Tuesday 24th April 2012
The BBC is advertising for a new Director General. Like many others I have been asked what I think. About 25 years ago I was asked the same question by the Times. It was a very different era. The UK was arousing itself from a long period of decline. What I wrote looks naive now. The UK needs growth again but the Government’s “growth strategy” does not include the BBC, the UK’s largest media company — though outside observers remind us from time to time that the UK should be … Read more…
Monday 26th March 2012
The UK’s film and TV industries are pleased. In last week’s budget, they got their tax breaks. The Right Decision? Yes, it was the right decision. Too many of the UK’s competitors use them, with little chance of the UK’s being able to do doing anything about it. So the UK is simply losing the business. There is no single set of state aid or competition rules that can be applied across all the national jurisdictions involved – and they can all call up some kind of “cultural … Read more…
Tuesday 28th February 2012
The two most important recommendations of the recent UK Film report, according to its author, are (1) that producers should be free to use the money generated by success to invest further – as opposed, I presume, to returning money to public bodies which have funded them – and (2) that producers should work with distributors right from the outset to tailor their film to audiences. All this is in the interest of greater commercial success – but not necessarily mainstream films, the term used by Prime Minister … Read more…
Thursday 19th January 2012
Overseas Performance Matters The Report makes one obvious point about film that is too easily forgotten. From 72% of the box office for films made exclusively with UK money to 86% of the box office for co-productions, all successful films in which Britain is involved must get over ¾ of their revenue overseas. That should not be a surprise. If a middle sized country is to be a player in a global world, it must have premium products and services that get most of their revenues from somewhere … Read more…
Thursday 5th January 2012
I wrote recently about the “format” revolution that started in the 1990′s. It originated in Europe. Netherlands-based Endemol was a key player. Endemol created the iconic show Big Brother. Time-Warner is a great company, but I hope Endemol remains European. In the next few weeks, the ownership of Endemol will be weighed in meeting rooms and conference calls. Before Christmas Time Warner changed their offer for Endemol to $1.3bn all-cash. The creditors, however, support a debt restructuring. That could help keep the firm in European ownership. Creditors, it … Read more…
Friday 2nd December 2011
Viewers of ABC in America, Channel 4 in the UK and other channels in countless other countries will have heard of Wife Swap and The Secret Millionaire. Not so many will have heard of the Zodiak Media Group, the company that owns and makes them. Zodiak Media is a European firm with its main operating headquarters in London and Paris, majority-owned by the Italian De Agostini Group. De Agostini started to build its Communications Division in 2007, acquiring Marathon (France) and Magnolia (Italy and Spain). Then, in 2008, … Read more…
Thursday 17th November 2011
A recent piece in the Economist drew attention to the leading role of the UK in the global format business. According to research from Fremantle, the international producer and format owner, the UK currently provides 43% of the formats in international distribution. As the article correctly argues, this is a direct result of reforms in Britain starting in the 1990’s. As the Economist writes: Like financial services, television production took off in London as a result of government action. In the early 1990s broadcasters were told to commission at … Read more…
Tuesday 25th October 2011
In this our anniversary series of blogs, I’m talking about some of the companies we still work for and others we have worked for in the past. One of them is in the news today. Hit Entertainment is to be bought by Mattel, the toymaker. Our closest link with Hit is with Thomas the Tank Engine (now usually Thomas and Friends). Britt Allcroft, who licensed the Thomas books, was a client with whom we did a lot of work in our first decade of our company’s life. She … Read more…
Wednesday 12th October 2011
The British company Mentorn was one of our very first clients. It is now part of Tinopolis, a very interesting company. I once asked a successful entrepreneur: what were the key qualities of those who could build successful businesses? He said “energy, opportunism and being good at math”. That’s got to be true of Tinopolis. This company, based in Llanelli, Wales, began life producing Welsh-language content (Welsh speaking population: 631,000). Its name hales from the days when its hometown, Llanelli, was the capital of the Welsh tinplate industry. … Read more…
Tuesday 30th August 2011
I was fortunate to hear Eric Schmidt, Chairman of Google, speak at the Edinburgh Television Festival and to attend the Question and Answer session the following morning. Schmidt posed one big question — in my view a massively important one: why hasn’t a country like the UK built large technology companies? (He reminded us that the first commercial use of a computer was at the headquarters of J. Lyons, once famous for its tea shops, in West London). For the audience of British TV Executives the question took a … Read more…
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