’ve replaced our democracy with the great tyranny of those with bold-faced names over the rest of us, and that is a terrible thing.” May, 2007
Michael Lynton Chairman/CEO, Sony Pictures Entertainment “As far as local-language television production is concerned, we’ve been probably the most successful of all the U.S. studios. I think there’s a ways to go judging from the work of companies like FremantleMedia and Endemol.We have to get more involved in the formats business because that’s really where the money is.” June, 2007
Robert Halmi, Sr. President/CEO, RHI Entertainment “My relationship [with broadcast networks] is that I don’t like to see them too much. I come up with great ideas and I make a presenta150
tion and usually they order it. I put some money into art. Every time I dream something up I draw it out and I try to explain what the story is [in pictures].When we lay this out it’s easier to sell when people see it.There are mostly stupid people there (at the networks) so they don’t understand things.They have to see them.” October, 2007
Philippe Dauman President/CEO,Viacom “We invented fragmentation in the cable world.We challenged the broadcast networks when we created MTV, Nickelodeon and our other networks, and our brethren created their networks.We believe the same will occur online where you start with the MySpaces and the Facebooks, and then you go in depth to smaller, more focused communities.”
October, 2007
Anne Sweeney Co-chair, Disney Media Networks; President, Disney-ABC Television Group “We learned that the majority of the online viewing happens in the first 24 hours after a show has aired on ABC.And we also found out, because we’ve been tracking this quite carefully, that 77 percent of our audience watches the shows online because they missed them on television and they wanted to catch up.We also found out that 85 percent of people who watched the shows on the player were able to recall the advertiser, so not only was this a great convenience for our viewers—giving them a chance to catch up—but it was a wonderful boon to our advertisers.” October, 2007
Gerhard Zeiler October, 2007
John de Mol Owner,Talpa Media Group “It is still the same problem. Broadcasters still tend to take a copy of something that is successful instead of a risk with something that is really new. So unfortunately the market—at least as far as my experience goes—has not become more open to new and what I call ‘against the flow’ shows.”
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CEO, RTL Group “Our philosophy is that in the digital age, when consumers can choose between hundreds of channels, you can’t really be successful with just one channel even if you have the biggest one in your market. Like any other industry, you have to offer more choice to the consumer, which is why we started our family of channels approach.”
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October, 2007
October, 2007
David Haslingden
Thomas Valentin
CEO, Fox International Channels and National Geographic Channels U.S. and International “The golden rule that we follow, which traverses both business and product strategy and neatly brings them together, is that we need to build a strong, engaging and lasting connection with our viewers.And there is no doubt that, if you have a portfolio of channels, you have greater weapons in your arsenal to make that connection stronger, deeper, more engaging and more lasting.”
Deputy Chairman/Head of TV Channels and Content, M6 “The young, as all of our viewers do, expect from M6 first and foremost innovation and creativity. M6 has in its DNA a love for taking risks and for innovation.This is what our viewers expect: a channel that knows how to surprise and astonish.”
October, 2007
Darren Childs Managing Director, BBC Worldwide Channels “We made a decision that we wouldn’t [launch a channel] just to replicate something that existed.We would only do something if we saw, in a specific genre, that we could either be number one or number two in a market.That’s the strategy we put in place. One of the key things [about] the uniqueness of the BBC when you compare it to other studios or other content producers is the sheer volume of its high-quality content.We make 20,000 hours a year of content: 12,000 hours of entertainment and 8,000 hours of news.There isn’t another company on this planet that I can think of that can offer a six-channel bouquet from preschool kids’ content to the best news channel on the planet.”
October, 2007
Mark Burnett Creator, Survivor “Just as Survivor and The Apprentice are very simple to understand— you’re being marooned like Robinson Crusoe in one, and the other one is just a televised job interview process—5th Grader is also very simple in that most adults struggle with fifth graders’ homework. It’s amazing really.We all learned how to calculate the area of a triangle.We all learned the planets in the Solar System—basic stuff when we were 10 years old—but since then our brains have become so full of information that we can’t remember schoolwork. So here’s a show that really brings that to the forefront and allows the kids to celebrate being smarter than the adults. It’s really empowering to kids. I think 5th Grader is driven in large part by the kids who watch it with their parents, and love the fact that they know more answers than their parents do.” October, 2007
October, 2007
George Bodenheimer President, ESPN, Inc. and ABC Sports; Co-chairman, Disney Media Networks “What I find amazing today is that 30 couples have told us they named their babies after ESPN with variations like ‘Espen.’ Very few companies can claim this affinity with their customers or as we like to say—fans.”
Dan Schneider Creator, iCarly “I’m not concerned about competition. I remember when I was a kid there was a McDonald’s my dad used to take me to and I remember when they opened up a Burger King across the street.And I said to my dad,‘Wow, I bet McDonald’s is really upset about the Burger King.’ And my father said,‘No. It’s good, it just brings more people to the area and it makes more people interested in coming to this place. So in a way, yes, they’re competitors, but it helps 152
them both because there’s more activity around them.’ I feel the live-action [tween market is] like that. Disney has helped show how profitable and how mainstream it can be.” October, 2007
Len Cochrane President,TELETOON “Listening to our audience and constantly adapting [is the key to remaining competitive].When our audience told us that our branding was no longer as fresh, smart, and savvy as our shows, we listened and undertook a re-branding process. Throughout the entire creative process we consulted not only our strategic partners, but talked and listened to our 1,000-strong online youth advisory panel. Now our audience owns our brand more than we do.” October, 2007
Justin Bodle Founder/Chairman/CEO, Power “Private equity is now a very serious part of the independent film business that is dwarfing almost every other sector outside the Hollywood studios.We’re seeing the start of that in television. Substantial private-equity players are [investing in television companies], and when they start making some very big footholds in the market we will see a considerable change in the independent television sector as well. That will have a significant impact on the way the business is done and on some of the strategy that is put into play by the indie sector going forward, [because private equity will look for] consolidation, high rate of returns and a much more structured, competitive edge to the studio system.”
[occurred] when we’ve changed the paradigm of the way business is done in different markets.We need to continue to reinvent how viewers watch [our content] and how we sell it to our advertisers and our affiliates.We need to listen and be humble about it and then come up with really creative programming and solutions for our clients.” January, 2008
Joe Uva CEO, Univision “The fact is, Hispanics are not only the fastest-growing population segment in numbers, they also represent the fastest-growing in terms of purchasing power. That means that every dollar spent against them is a dollar spent on growth, not on defending sales against those non-Hispanic segments of the population whose numbers are declining as a percentage of the whole and whose buying power represents less than it did in the past.”
January, 2008
Don Browne President,Telemundo “The principle and the vision is that the lifeblood of what we do is the U.S. Hispanic audience we serve. And it’s very complex, very diverse and rapidly evolving and growing. So the more you understand that, and if that is the raw material you use to produce your content, and you create a diversity of platforms— broadcast, digital broadband, Internet, cable and international and you are open to the next form of distribution—and you are populating these distribution platforms with relevant content, you are going to have a good business.”
November, 2007
Paul Aiello
April, 2008
CEO, STAR Group “We’ve had great success in the past.You can’t be comfortable with that. Indeed, we need to be paranoid and need to realize that the success of this company has
Guillaume de Posch
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CEO, ProSiebenSat.1 Media “Basically, to make TV you always need a unique combination of people who are more creative and people who are more business-oriented.
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The one doesn’t work without the other.You can’t just have creative people, nor can you have only businesspeople, and my job is to make sure that within the group at every level, we always try to have that balance between creativity and the reality of the business.” April, 2008
form content that people could snack on through the web. Media companies are now making the ‘full meal’ available instead of a snack. We’re working on products that support that, to allow people to more easily offer mid-form and long-form programming in a very high-quality way, up to HD quality, on the web.”
Robert Greenblatt President of Entertainment, Showtime Networks “The mandate is that we need shows that have some kind of extraordinary hook to them.They’ve got to be inherently provocative or surprising.There is a lot of clutter and we are on the smaller end of things.We can’t get away with just a good cop show, or a really good law show.We have to do something that in its very description makes people sit up and lean forward.We have to have an idea that immediately makes you cock your head and go, ooh, how is that going to work? Then you have to figure out how to make it really extraordinary—that’s the easier part!”
April, 2008
Christie Hefner Chairman/CEO, Playboy Enterprises “The basic idea of a post–feminist revolution, post–sexual revolution mentality of ‘I expect to have a career. I expect to be treated fairly. I expect to be treated seriously. I expect to be with a man who is going to share responsibilities.And I also want to dress sexy and have fun when I go out,’ seems very much to be the point of view of the majority of young women today. I think it’s a healthy perspective and in a self-interested way a very good point of view from Playboy’s perspective.”
an alternative to the studios.You look at FremantleMedia or Endemol, and they’re making worldwide successes out of products from the U.K. that they own the IP to and distribute internationally. [The studios] can’t insulate [themselves] from the impact of that kind of producers’ economic success.”
April, 2008 April, 2008
Jeff Zucker President/CEO, NBC Universal “We’ve greenlit a lot of shows based on seeing the pilot and that hasn’t really gotten us anywhere, except to waste a lot of money. The greenlight decision in many instances will have to be based on our gut, our knowledge of the writers and actors who are involved, and our belief in the concept. But frankly that’s no different than what we do on the film side. We don’t make a pilot of a film before we decide to make the film.”
Jana Bennett
April, 2008
Director, BBC Vision “Britain is marked by a lot more debate about public-service broadcasting. The press sometimes contributes a lot to it. At other times they don’t necessarily recognize or celebrate the strengths of British broadcasting; instead, they spend an awful lot of time on slightly negative activities, that sort of interrogating—they’re navel-gazing, really. America looks more at how do you end up being world class, Britain worries more about how we regulate.”
Martha Stewart
April, 2008
Elisabeth Murdoch April, 2008
Jeremy Allaire CEO, Brightcove “We’re seeing an evolution in the kind of TV product that people are making available online.The last two years were about clips, short-
Chairman/CEO, Shine Group “Strong producers will put their product where they know they’ll get the most return. I think that’s a huge testament to an independent distributor, who can be nimble and a superb salesman. It’s 154
Founder, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia “We have marthastewart.com and we’re tweaking it daily. About two months ago we had the Martha logo and its pretty colors on the home page, and it said ‘The Martha Stewart Show.’ But it didn’t have the heading ‘Television.’ Everything is at a glance on the web.You have to be very obvious to get the traffic, to get the eyeballs. So I said, Change the header to say ‘Television.’Well, the next day we had a 57-percent increase in traffic just by changing ‘The Martha Stewart Show’ to ‘Television! The Martha Stewart Show,’ and it has continued to build and build and build. So you must experiment with the words you use on a website to attract the eyeballs, which are being drawn in a billion different [directions].”
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April, 2008
Bonnie Hammer President, USA Network and SCI FI Channel “We’re looking towards the networks as our competition as opposed to looking over our shoulder to see who is catching up to us. It’s no fun looking backwards just to see who’s nipping at your heels.The fun, and the challenge, is looking ahead to see where you can go and grow.The goal for USA is not necessarily to be the fifth network. It’s really to be the most respected TV brand out there. Lose the word ‘cable.’ Lose the word ‘broadcast.’ When you look at the kids growing up, they don’t know the difference between a broadcast network and a cable channel. Our goal is to be the most respected television brand or, frankly, media brand.We have such great online sites as well.” April, 2008
Abbe Raven President/CEO, A&E Television Networks “AETN is a global media entertainment company, so I feel it is critical to invest in original programming. It helps us direct our core channels like A&E to be not only a top ten network but a top five network. It helps The History Channel continue to grow and it’s what makes our brands successful
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around the world. It’s all about being a content company.We’re really one of the few companies that produces and airs both nonfiction and drama.We’re unique in that regard and that has helped brand us as who we are.” April, 2008
Sheila Nevins President, HBO Documentary Films “Well, I have a particular passion for people who wouldn’t be known unless we embraced them. So a bio-pic or a bio-doc isn’t unusual for us. I think common men and women have uncommon things to say. Just human survival has its own eloquence and fame is not necessarily any more worthy of television or of a documentary’s attention than anonymity. I like anonymous people a lot. I like the stories they have to tell. The uncommon in the common is just so incredibly interesting to me. I like to talk to people and I like docs that talk to people.And it’s so odd to be in a fame business
and find that the best docs are usually about unknown people.” April, 2008
Shonda Rhimes Creator/Executive Producer, Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice “I definitely would say [characters] inhabit my head on an ongoing basis.That’s been the toughest part for me—they don’t go away! They feel like they’re a part of my life and in a very strong way I feel like I have these friends, who are doctors, who live in this world in this hospital and I spend a lot of time [with them] and nobody else spends that kind of time [with characters]. So in a weird way there is this whole imaginary world that is very, very real to me.” April, 2008
Lynda La Plante Founder, La Plante Productions “Nobody is actually looking at a show and saying,‘This was a really beautiful, artistic piece of work.’ What they are saying is,‘Whoops, it
got a million viewers, we’re down 2 percent in our viewing figures.’ Viewing figures have now become of such importance.And the sad thing is that if the BBC has a terrific show, they will put it against ITV’s best show. If two prestigious dramas are on at the same time, viewing is cut by half.” April, 2008
Hisashi Hieda Chairman/CEO, Fuji Television “Compared to other content producers, the production personnel of our entertainment programs are very young and authorized to make big decisions.This leads to the production of programs that respond to the times.As a result, advertisers value us as a broadcaster that’s supported by the younger generation, a group that [is a main target for advertisers].” April, 2008
Li Ruigang President, Shanghai Media Group “Last year, we took the lead in China to acquire formats from a number of international companies.The formats acquired proved to be very successful after being localized properly.We are looking forward to more involvement in the international media industry.” May, 2008
Amy Pascal Co-chairman, Sony Pictures Entertainment “The nice thing about a franchise is that you can rely on it in your schedule. If you have something like a Spider-Man or a James Bond you can organize your release schedule around that, which is great. But the challenge is to keep each film in your franchise fresh and original and make each picture a stand-alone movie. It isn’t necessarily true that the same people who go to see the first one also see the second one.You want to activate a whole new audience.We’ve done it successfully and we’ve done it unsuccessfully, and the times that we’ve done it successfully are when 156
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we understood why the first movie worked and we tried to emulate the emotional intention of the movie and we stayed with the story and with the characters.” April, 2008
Simon Schama Historian/TV Presenter “In Britain, there is so much talent, [although] inevitably, even in Britain, once you get a hit there is a sort of understandable craving to rest on your laurels and do the same thing over and over and over again. Obviously, I wish there were more money to actually produce original documentaries in the U.S. I do think we are suffering slightly from blockbusteritis. The big commercial sponsors are willing to sponsor the names that have become monumental in documentary-making, and that’s sort of the arteriosclerosis of the creative [process].”
June, 2008
Alexander Rodnyansky CEO, CTC Media “You can definitely see how important television is in Russia, because given the sheer size of the country, there is no national distribution for newspapers, for magazines, for radio, so television is the only truly nationwide medium. If you are a national advertiser, and want to launch your brand in Russia, you would definitely go to TV.And if you look at ad prices on a cost-perthousand (CPM) basis, you would understand why television has such potential to grow even more because it’s cheaper. I know it sounds strange for people from the West, but television is cheaper than radio or newspapers or magazines.” June, 2008
Michael Garin CEO, Central European Media Enterprises “In the United States, as new technologies evolve, [the networks]
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have the talent to create programs but [they] don’t have the resources because the revenues are getting lower and lower and lower.The audience gets fragmented, the advertisers are going to stop paying for this stuff at a certain point, and nobody is going to buy it on a subscription basis. One of the reasons [they are] not going to be able to satisfy the advertisers is because [they are] not going to be able to program—people will choose what they want to watch, when they want to watch it.There’s no ability to let one program lead out into another one.And no promotions— there’s not going to be a network, so you’re not going to be able to air all those promos saying, coming up at 10 o’clock, watch so-and-so. I just don’t see the networks being viable over time.” October, 2008
Philippe Dauman President/CEO,Viacom “Over this ten-year period that you describe, we have maintained a presence in China. Clearly, it is an important market for the future. For the media business, though, it has not been a very profitable market. We need to see improvement in the legal structure there, including enforcement of copyright, which we anticipate should improve over time. As the country sees more indigenous business development, they will want this protection. But we also need greater access. The entire U.S. film industry is limited in the number of motion pictures that can be viewed in China. There are only 25 Western movies that can be exhibited in China on an annual basis for all studios. So you don’t have access and you can’t choose which films go in; the government decides which ones are allowed. And as we all know, there are piracy problems.”
October, 2008
Michael Eisner Founder,The Tornante Company “I can’t decide whether it’s going to be evolutionary and will happen over time, or someone will create something like The Sopranos or Sex and the City or Happy Days or Seinfeld, that everybody in America just has to see and then the aggregators will say, Hey, wait a minute, this is more important than search. This is more important than usergenerated.And that is on the horizon. I don’t know if it will happen from our company, but the likelihood is it will happen from somebody we never heard of.” October, 2008
Hernán López COO, Fox International Channels; President, Fox Latin America and U.K. “Almost the majority of our revenues come from either emerging markets or mature markets with a relatively low cable-and-satellite penetration. So even if we did nothing, which as you know, is not in our DNA, our channels still have a lot of upside from having strong ratings and being in a market that has 25-percent penetration [with the potential to grow to] 80percent penetration.There’s no reason why rich markets around the world wouldn’t be able to get to the levels of penetration that you see in the U.S.And at the same time, we will continue to launch channels wherever it makes financial sense. Most of our channels break even within six quarters of launch.And again, we have managed to do that because of our scale and our very sharp attention to margins and operating costs.” October, 2008
Armando Nuñez, Jr. President, CBS Paramount International Television “There are many more pipes out there that need content. Have the models been worked out? Are they significant revenue generators at this point? No, they are not.Are we 158
spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to best exploit our content on these new distribution pipes? Absolutely.We are optimistic that there are going to be some viable revenue models via these new distribution platforms, and most importantly, that we are able to do it in a manner that is complementary to our traditional business.To cannibalize the traditional piece, particularly at a time when international demand for our content is thriving, might be counterproductive. So most importantly we have to find a way that is complementary.” October, 2008
Ynon Kreiz Chairman/CEO, Endemol “It’s not an exact science.We make a lot of shows, not just the big giant tent-poles. Last year we produced more than 500 different shows in almost 60 countries.We actually do a lot more than the very big shows. Some of them are only made by the Endemol teams in the different countries for the local broadcasters. Others travel to just a few countries, while some of the shows surface and rise above the others to become global hits.When we start the process, we never know how strong the show will be and we make decisions about the shows on a case-by-case basis.”
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October, 2008
Marc Cherry Creator, Desperate Housewives “You know, there are moments when I marvel at the things I’m supposed to give my opinion on! When they handed me the Desperate Housewives perfume and asked me to smell it, I thought, what in my background prepared me for this moment, exactly?” October, 2008
Tim Kelly President/CEO, National Geographic Ventures “We have had a number of big discussions internally to make sure we are focused on what we think is important. We’re not really a media company. We have media capabilities, but we are a nonprofit institution. We fund research, exploration and a lot of educational activities, and media is one of the ways we reach people. But we have to entertain people before we can inform them. We are really focused on the big urgent issues of the day, and it’s not just the gloom and doom. We want to look at what happens in the long run based on the different choices we can make and focus on some of the solutions.”
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October, 2008
Chad Hurley Co-founder/CEO,YouTube “What happens on YouTube is a reflection of what is important and relevant in the world. YouTube provides a forum where people gather and express themselves, share experiences and reflect on what they think about and care about moment to moment. And we’re the only broadcast medium that can provide this group with the relevant mix of mass, niche and personal media they demand. In other words, every user on YouTube becomes his or her own content programmer.”
husband and wife rivalries! And they are acted out on our stage, which is a 20-foot-by-20-foot ring.There are the interviews that take place backstage that set the tone for what’s going on, then there’s the actual match that adds the sports element, then there is the contact side in the ring, but it’s still all entertainment. It translates across every language and across so many ages because there really is something for everyone at a WWE event.There’s action, there’s pyrotechnics, there’s music, there’s some vaudeville.We even have weddings in our shows.We capture every aspect of human emotion and for all age groups, and if we’ve done our job well, we’ve put a lot of smiles on people’s faces.” October, 2008
brands that are going to be a fad, here today, gone tomorrow, no matter how popular they are.” October, 2008
Andy Duncan Chief Executive, Channel 4 “As is happening in a number of countries, the traditional terrestrial broadcasters are seeing their share eroded as you get multichannel growth and the fragmentation of [the audience] and therefore of ad revenue.And while we’ve had a very successful portfolio strategy and we’ve built up a number of channels—notably E4, More4, Film4 and 4Music—in [terms of] ad revenues they are not as lucrative as the traditional core channel has been.Therefore, we are seeing erosion of revenues.”
Carol Mendelsohn October, 2008
Tim Kring Creator, Heroes “There are literally a half a dozen of us at the top who share a tremendous amount of responsibility, and because of the size and scale and pace of it, it’s almost like being in wartime! You’re making decisions on the fly and in hallways and on the stairwell on the way to a meeting.You cross paths every once in a while and bark out orders to each other and then go in different directions. It’s a real three-ring circus! But the truth is there are divisions within the ‘company,’ if that’s what it’s called! [Laughs] What’s interesting for me is that I didn’t come from a background of running a large enterprise. I didn’t go to business school.There was literally no training at all.You just invent the wheel every day.” October, 2008
Linda McMahon CEO,World Wrestling Entertainment “WWE is really about human emotion and passion, whether the story lines within our programming capture business rivalries or professional jealousies or sibling rivalries.And sometimes there has even been the McMahon family involved with
Executive Producer/Showrunner, CSI “CSI has been the catalyst for a boom in procedural dramas. It has reinvented the cop drama.Watch Law & Order.At every crime scene there are now forensic investigators in jackets and latex gloves.Watch any cop show or film for that matter, and you will see CSIs.Watch any stunningly visual film today, and you will see CSI shots.Anthony Zuiker’s pilot for CSI, directed by Danny Cannon, created a new visual language for the screen.”
October, 2008
Claude Schmit Managing Director, SUPER RTL “The target group has shrunk. Today there are a lot less German
October, 2008
Jeff Dunn CEO, HIT Entertainment “In our business, unless you have critical scale of audience awareness and fondness for the characters, then it’s really tough to be in any business off screen.The cost of making toys, the cost of making home videos, certainly the cost of creating theme-park attractions, requires that you have a big enough, loyal audience to make that pay off.The attractions business, however, has a different [component], which is, the people who own theme parks are spending millions and millions of dollars to build the structure and it’s going to last a long time. So you don’t want 160
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kids.A couple of years ago we had 9 million, now we have 7.5 million, so it is a huge decrease in the target group.And at the same time, the competition from other channels has increased.We have Nickelodeon in the German market again, which is playing a role. Obviously, the public channel KI.KA is playing a role.And there is a fragmentation from other media as well.” October, 2008
David Zaslav President/CEO, Discovery Communications “We have 20 years of programming in our library and it’s like a fire hose.We don’t have to have that fire hose wide open right now because we think our content is really valuable and we are monetizing it by building channels around the world.We are [showing our content] on a lot of platforms but we haven’t opened that hose wide open because, on a number of these platforms, it’s a balance.There
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are people consuming content on these new platforms but we also have to be careful that there is a business model on those platforms that makes sense.” October 2008
Ronnie Screwvala CEO, UTV Software Communications “The uniqueness of India is that it is going to be a very high-growth domestic market plus it’s going to be an excellent hub for growth in Asia. Some Indian companies understand working the Western model almost as well as the Western companies. I think, therefore, we would be able to grow exponentially in size and footprint.” November, 2008
Laureen Ong COO, STAR Group “I find it amusing how many new pan-regional channels are popping up here in Asia. It’s a tough market to play in, because there’s not a lot of money to go around to support
the channels.There are more and more players, so it’ll be interesting to see how that shakes out in the future.When I got here I killed a couple of channels that [STAR was] thinking about doing that were going to be pan-regional in nature, in the English language. When you actually looked hard at the P&L [profit and loss statements] of these channels, they were never going to make money.At the end of the day, you have to remind people, we are a business!”
monetizing that? Is it cannibalizing your network run? We don’t stream full-length versions of our shows because our affiliate deals don’t permit it, but if I could, I’m not sure I would, because we’re still in the business of trying to deliver high ratings to the advertisers.And if a few households with people meters are watching a show on Hulu instead of watching it on NBC, doesn’t that affect their ratings? And does the monetization come out the same? I don’t think so.”
January, 2009
April, 2009
Ted Harbert
Jon Feltheimer
President/CEO, Comcast Entertainment Group “Sure you can make the show available on your website or on Hulu, but I have to again question that. Though NBC is struggling with Heroes, which is a well-made program, they’re saying it’s down to 7 million viewers, but another 2 million viewers watch it on the digital offering.And I say, how happy are you with that? Are you
Co-chairman/CEO, Lionsgate “At the end of the day, I would say the key is that the economic downturn is a great wake-up call for all of us to look at the businesses we’re running and how much overhead we’re spending and just make sure that we are employing our capital as efficiently as possible. I gave the keynote speech at NATPE and I said,‘A bad economy is the best critic on the planet.’At the end of the day, consumers are being a lot more selective about their entertainment, and that says to all entertainment executives that we have to be particularly disciplined and selective about the way we run our business.”
lot of their desires and hopes and obstacles from your own life.” April, 2009
Jeffrey Bewkes Chairman/CEO,Time Warner “If we leave out the financial crisis that started last year, and look at the preceding three or four years, your question would stand: Why is it that media stocks during those years— 2005, 2006, 2007—didn’t go anywhere? If you look at most of that period, we were growing earnings around the 8- to 12percent range quite regularly. In a normal long-term average, the value of your company would go up somewhat in line with the growth in your earnings, 8 to 12 percent. But that didn’t happen for most of the media companies, even though they were hitting expectations. And the reason is that when investors looked out three, four or five years, they assumed that the earnings would stop and go flat. They thought that media earnings from advertising on networks, movie tickets, DVD sales, etc., would go flat because piracy and digital convergence would hollow out the revenues.”
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Creator, Mad Men “I wanted to show how different things were back then but also my nature is to show how similar things are [today].And even though the attitudes are less institutionalized and thank God there is legal protection at work, for the most part I find that a lot of these things haven’t really changed. I really wanted to show that when we look at history and when we look at people’s lives before us, we act very wisely and judgmental because we know what happened and how things have turned out. But it’s kind of foolish, because to some degree people don’t change and you should recognize these people and recognize a
Joe Uva
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CEO, Univision Communications “Univision Network is one of America’s top networks, regardless of language and, in major markets across the nation, many nights beating CBS, NBS, FOX and ABC. Over the past five years, Univision’s prime-time audience has increased 17 percent while ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX have declined an average of 16 percent.” April, 2009
Darren Throop CEO, E1 Entertainment “We really want to get our three pillars [TV, film, music] of the business working collaboratively, so we
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can unlock any synergies or any potential for additional revenue opportunities.What we’ve built is a major alternative where you can take a single piece of visual, audio or television content and plug it into an infrastructure and we can monetize all of those rights across the group. Everything from publishing and merchandising and licensing to toys to whatever revenue streams can be derived from that piece of content.” April, 2009
Wadah Khanfar Director-General,Al Jazeera “I think the next phase of our reporting should concentrate on bringing hope to the new generations. Unfortunately, this region has seen a lot of blood, a lot of conflict and a lot of sadness because of many wars and many confrontations. Since Al Jazeera is widely seen by the audience, it should have programs and a philosophy of reporting that encourages hope for youth and hope that the new generation might be prosperous and open. Without that kind of hope, extremism and radical views arise and desperate people may think of various ideas that could destabilize our future.” April, 2009
Tony Cohen CEO, FremantleMedia “FremantleMedia has made the studios, along with U.S. broadcasters, far more open to material that comes from outside the U.S. Many of the leading TV executives come to places like London in the weeks before MIPTV and MIPCOM to see what the local market is generating, because the material is very powerful and, in particular, the U.K. market has been the leading exporter of entertainment and reality formats for many years.The U.S. is now drawing level with it. It’s opened their eyes to what’s possible,
but it has also intrigued and whetted their appetites as to what the potential of operating locally in markets around Europe might be. The only issue with that is that the execution of those ambitions can be very tricky, because in each of the local markets around the world you need credibility and relationships, the same as you do in the U.S., to make a really strong business. One of the reasons why FremantleMedia has been so successful is the strength of its local companies.They do have that credibility in the local markets, and that’s a real challenge for the Hollywood studios.” April, 2009
Bonnie Hammer President, NBC Universal Cable Entertainment and Universal Cable Productions “We as cablers developed a certain programming savvy and learned how to come up with a level of quality that the networks have had for all these years, and they’ve provided a super learning curve for us. Now, I think it’s time for the networks to turn around and learn a little bit more about promoting and marketing from a brandcentric point of view.”
another mechanism of producing U.S. series that doesn’t rely on spending tens of millions of dollars every year on pilots, 90 percent of which never see the light of day. There is a lot of waste in that traditional big-studio model.We came up with this more cost-efficient way.We go directly to 13 episodes so the series doesn’t get cancelled on episode four. It’s an asset that we can sell around the world; we can also sell DVDs.” April, 2009
April, 2009
Lorenzo Pellicioli
Sophie Turner Laing
CEO, De Agostini Group “Growth, in every sector, is achieved through research and innovation.We therefore wish to set up, as soon as possible, a network of creative talent that is able to develop ideas that can be exported to the markets where we already are present as well as in those in which we would like to operate. For that reason, besides focusing on creativity, we are also intent on distribution, as we are present in many countries, mostly European.”
Managing Director for Entertainment, Sky “We’re about giving people choice. There’s a slight snobbery that multichannel is only repeats, or low quality. And low quality is such a subjective thing, because a lot of what gets talked about is how much you spend on the programming. It’s not how much you spend; it’s what you spend it on. So, this [idea] that multichannel is all cheap TV is actually wrong, because what we’re delivering is lots of programming for peoples’ various passions.”
April, 2009
Herbert Kloiber April, 2009
Emiliano Calemzuk President, Fox Television Studios “What we tried to do was hedge the financing risk by creating 164
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clients are looking for.We are looking to spend more money on single projects than to just be at the receiving end of a big output deal.” April, 2009
Nancy Dubuc Executive VP/General Manager, History “I think we’ve done an excellent job of being everywhere that the consumer is.We’re in the gaming community.We’re one of iTunes’ top nonfiction brands.We’re a global brand, a new-media brand, a digital brand, a traditional linear brand, a publishing brand and a consumerproducts brand.We have one of the most robust factual DVD businesses in the industry, and we are in education. I feel confident that we are everywhere that the consumer is. And we’ll continue to follow them. If they find new places to go, then we’ll find new places to be.” April, 2009
Cyma Zarghami President, Nickelodeon and MTVN Kids and Family Group “When a property like iCarly, which is now almost a household name, gets an incredible audience every week and has this other element that is extremely popular, the website iCarly.com, then it feels like there is an opportunity to give the consumer more in multiple
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places.That is how we go about it. Then you have to stay true to what the property is.Again, it is a show that is steeped in digital. It’s a comedy and it has characters that are really resonating, so we take the combination of those three things and try to make the best possible products that we can and put them in front of the consumer.” April, 2009
Shigeo Fukuchi President, NHK “Because a single TV network faces constraints on budget and production capacity in making major series, international joint production involving multiple broadcasters is one important approach.We would not be able to make a sixpart series on our own. Moving forward, we want to account for the demands of overseas markets and international perspectives right from the program-development stage, with our goal being to make programs that will be more appealing to the global market.”
May, 2009
Bruce Rosenblum President, Warner Bros.Television Group “In addition to our scripted success, we have more than a dozen unscripted/reality programs on the air or scheduled to premiere this year. So, it’s not a matter of all of a sudden beginning to compete with FremantleMedia or Endemol. We’ve been in this business and are highly successful at it. In fact, I think you see Fremantle and Endemol now trying to compete with us, in terms of trying to expand their programming to include scripted series.” June, 2009
Adrian Sarbu President/COO, Central European Media Enterprises “One of the pillars of our business model has been to develop and produce our own content—and that’s not only news but also local nonfiction and especially local fiction. Our local content sets us apart from the
competition because it delivers such good ratings for us. In addition, over the last 15 years, we have succeeded in changing the whole perception of commercial television.” October, 2009
James Murdoch Chairman/Chief Executive for Europe and Asia, News Corporation “Only five years ago, when I first went to the U.K., people said the market was mature, that it couldn’t grow anymore, that the BBC was too strong, et cetera, the same things they’ve been saying for a long time, and yet we’ve managed to grow the subscriber base in the U.K. enormously since that time.That is contrary to what anyone would have believed possible, and the same goes for Italy, where people said that to merge Stream and Telepiù would be very difficult, and the marketplace was too challenging, and Italian customers were very happy with RAI and Mediaset.We disagreed, and we think that customers around the world like choice.They like a company that cares about them.They like great programming and they will pay for a great offering and they’ll pay for consistent innovation. We’ve seen that over and over again and I don’t see a major reason why Germany should be any different.” October, 2009
Anne Sweeney Co-chair, Disney Media Networks; President, Disney/ABC Television Group “Hulu has a different audience than the audience we get for abc.com.The Hulu audience is more of a casual viewer, generally more male.We know that the abc.com audience, while younger than the ABC audience, is older than the Hulu audience.” October, 2009
Octavio Florisbal CEO,TV Globo “We believe that mobile phones and digital television outside the home will drive digital growth in Brazil. If we look at mobile phones 166
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first, Brazilians adore talking on their cell phones and love changing their cell phones. In Brazil there are 160 million cell phones and we predict that in five to eight years these 160 million phone owners will be able to receive television for free, without paying anything.” October, 2009
Matt Groening Creator/Executive Producer, The Simpsons “The density of the scripts on the show are due partly to insecurity and just thinking maybe this joke doesn’t work, but if we throw three more jokes in there, that will help, and partly because that just became our signature—we tried to do jokes for everybody watching. That is, there are jokes that are very broad and silly for kids, a lot of physical humor, which we like, going back to silent comedy like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. And we love animation, and with animation you take advantage of exaggeration and mayhem. And then we put in really smart jokes for people who have read a few books and seen a few films. And it turns out that it doesn’t matter if you don’t get every joke. You can still enjoy the jokes that you do understand. There is a secret goal in all of this, which is to make the show watchable more than one time. By having so many things going on on-screen at the same time, and so many things go by so quickly, there is no way you can get every single joke in one viewing.” October, 2009
Steve Mosko President, Sony Pictures Television “A while ago, some of us on the studio side were in denial.We thought that [reality TV] would come and go and that it was just cheap programming that was going to help the bottom line at the networks.The reality is, no pun
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intended, that that’s far from the case.These shows are not only part of network schedules, they are part of our culture here and around the world.A lot of these reality shows have become watercooler shows. Whether it’s American Idol or Dancing with the Stars or Survivor, those are shows that are top of mind for folks.” October, 2009
Cathy Payne CEO, Endemol Worldwide Distribution “In this market [buyers] are more selective and looking for reliability in programming—something that is long-running and has a proven track record. Networks are more likely to buy a rerun of a proven show, or buy an extra run, as opposed to something new—it’s often more cost-effective and reliable as they know what they are buying.While networks will always spend their big money on those big shows that define their network, I do think that well-priced acquisitions for the right product have come into play. But without a doubt everyone is very selective and not buying anything more than what they need.” October, 2009
Susan Whiting Vice Chair/Executive VP, The Nielsen Company “We are learning that overall video usage is up.And the amount of time that people are spending on additional screens beyond TV—on the PC and the mobile phone—is increasing.The additional screens are actually complementary.They are building on top of TV usage; they are not cannibalizing each other.We do see more simultaneous use: when people are on the Internet, they are also watching TV, and vice versa. However, the actual amount of viewing of video online and on phones is still relatively small; they are just growing at a faster pace.The average time spent watching video online per month is 3 hours and 11 minutes, 168
while watching TV in the home is 141 hours and 3 minutes per user. So 99 percent of the viewing is still on the big screen.” October, 2009
Lee Bartlett Managing Director, ITV Studios “I don’t believe that any one company, no matter what its reputation or how creative it is, can have a lock on creative talent. I am interested in creative talent, and as long as it makes financial sense, whether it’s through partnerships, joint ventures, housekeeping deals, any name you want to put to it, I want to have people present ideas that we can then turn around and develop and produce. I don’t care where they come from.And I’m not a big believer in having a giant staff of creative people, because I think creativity is best done in small groups.” October, 2009
Jamie Oliver Celebrity Chef “When I was doing School Dinners, I went into a lot of the kids’ homes and I saw them eating such rubbish. I realized that there’s a whole generation who can’t cook and so their kids aren’t eating any home-cooked food. So it’s important because if we’ve got people growing up eating rubbish every day and never learning to cook for themselves, the situation can only get worse over the next generation and the one after.” October, 2009
Tom Rogers CEO/President,TiVo “What we are now seeing is where control meets what I’ll call infinite choice.That takes TiVo from being a device that can record programming that is coming through linear television and turns it into a device that allows you to get anything you want whenever you want—and recording is simply one way of having that choice.With the facilitation of broadband video to the television set and the integration of content that cable and satellite do not provide, whether it is through Amazon
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or Netflix or Blockbuster or YouTube, you have the ability to get to your television what you want, when you want it, whether or not it’s on linear television. So what we’re seeing is choice meets control; control meets choice. It’s the interaction of the amount of choice and the ultimate control that you can assert over that.” October, 2009
Dawn Airey Chair/Chief Executive, Five “I’m never satisfied! I’m sort of the Oliver Twist of chief executives when it comes to performance: ‘Give me more!’ I always want more!” October, 2009
Andreas Bartl Managing Director for German Free TV, ProSiebenSat.1 Media “TV on demand is a very important trend among viewers and will continue to be so over the next years. It’s not as big in Germany yet as it is in the U.S. But viewers, and especially young viewers, have grown up with the Internet and have become accustomed to having what they want immediately, anytime and anyplace.This is also something we are dealing with and will continue to do so in the future.We are ready for this development, and we take it very seriously.” October, 2009
Ron Howard Director/Producer “Every filmmaker or television producer or director hopes that their story is going to be so riveting that people just can’t help but drop everything and watch it start to finish, but that isn’t the way we live today. I do the same thing. I watch stuff on my computer. I haven’t quite taken to watching shows on my iPhone yet, but my wife has some favorite shows that she likes to watch and revisit and she has those on her iPod—and we’re not kids.”
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