Versatile Amphibian

About 10 days ago my team and I published an analysis of the creative challenges for UK TV. Our concerns were that the creative basis of our TV economy was being damaged, despite an environment of increasing revenues, driven by TV's role in reinforcing the telecoms market through triple and quad-play bundling. What we found was troubling. Although revenues are indeed up by 10% since 2012, our share of global TV revenues has fallen and that the entire of the revenue increase can be accounted for by sports rights. As we showed in our 2013 Royal Television Society report , sports rights spending flows straight through the industry into the rights bodies, clubs and players, rather than into new skills, ideas and creative formats. And the worst is yet to come: the new Champions League and Premier League rights deals add more than a billion pounds a year onto the rights budget, so unless revenues increase new funding sources will be required if net spending on new creative content is t...

I've been doing a really large number of driver trees recently - we've taken to using them on every project to get really into the guts of value creation for businesses and thus decide where to focus initiative development (How To Win, if you're keeping score). Anyhow, I had to pause for thought recently to work out how to represent the subscription aspect of telecoms retail for a client. Since it took me a minute, I thought I'd share... its lack of elegance suggests that its not quite right, although it was enough to demonstrate that there was a certain lack of coverage in the initiatives that my client was pursuing and thus spark a debate. Enjoy.

Since I'm stuck on a Eurostar crawling through western France I thought I'd use the downtime to share this table I've made on the differences between Industrial and Digital companies across the main business functions. A strange insight into how my mind works... but hopeful a useful summary!

On Monday I was privileged enough to present a keynote at the SATNAC conference in South Africa, the slides for which can be found here . The presentation is a little less conceptual than my usual... in that there are significantly fewer pictures of cats off the internet. The thrust of my argument was as follows: Part 1 - setup We are in the early throes of a shift to a new economic system This means redefinition of the roles of individuals in society, businesses and governments in their lives Conceptually, some commentators believe that this new system will enable African countries to leapfrog over their developed world counterparts because they don't have the infrastructure, business model and cultural encumbrances of the Industrial Economy To examine whether that is true, we need to look at the ingredients for success at a macro (national or perhaps mega-corp level), which I'd describe as: Pervasive access to computing (because this is the general purpose technolo...

I had the chance to return to a topic that was very close to my heart for many years: that of the development of foundations for a digital economy in Africa. I'll drop a transcript of my keynote at SATNAC here in the next day or so, but for now, here's two high level figures on the investment over the last 5 years.  I'm planning to restart blogs on this topic (and in general) once I've completed my latest book, on the traits of a digital business, later in the year. In the interim, here's two figures: total investment in telecoms infrastructure, including international, core, MAN and access for all African countries, split by region. My summary of the figures is that although investment has been huge in African countries, on a per capita basis very few countries are even on par with the global average investment. Given where they're coming from, this means that African countries are effectively falling behind in terms of the foundational infrastructure th...