Versatile Amphibian

My unexpected ‘life redesign project’ is still in progress, but - with a little trepidation - I’m going to start blogging again. So here we go.  I’m of the belief that participants in the TMT industry need to read widely in order to understand the present and future dynamics of the market. To that end, this (short) post is a collection of the articles that have caught my eye in the last week. This week: rumours of cut cords greatly exaggerated, Wii U fail, Ofcom cost taxpayer billions and only 30% of executive decisions are good ones (says McKinsey…) Media Cord cutting didn’t really happen in the US last year. No shit. This shows how a badly worded survey can totally mislead unwary observers. Common sense needs to be applied in the future… http://allthingsd.com/20130320/how-6-million-cord-cutters-disappeared/ Good analysis here of multitasking behaviour amongst the TV audience. It’s always gone on, which is why second screen et al are no threat to TV – we’...

I’m of the belief that participants in the TMT industry need to read widely in order to understand the present and future dynamics of the market. To that end, this post is a collection of the articles that have caught my eye. Just to warn you, this week I’ve been feeling particularly sarcastic. This week: the week of fear: cord cutting rife, consoles dead, apps will kill films, Galaxy smashes iPhone, China hacks Coke, LeBron kills NBA videogames & scientists laser paper FOR FUN! Digital media Panic! Cord cutting is rife again. Or perhaps not. http://allthingsd.com/20121107/cord-keeping-pay-tv-shrinks-for-the-quarter-stays-steady-for-the-year/#comment-703163289 An interesting use of images from Instagram to create an NBC news microsite on the US elections. This kind of thing certainly won’t replace mainstream news broadcasting, but it does add colour around the main HD editorial. Powered by Chute, by the way, which is an interesting little technology that enables social medi...

My latest State of the Media Democracy B-Side covers an emotive and controversial issue – that of cord cutting. For those of you not familiar with the term, cord cutting refers to customers cancelling their pay-TV subscriptions and replacing them with free or paid-for on-demand services. As the chart below shows, the proportion of respondents subscribing to pay-TV services actually went up in all markets in 2011. This is despite the fact that in 2010 a relatively large number of respondents (about a quarter in France and Japan) said that they were intending to dispense with their subscriptions in favour of free or paid-for streamed alternatives. So why didn’t they? The answer is two-fold, I think. Firstly the number of people with the equipment to actually cut the cord is fairly limited as a proportion of the total. Most consumers with connected-ready TVs and Blu-ray players haven’t actually connected them because they lack the requisite (and expensive) Wi-fi dongle and the TV is too f...