According to the report, produced by Digital TV Research and released Wednesday, China surpassed Japan to become the world’s number two market for pay TV (subscription and on-demand) in 2012. Looking ahead, the authors said pay TV revenues will more than double over the next five years in four countries — Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam — and triple in Indonesia. During that same period — 2012 to 2018 — revenues are expected to fall in South Korea and Hong Kong.

Andrew Wallenstein hits out of the park once again, great analysis !

Hulu’s future can be boiled down to five distinct paths, and it’s this latest one that might be the likeliest and best option.

1. Hulu gets sold

2. Status quo

3. Make room for another owner

4. News Corp. buys out Disney

5. Disney buys out News Corp.

tech and content are lifelong friends, it’ll work out in the end…

Bernstein analyst Todd Juenger is convinced that, at least for kids’ programmers, and Viacom in particular, the Netflix deals are bad ones, because they train Netflix subscribers and their kids to watch the shows on the Internet instead of on TV.

This makes intuitive sense to people like me, who have kids who watch a ton of Viacom shows — andalmost never watch them on TV. Viacom has said thatthis isn’t the case, but today Juenger has a new note making the same argument, with new data.

the #contentrumble is alive and well ! next up will be Walmart-Vudu, mark my words

While the Amazon Studios pilot Zombieland, based on the hit 2009 Sony movie, has already been cast and filmed, this is the first time the company has acknowledged its existence. The pilot hails from Sony Pictures TV, marking the first Amazon original project from a major studio.

Digital delivery is one of the hottest topics at Hong Kong’s Filmart, as more Chinese auds use their cellphones and tablets to access content. China has a population of 550 million webizens and the number of mobile Web users was up nearly 18%, or 64.4 million new users, to reach an impressive 420 million total users last year.

“the pace of innovation is accelerating and that traditional media industry gatekeepers run by executives such as Brian Roberts, Rupert Murdoch, Bob Iger, Sumner Redstone, Jeff Bewkes, etc. do not hold the same grip on content creation and distribution that they once did,”

HanWay Select has signed a subscription VoD deal with Sohu Video, the VoD arm of Chinese internet giant sohu.com.

The deal also increases the availability of arthouse product in China’s booming online video market, which so far has been mostly focused on Hollywood and commercial Asian titles.

Micelli said Netflix, whose deals are structured to cover multiple regions around the world, will control each series for 4 years exclusively and then re-sell them to a linear cable channel. Micelli expects Microsoft’s XBox whose studio is led by CBS vet Nancy Tellem to compete with Netflix for high-end programming. But not necessarily Amazon Studios which is looking at a smaller scale – comedies for $1 million an episode. Also programming will be Redbox and Verizon via Redbox Instant By Verizon.

The Netflix CEO sought a a tricky balancing act at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference on Monday, touting the success of “House of Cards” but downplaying the short-term impact the series will have on Netflix. 

“It’s not the center of the company,” cautioned Hastings. “It may be the center of the PR for a while and that’s ok but i don’t want you guys to think that suddenly we’re the original content company.”

” - The share of Americans who attend a cinema at least once a month declined from 30% in 2000 to 10% in 2011. - By 2015 Americans will have 861 million internet-connected devices, up from 560m in 2012, averaging 2.7 devices each . - Box-office revenues outside America are growing two and a half times as fast as they are domestically. - People watch the same amount of movies that they did a few years ago, they’re just spending $6B less a year to do it.

So where does this leave us?

1. Young filmmakers interesting in quality character-driven tales should go into TV.
2. If the studios & their heaps of cash get out of the tentpole business, who is going to take their place?
3. The business model is broken. Who is doing something to fix it? Why is this not an industry level discussion?
4. Now would be a good time to launch a micro-budget global transmedia development/production/distro company. “

“Not all these havens are in sunny climes; indeed not all are technically offshore. Mr Obama likes to cite Ugland House, a building in the Cayman Islands that is officially home to 18,000 companies, as the epitome of a rigged system. But Ugland House is not a patch on Delaware (population 917,092), which is home to 945,000 companies, many of which are dodgy shells. Miami is a massive offshore banking centre, offering depositors from emerging markets the sort of protection from prying eyes that their home countries can no longer get away with. The City of London, which pioneered offshore currency trading in the 1950s, still specialises in helping non-residents get around the rules. British shell companies and limited-liability partnerships regularly crop up in criminal cases. London is no better than the Cayman Islands when it comes to controls against money laundering. Other European Union countries are global hubs for a different sort of tax avoidance: companies divert profits to brass-plate subsidiaries in low-tax Luxembourg, Ireland and the Netherlands.”

“But Hollywood is not just any industry. It’s the true north of our culture. To become a broker here! Think of the power! Think of the parties! And this is why so many are called. Everyone would like to be a player and Hollywood is littered with the wreckage of careers of people who looked at the entertainment industry and thought, “I would love to be a big shot and, anyhow, how hard can it be?” It turns out that making entertainment is extremely hard. Even Disney can make a stinker like John Carter. Even very talented people (the Weinstein brothers or Bonnie Hammer, for instance) make mistakes.

So does Netflix have an edge? Is there any reason to think they can flourish where so many have failed? The apparent answer is data. Netflix has lots and lots of data. They know what we watch, when we watch, where we stop watching, where we repeat a scene, where we reach for the fast-forward button, and most critically, when we break off and move on. They know which movies sell well at 8:00 on a Friday night and which ones we like to watch on Sunday afternoon. They can surmise which directors, writers, and stars produce the most watchable entertainment. They have magnificent data.

And that’s a tragedy. Netflix has so much data that they are going to be tempted to climb into the creative tent and start offering “advice.” I mean, what is all that data (and power) for, if it doesn’t let you call some shots? They can claim to know exactly what works and what does not. Well, sorry, no. Knowing that something works leaves us a long way from knowing why something works. And this leaves us a long way from knowing how to reproduce it in another movie. The only thing this data can be absolutely sure to produce is arrogance. We have seen this mistake before.”

“For messages to be heard in 2020, brands will need to create an enormous amount of useful, appealing, and timely content. To get there, brands will have to leave behind organizations and thinking built solely around the campaign model, and instead adopt the defining characteristics of the real-time, data-driven newsroom — a model that’s prolific, agile and audience-centric.

The campaign model, relatively speaking, is miserly. Ad units like TV spots are produced in small batches and doled out across channels. Even digital advertising is versioned with relatively minor variations that most people would have a hard time evaluating as “different”.

As Jacques Bughin and David Edelman of McKinsey & Company predict in their submission to the 2020 project, “The need for relevance will drive consumer demand and shape advertising supply. There will be billions of interaction points that will place enormous demands on brands to create and deliver just the right piece of content.”

@netflix is the real revolutionary. I cite deux Declarations of Insolence: 1) They guaranteed us two seasons upfront & 2) They bestowed us w/ extraordinary creative freedom. The former did affect storytelling. Knowing our sandbox was filled w/26 hours allowed us to focus on long arcs rather than cliffhangers. Ditto the latter; it encouraged risk-taking rather than branding. Netflix’s rebel-without-a-pause attitude surely informed the choice to release 13 eps with a single click. The storm in the atmosphere? Viewer Empowerment.

J-son saw revolution in cyclical terms. He believed: “Every constitution, then, and every law naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right.” 19 yrs makes sense — it’s a generation. Each generation requires its own rules. That 20-yr theory applies to TV. In the ’50s, the tube replaced radio as the primary source of home entertainment. In the ’70s, cable expanded the scope of TV beyond the broadcast networks. In the ’90s, HBO brought original paid-cable programming into the mainstream. And now, in the 20-teens, Netflix has dissolved whatever barriers separated TV from the Internet. In another 20 yrs, the wheel will revolve again in some unimaginable way.

Netflix democratizes the viewing experience. It exploits a trend (DVR, on-demand, streaming), which strips execs of the power to determine when & how a show will be viewed, and it places that power in the hands of consumers. That’s chaos for networks, but out of that storm emerges a new order, one governed by viewers instead of content-providers. TJ wrote a slogan fit for Netflix: “The least governed are the best governed.”