European Broadcasters Channeling Fear

PARIS — If there is one thing that European commercial television broadcasters like less than a recession, it is that other “R” word — regulation.

The industry has rebounded from the economic downturn, with advertising revenue recovering to prerecession levels, according to the Association of Commercial Television in Europe, an industry group based in Brussels.

As other media reel from technological changes, television keeps going strong. Yes, the traditional broadcasters — commercial and publicly financed networks — now have to share audiences with hundreds of new digital channels, but overall viewership keeps climbing. It has crept up to an average of more than three and a half hours a day across Europe, according to the television association. More and more viewers pay, too: British Sky Broadcasting, the satellite broadcaster, recently reported that it had reached its long-term goal of 10 million subscribers.

“For more than 10 years, people have been saying television will lose, and that is just not the case,” said Philippe Delusinne, president of the broadcasters’ association.

Yet few high-fives were exchanged last week as members of the association gathered in Brussels for an annual conference. That is because of their fear, justified or not, of regulators and lawmakers at the European Commission in Brussels and in national capitals across the 27-country bloc.

Perhaps their biggest worry is a pending overhaul of European copyright rules. Lawmakers want to make it easier to license television shows and other media for use by online video services, which remain meager across Europe. Some commercial broadcasters fear that a greater availability of online services would weaken one of their biggest selling points — exclusive rights to sports, movies and other popular programming.

The doyenne of Brussels regulators, Neelie Kroes, who is now in charge of the E.U.’s digital agenda, visited the broadcasters’ conference last week, where she made it clear that she took a dim view of complacency.

“The truth is that technological revolutions always pose challenges for gatekeepers,” she said in a speech. “The pattern is the same for the digital revolution as it was with the industrial revolution and the printing press. It is only the scale and pace that is different today.”

Despite their fear of regulators, commercial television companies have not fared all that badly in Brussels of late. Among other things, they have secured a requirement that their archrivals, public broadcasters like the BBC, must demonstrate the “public value” of investments in digital services that could compete with private-sector offerings.

At the national level, commercial broadcasters have had a harder time. Lawmakers in Spain and France, for example, have imposed new taxes on commercial broadcasters to help finance public broadcasting. At the same time, France appears to be backtracking on a pledge to remove ads from public TV, which was expected to direct more ad revenue to the commercial channels.

“When the economy gets difficult it is easy politically to make decisions like this,” Mr. Delusinne said.

But public broadcasters can no longer take their political protection for granted. With austerity the order of the day in European capitals, their financing suddenly looks a lot more precarious than it did two years ago when commercial rivals, reeling from the ad slump, envied their steady revenue.

In Britain, for example, the BBC has agreed to absorb hundreds of millions of pounds in costs previously covered by the government, including the budget for the World Service. The license fee that finances the BBC is set to be frozen at the current level for six years. The broadcaster’s management and journalists have been caught up in a nasty dispute over pensions.

In some other countries, particularly in Eastern Europe, public broadcasters are facing bigger cuts.

Against that backdrop, European commercial channels have a fair amount to celebrate — as long as they keep the volume turned down.

E! Network to Produce Daily Online Show

Variety announced today that E! is boosting its online news efforts, greenlighting a new broadband skein dubbed "E! News Now."

Cabler will produce at least 12 daily editions of the online skein, which will be hosted by thesp Valery Ortiz ("What About Brian?") and former MSNBC reporter Ashlan Gorse ("The Hot List"). Each seg will run between one and two minutes in length and focus on a single breaking story or general topic.

In addition to distributing the segs via its own website, "E! News Now" will be available via mobile phones and yet-to-be announced distribution partners.

"'E! News Now' will allow us to bring (breaking) stories to our users as quickly as possible," said John Najarian, senior VP of new media and business development for E! parent Comcast Entertainment Group.

TVB Planning Cross-Media Buying Platform Rollout

The Television Bureau of Advertising is preparing for the fall launch of its ePort cross-media sales platform, reports MediaPost.

ePort will let members, ranging from TV stations to ad agencies, send and request proposals for ad buying on TV as well as online and on other digital media. The TVB has 21 broadcast groups and two sales rep firms already signed on and is hoping to bring the rest on board before the fall launch.

Spot Buy Spot, a Chicago-based technology firm, will manage the platform. The TVB is also planning a November initial launch for ePort, with more functionality and services, coming online in March of 2008.

Internet Ad Spending Set to Overtake Newspapers

Financial Times reports online advertising will overtake U.S. newspaper advertising in terms of size by 2011, according to a new forecast from Veronis Suhler Stevenson. Consumers are shifting to digital alternatives and migrating away from newspapers, broadcast television and other media.

Cuban: The Internet Is Dead; Cable Is King

HDNet chief Mark Cuban, who was made a billionaire by his Broadcast.com, now says: "The Internet's dead. It's over." Cuban asserts that cable and satellite have become superior to the Internet as platforms for interactive services. In effect, he says, cable networks are "intranets."

Multichannel has the full story.

Google Courts Broadcasters with YouTube Ads

According to VNU Net, Google has teamed up with broadcasters to create a new advert format for its YouTube video-sharing website. Patrick Walker, European head of video partnerships at Google announced on Friday at MIPTV that broadcasters and other content producers are working with Google on 30-second "pre-roll" ads to appear before content is viewed on YouTube.

The ads will start appearing next year, and revenue will be shared between YouTube and the broadcaster.

Google's revenue from YouTube is likely to get yet another boost following the company's $3.1bn acquisition last week of digital marketing company DoubleClick.

Google will use DoubleClick's technology to encourage YouTube users to click from one video to another.