Pay TV Channel Research Articles

Public service media, sports and cultural citizenship in the age of social media: An analysis of BBC Sport agenda diversity on Twitter

As a crucial part of their mandate, public service media have historically used sports to construct and nurture cultural citizenship. In a landscape characterised by dwindling resources and growing competition from pay-TV channels and on-demand streaming services, concerns about how public service media will enhance cultural citizenship through new platforms, including social media, are all the greater. In the digital age, delivering diverse content should remain a foundation of public service media in their countless platforms: public media should not only concentrate on major sports but also provide exposure to traditionally underrepresented disciplines and individuals, including sportswomen and athletes with disabilities. Through content analysis, this research examines the agenda diversity offered by the British Broadcasting Corporation through its sports-centred Twitter account ( @BBCSport). The analysis of 10,821 tweets indicates how the British Broadcasting Corporation's content reinforces, rather than counteracts, the long-standing diversity imbalances in the analogue age. This case study facilitates an understanding of the nuanced relationship among public service media, social media and sports, demonstrating that more content does not necessarily ensure diversity. The football-driven, male-centred and able-bodied agenda displayed by @BBCSport signals that public service media should reframe their social media strategies to adequately contribute to fostering cultural citizenship.

Canal+: from innovative newcomer to beleaguered brand

This article examines the advent, embedding, and problematic contemporary situation of Canal+ within the context of the French television landscape as a whole. The first section is devoted to the arrival of the new pay-tv channel in 1984 and its growth to maturity to become an integral part of the French television system. The second section concentrates on the challenges facing Canal+ in recent years and the company’s strategic response in an era of unparalleled expansion in the supply of both television and video content as well as radical changes in media usage by French audiences.

Uma Plataforma Escalável de Alta Disponibilidade para Monitoramento, Armazenamento e Recuperação de Vídeos da TV por Assinatura

The production industry and the market for the distribution of audiovisual content is regulated in different ways by different countries, which, on the one hand, want to protect, develop and foster national audiovisual production, but on the other, want to allow free access for the public to foreign content. National legislation and regulatory policy in countries often pose challenges to IT governance, as well as requiring practical efforts in building and maintaining tools that can assist in monitoring the audiovisual market. This paper presents technical aspects of the Conditioned Access Service Monitoring Platform (MP-SeAC), a software designed, built and operated by Ancine in Brazil as a tool to assist compliance with Law 12.485/2011 that regulates the performance of economic agents in pay-TV market. MP-SeAC software captures, processes, records, indexes and retrieves videos from 200 pay-TV channels, allowing for continuous monitoring of programming and enforcement of effective compliance and promotion of national production. In the future, the recorded video collection will also serve the education and research community and society at large.

Based on Premium Channels Package Optimum Combination of 0-1 Programming Model Design

According to the statistical analysis of the user viewing pay channels behavior based on RFML Model and Pay-TV channel promotion strategy research, build an optimization model. First of all, use the results of RFML model about user viewing behavior and build 0-1 programming model. Secondly, solve the problem by the greedy dynamic programming algorithm while comparing the results to determine the optimal solution for each channel premium channels users. Finally, clustering analysis, the optimal solution for all users to cluster, given the optimal combination of design program results. The results showed that: RFML model results to calculate a single and comprehensive index, and further shows the current users of the program package with premium channel slower satisfaction with the status 0-1 programming model for solving dynamic programming algorithm results show that high clustering results indicate 42 premium channels clustered into four groups show package ideal; CCTVFY type of program can be packaged separately; fishing and sports programs as class program package appropriate; photography, travel, painting Finance, for a small minority of users.

La Classe américaine

On 31 December 1993, French pay TV channel Canal+ broadcast a 70-minute film called La Classe américaine, directed by Michel Hazanavicius and Dominique Mézerette. They took excerpts from about fifty Warner Bros. productions, edited them to build a story and had the characters (played by A-list actors such as John Wayne and James Stewart) dubbed over by well-known French voice actors, resulting in what is known technically as a ‘détournement’, combining the techniques of film collage and dubbing. This paper sketches the origins and the production context of this very unusual audiovisual object, relying on insights from film theory, with particular reference to adaptation techniques like remixes and collages. The analysis also shows how meaning and humour are created through the montage of originally completely disconnected scenes and the addition of funny or crude dialogues that one would not expect from cinema legends like John Wayne. A final part highlights the film’s cult status and its influence on the creation of more détournements.

Marriott International and Pay-Per-View

In 2007, J. W. “Bill” Marriott Jr., chairman and CEO of Marriott International, faced criticism from various groups about the fact that the Marriott hotels offered in-room adult entertainment. Because the Marriott family and organization was affiliated with the Mormon Church, which decried pornography, claiming that it was harmful to children, family, and society, critics assailed the company for not being true to Mormon values. In an attempt to make a decision, Bill Jr. reflected on the history of the Marriott Corporation and his family's deep ties to the Mormon Church and community. The company had been founded on his father's strong principles, and Bill Jr. knew that the ultimate decision had to adhere both to these principles and to his responsibility for the corporation's financial stability and the needs of its customers. Excerpt UVA-E-0365 Nov. 11, 2011 Marriott International and Pay-Per-View As he prepared to meet with his board of directors, J. W. “Bill” Marriott Jr., chairman and CEO of Marriott International, looked at the angry letter dated July 18, 2007, that he had just received. In it, Robert Peters, president of Morality in Media, an organization dedicated to opposing pornography, had complained angrily about the fact that Marriott hotels offered in-room adult entertainment. Peters had detailed his chagrin after a recent Marriott stay, when he had discovered this fact. In his letter, he wrote that he would “avoid staying at Marriott Hotels, despite their quality and affordability, because Marriott Hotels is a major distributor of hardcore pornography on its pay-TV channels.” Peters was just one of many critical voices over this issue. Among other conservative groups, Concerned Women for America, the American Decency Association, Focus on the Family, and others had publicly denounced Marriott, claiming that pornography was harmful to children, families, and society. The outcry had become so fierce that the Marriott board of directors had asked for a special meeting with its CEO to discuss what, if anything, the hospitality company management should do to address this issue and fend off a possibly ugly public relations debacle. In preparing for the meeting, Bill Jr. reflected on the history of Marriott and the sometimes unpopular business decisions it had been forced to make. Marriott and Mormons Marriott was not the only hotel chain that offered pay-per-view (PPV) adult movies in its rooms; Hilton and Westin hotels, among many others, also did. What made the Marriott situation unique, however, was the company's direct connection to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (also called the LDS Church or the Mormon Church because of its subscription to the Book of Mormon). Marriott's founder, J. Willard Marriott (Bill Sr.), was a devout Mormon. His father had followed Brigham Young west to Utah in the 1850s. His son, Bill Jr., was also prominent in the Mormon Church at the national level, serving in various volunteer leadership positions. The Mormon religion explicitly prohibited pornography, considering its use a violation of a commandment of God. . . .

Secure pay-TV for chained hotels

There is an increasing demand of securely selling pay-TV channels to large organizations such as chained hotels. Most solutions usually employ a key generation authority to distribute secret access credentials for all users, which would cause the single-point problem of inefficient key management. Further, there is a risk of the leakage of users' access credentials while countermeasures to find out the leaked credentials are lacking. To address such issues, we propose a leakage traceable hierarchical key distribution (LTHKD) framework with the key delegation and the key-leakage tracing. The key delegation allows the key generation authority to apportion the tasks of access credential generation to a number of group authorities; the tracing mechanism provides an efficient method to find out the leaked access credentials. We present a concrete LTHKD scheme by extending hierarchical identity-based encryption to groups with users' access credentials elegantly encoded by unique fingerprint codes. We formally prove the security of the proposed scheme in a rigorous definition and conduct thorough theoretical and experimental analyses to evaluate the system performance. Surprisingly, the results show that the added key-leakage tracing mechanism has little affection on data encryption and decryption procedures.

You've Been Pranked: Reality Tv, National Identity and the Privileged Status of Australian Children's Drama

Australian children have always been considered a special television audience. In November 2009, Australia's public service broadcaster the ABC launched Australia's first dedicated free-to-air children's channel. Within a year of its launch, ABC3's most popular program was a local version of the transnational reality format, Prank Patrol. The popularity of reality television with children challenges policy settings, including the Children's Television Standards (CTS), that privilege drama in the expression of the goals of cultural nationalism. While public service broadcasting ideology is expressed and applied to Australian commercial free-to-air channels through the CTS, public service media compete with pay TV channels for the child audience using a range of genres. Thus contemporary Australian children's television is characterised by an abundance of supply, pan-platform delivery and a policy regime that has remained largely unchanged since the late 1970s.

‘This is FilmFour – Not Some Cheesy Pseudo-Hollywood Thing!’: The Opening Night Simulcast of FilmFour on Channel 4

Channel 4's tradition of supporting, promoting and contributing to British cinema culture entered a new phase in 1998. Its film-making operations were consolidated into a single, semi-vertically integrated studio called FilmFour. On 1 November it launched a brand-new pay-TV channel of the same name. This channel programmed a variety of cinema, premiering world cinema films, FilmFour's own productions and independent films. It was the first digital channel in Britain affiliated to a public service broadcaster. The new channel was introduced on its opening night with a simultaneous broadcast with terrestrial Channel 4. Scheduled on this evening was a representative selection of films and programmes to entice viewers to take up the new channel, including the UK television premiere of The Usual Suspects (1995). This article presents a detailed textual analysis of this opening night simulcast. It examines how the new channel was presented to the audience, focusing particularly on interstitial material: the introductory programme, interviews with well-known faces from the British film industry, and additional material broadcast between the films. Evaluating the evening's output, the paper argues that the opening night simulcast represented both a marketing tool for the new channel and a means of extending the Channel 4 corporation's brand. This article offers a case study in how a public service broadcaster began to negotiate for itself a space in the new digital broadcasting environment by targeting a specific, discriminating audience.

Development of Pay Television Channels in China

In 2003, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) determine those network development years and released a policy document. This indicates that management is aware of the importance of pay TV and digital TV and hoping to promote the development of network services and system integration, and change the business model of the radio and television industry has long rely solely on advertising. As of July 2009, approved by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television to set up a pay TV channel has 142 units, divided into two categories broadcast on nationwide broadcast and province. In 7 years, the national digital pay TV channels from scratch, from small to large, from more than 20 of the initial development to the current level of 142, the number increased by 7 times. Judging from the number of digital pay channels have begun to take shape, the categories covered very rich. But from the overall development situation of Chinese digital TV, pay-TV channels, the number of users is far less than the (wired) digital TV subscribers, the development is very optimistic. 2010 cable industry revenues constitute the revenue of the premium channels is also very small. At present, China has a number of pay-TV channels integrated operating agencies, the premium channels transmission operators institutions user access and pay channels, operations, CCTV and local TV stations to form a pay channels.

Specialization & Personalization of Pay TV Channel

As a specialized and even personalized television channel, Pay TV should provide more personal, professional, attractive and ample content to a carefully segmented market. This article attempts to carry out a discussion of the practice of the specialization and personalization of Pay TV Channel.

Brand-Building of Pay TV Channel

It’s important for content of Pay TV Channels to be specialized, individualized and branded which becomes the purpose of specialization and individualization. Only with strong brand effect, can Pay TV Channels succeed in competing with Free TV channels and other media. Differentiation founded on TV brands will be beneficial not only for enhancing brand awareness and customer satisfaction, but for establishing TV media’s strategy system. For instance, in 2004 to 2008, China DTV Media, China’s leading Pay TV operator, put up a brand evaluation system containing market share, brand awareness, brand loyalty as measuring standards, with which the brand-building has been token up during market operation. Actually, in the long-term development, many Free TV brands have been created in China. Among winners of the Top Ten Programs awarded by China Broadcasting and Television Association in 2005, there are five TV programs, all of which are free programs, including Law Online (in CCTV), Nanjing Alive (in Nanjing Broadcast Television), Night News (in Heilongjiang TV), True Love Story (in Hebei TV) and The Past (in Hubei TV) (Zhang Junchan & LuiPeng, 2006). While compared with Brand-Building on Free TV Channels, in China, Pay TV Channels hasn’t walk the path of Brand-Building really. How can it move on better? In this section, there will be some analysis about it.

지상파 다채널방송 서비스 방식 비교 연구 (MMS와 KoreaView 방식을 중심으로)

지상파 디지털방송의 표준인 ATSC 서비스가 진화하고 있다. 한국방송협회(KBA)는 2006년 독일 FIFA 월드컵방송 기간 동안 MPEG-2 압축방식을 사용한 지상파 다채널방송인 MMS(Multi Mode Service)를 시험 방송하였다. MMS는 하나의 HD채널을 제공하면서 6MHz 대역 내에서 다양한 부가서비스를 제공한다. 비디오 압축 기술(MPEG-2)을 사용하여 HDTV, SDTV, Audio 뿐만 아니라 Data신호를 전송할 수 있다. 지난 2009년 11월, KBS는 MMS서비스보다 진화한 코리아뷰(KoreaView)를 제안하였다. 코리아뷰의 압축방식은 MPEG-2와 H.264를 혼합한 방식으로 미국의 모바일방송 표준(A/153)과 동일한 방식이다. 코리아뷰는 다채널방송서비스로 6MHz대역 내에서 HD와 3개의 SD프로그램을 제공한다. 지상파 방송의 다채널 서비스는 시청자서비스 확대에 주목할 필요가 있다. 또한 지상파 방송의 다채널 서비스는 디지털 전환을 촉진시키고 시청자들의 선택권을 확대시킨다. 디지털기술의 발전으로 유료방송 채널은 수백 개로 증가하고 있다. 그러나 지상파 방송은 디지털 전환이 추진되고 있지만 다채널 서비스를 제공하지 못하고 있다. 본 연구는 지상파 다채널 서비스인 MMS와 코리아뷰의 기술적 특징과 차이를 분석하고, 향후 서비스 도입에 따른 정책적 방향을 제시하였다. The Terrestrial DTV service compliant with ATSC has been advancing for years. In KBA(Korean Broadcasters Association), a multi-channel service was broadcasted on air during the period of the 2006 FIFA World Cup Germany with the various type of MMS(Multi Mode Service) using MPEG-2 encoding method. MMS Service can provides not only one HD channel but also serveral additional services within 6MHz bandwidth. Using digital video compression technology(MPEG-2), many various programs such as HDTV, SDTV, Audio and Data are able to be transmitted within the same bandwidth. From November 2009, KBS has been preparing an advanced MMS service, 'Korea-View' which has both methods of encoding, MPEG-2 and H.264 that is compliant ATSC mobile standard, A/153. Korea-View is a kind of multi-channel broadcast service to provide one HD and 3 SD programs with the bandwidth of 6MHz. Terrestrial multi-channel service is required to focuse on expanding viewer service. Such Terrestrial multi-channel services will contribute to transferring to digital broadcasting and to extending the viewers' welfare. Due to advances in digital technology, Pay-TV channels has increased to hundreds. Even though digital switchover is being proceeded, terrestrial broadcasters have been unable to deliver multi-channel services. In this paper, technical features and differences of MMS and Koreaview will be analyzed regarding terrestrial multi-channel broadcasting services, and the politic direction will be proposed in accordance with introduction of future service.

The Effects of Introducing Advertising in Pay TV: A Model of Asymmetric Competition between Pay TV and Free TV

This paper develops a theoretical model of asymmetric competition between a pay TV and a free TV broadcaster. Our model shows that the pay TV broadcaster has incentives to place advertising on its channel if the marginal return on advertising exceeds the viewers' disutility from advertising. In this case, however, the pay TV advertising level is always below the corresponding level on free TV. The pay TV advertising level can increase with a higher viewer disutility from advertising but the pay TV channel will never attract a larger viewership than the free TV channel. Furthermore, we show that introducing advertising on pay TV induces a decrease of the subscription fees on this channel and a decrease in the advertising level of the free TV channel. Moreover, pay TV viewer demand can increase if the pay TV broadcaster places advertising on its channel. If the viewer disutility of advertising is suffciently large, aggregate broadcaster profits increase through the introduction of advertising in pay TV, while aggregate consumer surplus always increases.

Video Competition in a Digital Age

(Testimony before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet, Committee on Energy and Commerce)Statistics and trends in the video marketplace show that consumers have abundant and diverse viewing options. There is more competition than ever before for viewers among all video providers - from traditional broadcasters to pay TV distributors to Internet distribution platforms - and new rules would hamper the ability of operators to grow and offer innovative new programming options.Contrary to views that there is a problem with diversity in media, we can cite steady growth in the number of local broadcast channels and an increase in pay TV channels owned by independent programmers. Internet video is also a viable competitor to traditional multichannel video providers as more content migrates to online platforms.America's video marketplace should be viewed as a pro-consumer success story. With an abundance of choices, competition, and diverse viewing options, the only real scarcity remaining today is our personal time and attention spans - not video options. We should celebrate that fact.

Where is the FCC's Annual Video Competition Report?

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is required by the 1992 Cable Act to produce an Assessment of the Status of Competition in the Market for the Delivery of Video Programming, otherwise known as the Video Competition Report. These annual reports are eagerly awaited not merely by lawmakers but everyone who monitors developments in the video marketplace. Twelve installments of the Annual Video Competition Report have been produced since the requirement took effect, but the 13th annual report has inexplicably been stuck in regulatory limbo for almost two years. When the report comes out, it will reflect the state of the video marketplace as of June 30, 2006, which is when the last reporting cycle ended. It is difficult to avoid speculating that one cause of delay is its failure to provide the critical empirical support for FCC Chairman Kevin Martin's 70/70 plan for expanding the Commission's powers over the cable industry, a plan that was widely discussed in the weeks leading up to the report's adoption last November. Importantly, however, when the FCC voted on the latest annual report at that November meeting, the agency did released a handful of encouraging findings from the report, albeit without much fanfare. Vertical integration has fallen steadily since the first Annual Video Competition Report was issued. Most new pay TV channels today are independently owned and offer an unprecedented diversity of programming options. The summary of the upcoming report also mentioned that although cable continues to serve the largest percentage of MVPD subscribers, its market share had fallen to approximately 68.2 percent as of June 2006 and that market share of cable's largest competitor, DBS service, had increased as of June 2006 to 29 percent. These trends are a strong sign of how healthy and vibrantly competitive this marketplace is today.

Competition Law Problems Raised by the Entry of Incumbent Telecommunications Operators in the Media Content Delivery Market

Over the last few years, the European Commission and the competition authorities of a number of (Member) States have been busy investigating transactions leading to the buying/selling of premium content rights. These cases have been triggered by several factors. First, premium content (essentially Hollywood movies and football games) has become of critical importance for all media operators. There is a consensus to say that the showing of premium content is what drives audience and thus the fees generated by subscriptions or advertising. The development of the pay-TV industry over the last two decades has been linked to the ability of pay-TV channels to show what would not be available elsewhere, such as, for instance, recent blockbusters or live football games. Many also believe that the development of new services, such as the showing of media content over 3G could be linked to the acquisition by 3G operators of premium content rights. Absence of access to premium content could thus lead existing pay-TV operators to exit the market, as well as prevent new operators from entering the market. Second, competition authorities have identified a series of practices linked with the buying and selling of premium content, which could generate serious restrictions of competition. The collective selling of football rights, for instance, may impede competition between sellers of such rights. Similarly, the exclusivity that is generally linked with the buying/selling of premium content rights may also produce serious foreclosure effects on the market for the delivery of content, in particular where the exclusivity concerns a large quantity of rights for a long-period of time. Competition authorities have also expressed concern that mergers between media operators could create foreclosure effects by allowing the merged firm to monopolize all valuable rights. Against this background, the objective of this paper is to provide a brief overview of the various competition law problems that could be raised by the offering of premium content or, more generally, of media content by vertically-integrated incumbent telecommunications operators. As will be seen below, as new entrants, incumbent telecommunications incumbents may find it hard to have access to premium content rights, especially when such rights have been monopolized by one or several pay-TV operators. On the other hand, once they have acquired such rights their vertical integration, as well as the fact they engage in a variety of activities on some of which they are dominant may be the source of specific problems. This is why this paper focuses on incumbent operators, rather than any telecommunications operator. Until recently, telecommunications incumbents had shown only a limited interest in distributing media content over their wires. Technical limitations made the distribution of movies or football games difficult. Moreover, until the mid-nineties, most vertically-integrated operators enjoyed comfortable monopoly profits, which did not make the search for new sources of revenues so compelling. The delivery of premium content was thus essentially left to pay-TV operators distributing their products through cable or satellites, or free-to-air TV which could finance the acquisition of a limited amount of such content through advertising revenues. The technical limitations impeding the showing of media content over telecommunications networks have, however, largely disappeared through digitization (which allows all types of platforms to deliver content), but also the development of ADSL, which allows telecommunications operators to deliver movies and other forms of content requiring a large band. At the same time, the growing competition faced by incumbent operators following the liberalization of telecommunications networks and services makes the search for new sources of revenues a high priority. The changes in technological and market circumstances have thus triggered a great deal of interest among telecommunications operators for the acquisition and subsequent distribution of media content. This paper comprises VII parts. Part II discusses the question of market definition in the media industry. Part III analyses the various obstacles telecommunications operators may face when they decide to enter the media content delivery market. Part IV reviews the strategies that can be developed by telecommunications incumbents wishing entering the content delivery market to acquire media content. Part V reviews the various competition law problems that may be raised by the fact incumbent telecommunications operators are generally vertically-integrated and offer a variety of services on some of which they hold a dominant position. Part VI examines the various remedies which can be used to stimulate competition in premium media content delivery markets. Finally, Part VII contains a brief conclusion.

Competition and Copyright: Retransmission of Free-to-Air Television Signals by Pay TV Services

Abstract Free-to-air television stations remain the most popular source of programming, even in pay TV households. Consumers value the bundling of pay TV channels with retransmitted free-to-air channels for a variety of reasons, in particular the improved signal quality provided in areas where off-air reception is less than ideal. Hence, the conditions under which pay TV services can retransmit free-to-air signals are of crucial importance. This paper compares US and Australian signal retransmission regulations and assesses their impact on competition between pay TV and free-to-air television and on actual or potential competition between pay TV media such as cable and satellite television. The analysis also touches on the competitive implications of common ownership of satellite and cable pay TV services. To place the signal retransmission issues in the proper context, the paper examines differences in the structure of free-to-air television distribution systems in Australia and the US. In particular, it contrasts the Australian tendency to distribute most programming and sell most advertising nationally with the more locally oriented network—affiliate system in the US. The paper considers the relative merits of compulsory licensing and full copyright protection for free-to-air television signals and examines mandatory signal carriage (‘must-carry’) regulations.