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 ?

Word reaches me that Maven have turned down one of the world’s largest travel companies and one of the world’s largest publishers as clients because they ‘are too small’. It seems that my prediction that Yahoo! would take them downmarket was very wide of the mark.

In the meantime it seems that the company has won Virgin Media, the UK’s largest cableco, as a customer, displacing the long running relationship with troubled Narrowstep.

So it seems that Yahoo! are using Maven as a platform for a major content play by aggregating through stealth.

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Rumour Mill

This is an interesting comment I received on the last blog which is worth repeating in a posting:

“You could try using pickaproxy.com service to see if that helps. We have recently setup tryouts to allow anyone to appear to be in either UK, US, France, Russia, China or Canada. To geospoof your UK presence set your browser proxy to uk.pickaproxy.com and specify port 8126.

As for the internet going forward, I am thinking that geospoofing services will help free users from geo restrictions, throw a wrench in geotargeting strategies, and maybe create a better world ”

I’d appreciate any feedback on how well this works for users out there. If you’re outside the UK try setting the proxy for the US and accessing Hulu. I can’t seem to get it to work.

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More Spoofing

Now, I know that Wales has its own version of the UK Channel 4, but it seems that Channel 4’s 4OD service has decided that I’m not living in the UK or Ireland.

Now, I did sleep rather well last night so could have missed the uprising in the street as my countrymen achieve independence and cast themselves adrift from the British Isles, but I doubt if this was the case.

A far more likely explanation is that Channel 4’s geo-targeting database has gone awry.

Now, I do run Tor, the geospoofing application, but I restarted my router and PC and switched off Tor and could still not gain access. http://www.ip-lookup.net/ clearly tells me that I’m in the UK, so either a cookie has blocked me or the problem is an ongoing one.

It made me ask – is there a better way to geo-restrict content, since all content providers seem to be under the misapprehension that restricting their content by territory is a good thing to do.

Current geo-restrictions tend to use a database lookup either using a downloaded database or a web service. There are problems with this. For example, my wife works for an American corporation therefore has a US IP address, which is great for watching Hulu, but not very good if you want to use her PC for the BBC iPlayer.

Also, the database is being continually changed, so it’s easy to come a cropper. The move from IPv4 to IPv6 is likely to make things even worse in the short term, although should improve matters in the longer terms.

Another issue with this approach is that major service providers such as AOL can assign their IPs to users from another country, thus causing content to be blocked locally.

Some other alternative are:

To trust the user (!)

To use a credit card as a key-in device

To use location based authentication on a mobile phone

To use the ISP to authenticate a location

Or, to give in and recognise that we live and operate in a global market and virtual barriers are as welcome as the return of the Berlin Wall.

Anyhow, enough on geo-targeting, I must dig my old TV set out of the storeroom so that I can watch Countdown on Channel 4!

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Geo Trouble