Nick Snow is the founder of Advanced Television Ltd and is publisher & editor-in-chief of advanced-television.com and Euromedia. In 1984 he worked on the debut issue of Cable & Satellite Europe, and over the years his companies have published many of the industry’s most highly regarded titles. He is also a screenwriter, producer and playwright.
You could be forgiven for assuming that Keith Rupert Murdoch answers to no one but himself. And there’s plenty in that – though his companies have been public for years, they have, in effect, been fiefdoms following the iron will of their leader. And that will has led his companies to participate in several groundbreaking, […]
Going dark is an extreme, but not very unusual, tactic when MSOs are negotiating package carriage deals with content companies. So far, so what? as Charter – America’s #2 cable operator – dims the lights on Disney’s channels as contract talks drag. What is different, is that Charter hasn’t shied away from (quite the opposite) […]
Barbie and Oppenheimer – Barbenheimer – (not a portmanteau any of their creators were expecting), have had big opening weekends. Indeed, Barbie is in the all-time top ten and is #1 in the ‘by a female director’ league. Both are ‘original’ dramas in the sense that matters most. They are not original stories – Barbie […]
BT has a new CEO in Allison Kirkby, though she is not new to the company having served as a NED since 2019, the same time Philip Jansen became CEO. BT is the definition of a lacklustre stock. This despite being in a major growth area and holding a huge market share. It is, to […]
Few have more admiration for Rupert Murdoch than me. He has been dominating the ‘new media’ space all my working life, and that is true for virtually everyone reading this. What I admire particularly is that KRM has – unlike any number of other faceless corporates or ‘characterful’ entrepreneurs – regularly bet the farm on […]
Sir Richard Branson’s rocket company Virgin Orbit has filed for bankruptcy in the US after failing to secure new investment. The satellite launch company had already halted operations and laid-off staff but says it hopes to find a buyer for the business. In truth, it was always an also-ran contender in the competitive launch business […]
Everyone knows the old fable about the Emperor and his lack of clothing. One person eventually calls out his nakedness and, eventually, everyone agrees; the collective illusion, the group think, is broken. The first truth-teller has to be brave, or have nothing to lose. But, in some ways, the most important figure is the second […]
It takes someone with the self-confidence born of being born into one of the founding families of second-generation television to call out that the third-generation simply isn’t working. James Dolan is the chair of AMC Networks, the content spin-off of Cablevision, one of the founding father companies of the US, then global, cable and pay-TV […]
Richard Sharp, the current Chair of the BBC, may have been an outstanding banker. He worked for both JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs and, presumably, made them a lot of money, certainly made himself rich. Is that the definition of a good banker? Did he do it more outstandingly than any of the other individuals […]
On the same day the DCMS has confirmed an earlier leak that it is dropping its mad idea of privatising C4, Matt Hancock, the gurning TV celeb and former DCMS Secretary, closed his personal app (he launched it five years ago, in case you’re not a follower). Does this coincidence indicate that the grown-ups are […]