Category Archives: Globalisation
Tuesday 16th October 2012
In America, Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States has been announced and it’s due for release on Showtime in November. (The book of the series, written by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, is to be released on October 30th.) The series has been a labour of love (and some pain) both for Oliver Stone and Matt Graham, who is British and co-writer of the series along with Peter Kuznick. My guess is the series will surprise, even shock, many Americans and result in lots of comment. If … Read more…
Friday 22nd June 2012
Beijing airport is a complex of what look like huge scallop shells, betokening a vast airport. We have two days there before moving on to our client’s location, Hunan Province, whose capital, Changsha, is three hours by air from Beijing. We are giving three days of workshops, explaining our approach to the evaluation of content and illustrating it from a wide range of case studies of new entertainment and drama from the West. We also give a session on business models from the West and examples of new … 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 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…
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…
Posted in
AVMS Directive,
BBC,
C4,
Communications Bill,
European Union,
Exports,
Globalisation,
Google,
Media,
Ofcom,
Regulation,
Sky,
TV,
You Tube
Thursday 28th April 2011
A new book by economist Pankaj Ghemawat has pointed out the limits of globalisation. (A review in the Economist called it the “case against globaloney”). We are less international in our tastes and preferences than many imagine. The book points to a kind of residue of localism that is deeply embedded. (For example former colonial powers do a disproportionate amount of trade with former colonies). Moreover a mere increase in trade – often used as a measure of globalisation — can be put down to technology and structural … Read more…
Monday 18th April 2011
If Big Brother was the defining show of the last decade. What will define this one? Three thoughts: Everyone is excited about social media. Its impact may be over-rated, but it will surely make the public interaction and voting styles of the last decade obsolete. Reaction will be more instantaneous and probably tied in with social media sites. These responses will be part of the fabric of the event, feeding into it at critical moments. Viewers will be able to interact with the show via webcams and video … Read more…
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