Most people don’t realise that the majority of the international news they consume come from two sources – AP and Reuters. There are a handful of national news organisations that also do a commendable job – AFP (Agence France Press) being primary amongst these, with CNN, the BBC and Sky/Fox also having reasonable representation.

But most of these organisations depend on ‘stringers’, or local camerapeople who risk their lives daily in many instances for their pictures. So, even in this era of ubiquitous video phones, video cameras and broadband, it is surprising that current events in Zimbabwe, Lebanon and Myanmar (Burma) are poorly covered. Areas like Darfur and China receive even less attention. No pictures = no story in newsrooms, thus encouraging further repression and censorship by the world’s worst regimes.

But services like YouTube are full of amateur coverage, and services like Current TV are beginning to have an impact.

However, even when pictures do get out I’m worried that the everyday brutality in the world around us fails to have the impact of the iconic image of the naked Vietnamese girl feeling from napalm or the execution of a Viet Cong soldier by a Southern Vietnamese officer that turned world public opinion about the Vietname War.

Now we’re left helpless in the face of such images. Worse still, perhaps we’re now immune as reality and fiction become so inter-twined. I always believed that more images were a good thing and that the internet would liberate, inform and bring about positive change in the world. Now I’m not so sure.

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Helpless.tv

There’s a whole industry out there making sports work on internet TV. Companies like the Perform Group and the folks at MLB live and breathe sports on the web.

So, how come there is so little on demand stuff to watch after the event ?

I cannot think of a single place I can go to watch any rugby whatsoever, anywhere in the world at this moment in time. All of those hundreds of thousands of hours are simply not available to viewers… Football is a bit better served with club internet TV channels, but you can’t replay Premiership games the day, week , month or year after…

There’s a serious business to be built here and I’m surprised how slow the major players are at picking this up.

Me ? I’m off to write a video recorder for the internet TV era (open page, capture stream, set start, write to disk, set end; it’s not rocket science…)

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Poor Performance

A big day in British broadcasting as the new, free-to-air HD satellite service Freesat is launched by the BBC and ITV. This is bad news for Sky and probably worse news for Virgin Media. As the recession bites it won’t be long before people start looking at those bills and wondering if they can get cheaper TV. Indeed, it seems that broadband is now more on selling point than TV or telephony in the triple play.

Allegedly, only half a million UK viewers receive HD, despite over 8 million having HD capable screens, so this is also probably the seminal moment in the introduction of HD to the UK.

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Going Higher

The move of ITV’s Head of Channels, Dawn Airey to Five after just seven months in the job point to just one outcome, in my opinion: RTL, Five’s owners, are set to launch a bid for the UK’s main commercial broadcaster, ITV.

With uncertainty remaining around Virgin Media’s channels (including the UKTV JV with the BBC) almost half traditional TV channels in the UK are up for grabs. With content becoming a far more globalised market I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of the US networks joining in on the act.

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Bid Time

The broadcast and broadcast services sector remains in the doldrums despite the radical changes going on in the broadcast world. The move to cheaper, easier ways of disseminating video content is bad news for most of the broadcast service companies and the telco sector is also failing to benefit.

For example, the merger of Alcatel and Lucent is in danger of dragging down two of the great names in technology as the strength of the dollar hits and it isn’t able to replace traditional telcoms revenue fast enough with data traffic such as video.

At the same time, broadcast advertising dollars are disappearing and they’re not reappearing again anywhere else – there is a tectonic shift to internet ads, but internet video is nowhere near making up for the lost revenues being suffered by companies such as ITV, for example.

As the pie gets cut into smaller segments, the market loses the old oligopolies and no longer has the economies of scale that were once available to the dominant players.

The basic problem is that the pie is the same size, new entrants are taking big slices out of this pie (IPTV players in Southern Europe, Google) there, quite simply, too many companies treading on each others’ toes. And we all remember from second year economics that competition drives prices down.

It is companies diversifying away from video, such as MTV owners Viacom, who are benefiting the most – they have just announced stellar figures based on the success of the Rock Band video game.

Broadcasting has always had an allure beyond its station (the media industry as a whole is tiny when compared to, say, oil production or banking). Now companies wanting to operate in the sector are in danger of feeding off crumbs.

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Who Ate All The Pies ?