world screen silver edition

Silver Edition

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Wow! 25 years of World Screen. A drop in the bucket in the larger con-text of history, but in the television industry, these past 25 years haverepresented a sea change.

Let’s look back for a moment to 1985: That was the year that Intelintroduced a microchip that featured a 32-bit processor, the most pow-erful computer chip up to that time. AOL was just starting up. GEacquired RCA and its NBC network. EastEnders launched on the BBC.The Cosby Show, Cheers and The Golden Girls were among the ten top-rated shows in the U.S. Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary ofthe Soviet Communist Party, marking the beginning of the end of theCold War. British scientists reported a huge hole in the Earth’s ozonelayer above Antarctica. A 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit Mexico, killingsome 10,000 people. And the We Are the World single was released.

How much has really changed? At first glance you might say notmuch. NBC is in the process of changing ownership again, globalwarming marches on at a scary pace, massive earthquakes have hit Haitiand Chile, and a new version of We Are the World has been recorded.

In fact, though, the changes since 1985 have been enormous. RupertMurdoch launched a fourth broadcast network in the U.S. and was thenthe force behind pay-TV platforms in Europe, Asia and Latin America.Deregulation changed the television landscape in Europe, allowing com-mercial stations to compete with complacent public broadcasters incountries such as Germany, Italy, France and Spain—all of this to thedelight of the Hollywood studios, which were able to sell enormousnumbers of films and series, giving birth to output and volume deals.

That wave of deregulation moved through Central and Eastern Europeduring the ’90s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and for the first timeviewers there were introduced to independent news reporting and largequantities of Western programming. In Latin America and Asia, theadvent of cable television spurred an incredible proliferation of channels.

During the ’90s we saw an escalation of merger mania that changedthe media landscape.As the journalist Ben Bagdikian wrote in The MediaMonopoly, “in 1983, 50 corporations dominated most of every massmedium and the biggest media merger in history was a $340 milliondeal.” In 1997, the biggest media companies numbered ten and includedthe $19-billion Disney-ABC deal, only to be surpassed in 2000 by theAOL Time Warner deal for a mind-boggling $182 billion in stock.

And of course the pace of change has accelerated feverishly since 2000,the year “old media” was proclaimed a dinosaur because the meteor of“new media” was about to annihilate it. We lived through the dot-comboom and bust and witnessed the arrival of on demand, download-to-own,TiVo, iTunes, catch-up TV, DTT, HD channels and flat-screen TVs.

So let’s take a closer look at today: we are watching video on laptops andmobile phones with the same ease as when we are ensconced on our coucheswatching traditional TV sets. Some of the best shows are on cable or pay-TV services and not on broadcast networks. Dramas and comedies still fillschedules, but reality and competition shows are consistently among thehighest-rated programs in countries around the world.

Throughout the last quarter century, World Screen has constantlyattempted to put all these events into perspective, give them context anddiscern their impact on the international media’s core business of buyingand selling content.

We have been fortunate to have had access to the CEOs and topexecutives at all the major media conglomerates, middle size and nichecompanies, and a wide range of filmmakers, directors, creators, writersand showrunners.

It’s been an incredible 25 years. I hope you enjoy this Silver Edition—and the bit of history it represents—and join us in celebrating thisimportant anniversary. n

Anna Carugati, Group Editorial Director

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April, 1985Don TaffnerFounder/President, D.L.Taffner “There may be an avenue forparticipation in programming, butyou’ve got to avoid getting into aposition in which ownership is thereason for a program’s getting on.The quality of the program shouldbe the reason.”

October, 1986Michael Jay SolomonFounder,Telepictures;President,Warner Bros.International Television“When the state is in control of television, the economicsdon’t run the business. In pri-vate television, the economicsdo run the business.... I think it’s progress. Some Europeanswill not call it progress; theywill think that it’s going backwards. I happen to totallydisagree.”

April, 1987Donald WearSenior VP/General Manager,CBS Broadcast International“On our original productions…we try to keep the capital thatwe have at risk as low as possible,and we hedge our bets. If we canpresell, we presell. If we can beg,borrow or steal on the produc-tion side, we do that.We’ll asksomeone for a contribution infacilities, let’s say, in order tokeep production costs low.”

October, 1988William SaundersPresident,Twentieth Century Fox International Television“We speak to all the buyers inOctober at MIPCOM, then we goto NATPE, and a few internationalbuyers appear there.Then we go toMonte Carlo in February, and wetalk about the same product againto the same clients.Then we goagain in April to MIP; I mean, whatmore is there to talk about?”

April, 1990Henry SchleiffSenior VP/Chairman,Viacom International;Chairman/CEO,Viacom Broadcastand Entertainment Group“On network television, it’s theindependents that have providedthe breakthrough programming,not the studios. It’s the NormanLears that said, ‘Hey, let’s go withthis English show that no oneseems to understand,’ and thatbecame All in the Family. It’s theCarsey-Werners that said, ‘Let’stake a black family and put it in aslightly different light,’ and thatbecame The Cosby Show. So theindependents have served as theR&D arm of network television.Now if the regulatory [climate]changes and becomes detrimen-tal to the independents, some ofthat innovation could disappearfrom network television.”

February, 1991Jim McNamaraPresident/CEO,New World Entertainment“Vertical integration sounds great onpaper, it’s a nice buzz phrase… Being a television broadcaster doesn’tmean you’re a producer… [But] forthe studios it obviously makes senseto be vertically integrated. I don’tknow if that means that Time andColumbia should own their ownnetworks, but I do believe that somevertical integration helps.Certainlythe notion of producing motionpictures, releasing in the theaters,exhibiting on videocassette and then controlling your subsequent

distribution seems to make sense onthe motion-picture side.”

July, 1992Geraldine LaybournePresident, Nickelodeon“The big U.S. companies—WarnerBros., Disney—have created top-rate animation that travels verywell. So they will have a tendencyto dominate the international mar-ketplace for a while and that willhave an impact. But I do believethat our Nick toons are probablycloser to a Europeansensibility…[and] the fact that ouranimation looks very European willhelp us quite a lot in the interna-tional market.”

February, 1993Jim Gianopulos President,Twentieth Century Fox International Television“As the market becomes increas-ingly competitive—as specializa-tion increases—the ability of anyone program to be financiallyviable becomes even more diffi-cult.... So the further we canspread the cost of developmentand production, and the moreways we can find to ensure theproduct gets sold and performswell worldwide, the more likelyit is that the product will be asuccess.”

April, 1993Jeff SaganskyPresident, CBS Entertainment“It used to be that co-productionwas just about money.We wouldproduce and they would finance.Those days are over. Foreign part-ners don’t want to be that sort ofpassive financial partner anymore,and they shouldn’t be.They’re put-ting up too much of the budget totake a backseat to anybody.”

December, 1994Gary DaveyCEO, Star TV“[Star TV’s Asia] market repre-sents two-thirds of the earth’spopulation, so you can assumeit’s a priority, particularly giventhe fact that you’re talking aboutthe fastest-growing economies inthe world.... It’s estimated thatover the next 15 years the num-ber of people in China, Indone-sia and India alone with earningsof over $15,000 a year will rise

April, 1989Ted Turner

Founder/Chairman/President,Turner Broadcasting

“I know [Rupert Murdoch,Robert Maxwell and Silvio

Berlusconi], but I don’tcompare myself to anyone…

I’d feel very lonely if I were the only one in

international distribution.Competition is the spice oflife and it’s really good to

have a multiplicity of voices out there.”

July, 1991Haim SabanChairman/CEO,Saban Entertainment“The hell with what the critics say. Let’s be realistic.Nobody’s in business toplease the critics.”

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Ricardo, Anna and the

World Screen family

From all atFireworks International

spectacular years!

CONGRATULATIONSon

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to 700 million.That is aboutthree times the population of theUnited States.”

April, 1995Bruce GordonPresident, Paramount Television International“Our business depends on peoplelike myself being able to get topeople who matter—whether it’sRupert Murdoch, Kerry Packer,Silvio Berlusconi or Leo Kirch. Ifyou want to make a deal for mil-lions of dollars, having that accessis essential.”

June, 1995Gustavo CisnerosChairman/CEO,Cisneros Group of Companies“I think the new generation ofcomputer users will naturally tryto do everything with the com-puter…they are going to do theirshopping with this technology.Their phones, their banking andmany other services will soon beconverged.”

October, 1995Brandon TartikoffChairman,New World Entertainment“Television viewers don’t carewhere something comes from.Sometimes they care about accents,but if something is entertaining, itwill work.They care about theshow, not the logo at the end. So Idon’t think there is a prejudice onthe part of the viewers. It justcomes down to the capability ofthe producers.”

April, 1996Michael GrindonPresident, Columbia TriStarInternational Television“Pay-per-view is still a relativelynew business. Everyone is tryingto figure the right formula andapproach.… One of the issuesthat makes people reluctant tocommit all the expensive pro-gramming to pay-per-view plat-forms is that we don’t knowwhat the returns are going to

be.… We don’t want all the riskto be on one partner—the stu-dios.We need a new way toapproach the business.”

October, 1996Herb GranathChairman, Disney/ABC International Television“Going into the cable business as anetwork representative, I wasgreeted with open hostility, andwhen I got into the elevator withsome of my network friends, therewould be boos and hisses from theback because we were losingmoney just about as fast as the net-work was making it. It was not aneasy time. Of course, most of thosefolks are now my best friends.”

October, 1996Helmut ThomaManaging Director, RTL Television“In Germany…there is not a lot ofneed for new channels. Just look atDF1’s bouquet—most of the showsare approximately 30 years old.People don’t want to watch theseprograms on free TV.Why shouldthey spend money to watch themon pay TV?... I’ve always been veryskeptical of digital.”

April, 1997Ted TurnerVice Chairman,Time Warner“I don’t want to make [Rupert]Murdoch stronger and I don’twant him distributing our programming. I don’t trust him.He is not a good partner.”

April, 1997Greg DykeChairman/Chief Executive,Pearson Television;Chairman, Channel 5“I take a very simple view of thefuture. I don’t understand it. If any-one sits here today and tells youwhat the world will be like in 15years, the only certainty is that theyare wrong.…The one thing I’mcertain of is that people will con-tinue to want entertainment pro-gramming.… I’m not a greatbeliever in the theory that people

want to choose the end of a showand that interactivity will beextremely popular.”

February, 1998Georg KoflerChairman/CEO, ProSieben Media“To succeed, a television stationdoes not have to be a great pro-duction company.The managementof a television channel has to selectthe best production companies toproduce programs.… Our job is tocreate a schedule and to market thechannel to the audiences and theadvertising community.”

June, 1998Jeffrey SchlesingerPresident,Warner Bros. International Television“As production increases, outputdeals may also take on new forms.For a company like ours, whichproduces a lot of product, youmight end up splitting the produc-tion between several different buy-ers.… Keep in mind that there arerisks for the distributor as well in amultiyear output deal.… You arelocked into a pricing structure thatwill not let you take advantage of amarket that is heating up withmore competition. Sometimes youcan be making more money if youare working in an open market.”

October, 1998Pierre LescureChairman/CEO, Canal+“Television is the most impressiveexample of localization in theentertainment industry.You have


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October, 1997Sumner RedstoneChairman/CEO,Viacom“In order to expand all over the world, you have to have thefinancial wherewithal… youreally have to be one of the big companies. But just beingbig is not enough. When wewere fighting for Paramount, I would say it is not enoughthat two and two make four. It has to make five.”


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to think globally when you areconsidering investments, financeand distribution. But when youare talking about programming,both the content of a show andhow it is scheduled, you have tothink locally.”

October, 1998Robert AltmanDirector“I know that for some reason thefeature-film world sees television as akind of step down. I don’t see it thatway. Quite the opposite. I thinkthere is better stuff on television than98 percent of the films out there.…There is a lot more you can do intelevision than in features.You cantake on more interesting settings,stories, actors and scripts because youdon’t have to try to create things [forfilm executives] that are only inter-ested in special effects.”

January, 1999Roger King Chairman, King World“Some analysts have projected thatin the next three to five years therewill be 180 new networks inEurope.We want to be part of thatgrowth.The global market is agrowth market for us.”

April, 1999Harry Evans SloanChairman/CEO, ScandinavianBroadcasting System“The U.S. networks have theirproblems today, but you shouldn’tforget they had a golden run ofdecades of growth.The value ofnetworks and their affiliatesappreciated consistently in the1960s, ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s.…I don’t want to miss out on thatsame growth that we’re now see-ing in Europe.”

April, 1999Jeremy IsaacsDocumentary Producer“At the moment, television doc-umentaries in Britain are beingproperly criticized for dishonestyand invention and pretense in thesupposed reality of [their] con-

tent because they are skewedbadly in the direction of enter-tainment—what has been calledthe docu-soap.”

April, 1999John HendricksFounder/Chairman/CEO,Discovery Communications“You can view digital as a threat oran opportunity. If you ignore digi-tal television, it can ultimately con-tribute to the demise of your busi-ness.Viewership will continue tofragment. Rather than beingthreatened by that, our strategy isto embrace it and see digital TV asan additional way for our productsto reach viewers.”

October, 1999Tom FrestonChairman/CEO, MTV Networks“Our goal is to move from being aTV-centric company to being atrue multimedia company that hasthe leading web destinations forkids and music fans world-wide…[which we can use] to drivethem back to television.Thatmakes it possible to create a wholenew hybrid kind of programmingthat is interactive and can air bothon the web and on TV.”

October, 1999Christie HefnerChairman/CEO,Playboy Enterprises“The advent of the VCR andcable television gave us an oppor-tunity to create branded televisionprogramming.That is differentthan most product because, withthe exception of Disney, mostpeople do not go to a movie orwatch a television programbecause it was produced by a par-ticular studio.”

October, 1999Michael R. BloombergCEO, Bloomberg“The wave of the future that is justunstoppable, I think, is that all tele-vision programming is going to beon demand....Things like DVDdiscs are interim technologies.

Down the road, we will be ableto go to a few central sites anddownload all the entertainmentand information we need.”

October, 1999John WellsExecutive Producer/Writer“I’m one of those people thatgets really upset when I’m notinvited to a party. So when I hearthat someone else did somethingthat I wish I’d done, then I get allof my juices revved up. It’s notmy best quality.”

October, 1999Leonard AsperPresident/CEO,CanWest Global Communications“I think for us being a global com-pany is axiomatic, and I think formost of the players in the mediaindustry who have any ambitionsto stay in the media industry, beinga global company is absolutelyessential. People have to grow orthey should sell.”

December, 1999Hisashi HiedaPresident/CEO, Fuji Television“The future will bring the convergence of broadcasting,communications and computers.Television will adapt to theinteractive world and offer various types of services.Digitalization will bringincreased picture quality andenhanced sound.… Eventuallyviewers may customize theirown programming by choosingthe programs they want to seewhen they want to see them,and we must be able to meetthose needs.”

April, 2000Marjorie ScardinoCEO, Pearson Television“Everybody in this whole digitalage is working on having streamingvideo. But we already have stream-ing video—it’s television, and itstreams video brilliantly. So television fits incredibly well withour future.”

January, 2001Barry DillerChairman/CEO, InterActive Corp.“Everybody has challenges todaythat they didn’t have before thisradical revolution of living in a dig-ital world.The people who pro-duce, finance and distribute theatri-cal motion pictures have a wonder-ful business.…The issues all comeabout in terms of how thosemovies will be sub-distributedonce they leave theaters.”

January, 2001Marcy CarseyCo-founder/Partner, Carsey-Werner“We really don’t look over our shoul-ders at what the competition isdoing. We don’t care about the infor-mation we always get [regarding]what the networks are looking for.”

April, 2001Ken BurnsDocumentary Filmmaker“Our whole field is being distractedby the pernicious so-called reality-based television, which is not in anyway reality-based. [Instead of ‘reality-based’] they should call it justcheaper production than a drama.”

April, 2001Jean-Marie MessierChairman/CEO,Vivendi Universal“The larger the company, the lessyou can manage it in a centralized


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January, 2001Howard StringerChairman/CEO,Sony Corporation of America“I doubt we’ll be downloadingmovies over cellular phonesany time soon. But five yearsor ten years out, the chancesof looking at your PDA andwatching a movie will be relatively easy and rather popular.… Broadband will bewell under way by then and Ithink segmentation [of themarket] will continue, but willbe defined by true demand.”


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way.You have to rely on a fullycentralized reporting system, but afully decentralized managementsystem, which I think is the key toVivendi Universal’s management.”

April, 2001Pat MitchellPresident/CEO, PBS“I think it’s really imperative in ademocratic society that we have atleast one public-media enterprisethat is not driven and determinedby marketplace factors alone…something goes on the air based[not just on the fact that] it willdeliver a certain number of eyeballsto an advertiser.”

April, 2001Sidney LumetDirector/Producer/Writer“One of the reasons why I was sointerested in [television is that] thepace of moviemaking is so slow.Generally, within [the movieworld] I’m very fast. I seldom goover 30 days, unless the productionis quite complicated. I’m hoping

when I do the next feature I’ll beable to use [television] techniques.”

April, 2001Marc TessierCEO, France Télévisions“The main challenge is the same for all the major general-entertainment channels.…Theyhave to adjust to a completely dif-ferent way of using TV, one that ismore selective, more personal andmore flexible in terms of schedul-ing.That means that we have tobecome a group that offers bothgeneral-entertainment channels andspecialized digital channels.”

June, 2001Michael MacMillanChairman/CEO,Alliance Atlantis Communications“[Marketing our programs andchannels] is going to becomeincreasingly important as high-speed broadband becomes available everywhere and there’stheoretical unlimited choice—which of course is impossible. But

as choice broadens, it will take verysavvy marketers with clear anddefined brands [to] stand out andcut through the clutter.”

October, 2001Hans-Holger AlbrechtPresident/CEO, Modern Times Group“Russia is a big, big market. It is the only remaining huge market inEurope, with 120 million peoplejust in European Russia and $1 billion in TV advertising.We strongly believe in Russia and[in its potential]. If you look to thepayback potential for investment,Russia is the place to go.”

October, 2001Patrick Le LayChairman/CEO,TF1“Most European countries,including France, will continue tooperate in a lopsided economicenvironment where commercialbroadcasters compete against sub-sidized networks that offer com-parable programming but areunder no obligation to deliverfinancial performance.”

October, 2001Leslie MoonvesPresident/CEO, CBS Television“For the first time, the Americantelevision audiences, producers,production companies and net-works have looked abroad to say,‘You know, there are creative thingsgoing on in the rest of the worldthat we should be more aware of.’And this is a major sea change.”

October, 2001John CassadayPresident/CEO,Corus Entertainment“Digital will create a sort ofmagazine stand for televisionviewers, where the same depthand breadth that you get on amagazine stand will be available toyou on your set-top box. But allthat breadth is still about specificity,where a viewer can choose exactly what they want to see.Segmentation will serve the audience much better.”

October, 2001Brian LappingDocumentary Filmmaker“Fiction can be justified—I don’tobject to fiction. I actually believethat nobody ever tells the wholestory about anything.We arefrightfully honest, proper andpompous journalists trying to tellthe truth. But what is the differ-ence between my truth andsomebody else’s fiction?”

October, 2001Peter FalkActor (a.k.a Lieutenant Columbo)“There seems to be such anobsession with superficial, sensa-tional [material]. Everything hasto move so fast now.You can’tsolve these kinds of murders withsound bites.And that’s really whatthey want today. Columbo has acerebral quality.That’s not reallyin fashion today, but I think it’sone of the reasons why it’s soappealing in countries like France,Germany, Italy, Britain.”

October, 2001Ivan FecanPresident/CEO, Bell Globemedia“It would be very difficult to justbe a free-to-air TV organization. Inthis day and age, you do need somekind of diversification, whether it’sthrough a different form of mediaor some combination of conven-tional television and specialty[channels].We think that, certainly


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October, 2001Michael EisnerChairman/CEO,The Walt Disney Company“The real mark of success50 years from now would be that I was unknown andirrelevant, but that the Disney name was still themost powerful and lovedname around the world infamily entertainment. Tobe a footnote would befine… . I’m a caretaker right now of that institutionand that culture.”


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for a country the size of Canada,it’s important to offer as wide arange of platforms as possible.”

January, 2002Emilio AzcárragaChairman of the Board/President/CEO,Grupo Televisa“We believe that free TV shouldentertain and inform. Critics alwayssay that the media should play arole in education—even more inour continent. I don’t believe so. Ibelieve that every company inevery country has to contribute toeducation, not only media compa-nies. Every big Mexican companyhas to help create a better Mexico.”

April, 2002Anne WoodFounder, Ragdoll Productions“Inevitably, what makes childrensmile in one country will makethem smile in another.”

April, 2002Peter CherninPresident/COO, News Corporation“Certainly, from our network’s per-spective, we don’t want to have

shows on the FOX BroadcastingCompany that just come fromTwentieth Century Fox.We wantto be able to depend on TwentiethCentury Fox, but we would alsolike to be able to depend onWarner Bros., Paramount, Carsey-Werner, etc.That being said, I thinkit is very difficult for a non-alignedtelevision studio that doesn’t have anetwork outlet to be as successfulas they would like.”

April, 2002Robert BennettPresident/CEO, Liberty Media“At different points in time and indifferent markets, different assets areattractive. Right now, we’re seeingthe European cable assets as beingattractive, partly because they’vefallen so far out of favor in theinvestment community. If we hadlooked at that three years ago, theywere far too expensive, and wewould not have been interested.”

May, 2002Barry MeyerChairman/CEO,Warner Bros.“In order for us to do high-quality, multidimensional dramas,we need the revenue from over-seas.We rarely greenlight a tele-vision series unless JeffSchlesinger [Warner Bros.International Television’s presi-dent] ‘promises’ us a number wefeel we can live with.”

May, 2002Herb ScannellPresident, Nickelodeon“In the animation business, TheSimpsons plus Nickelodeon helpedfuel a revolution in animation. Itbrought back the thought that ani-mation could be fun and funny,and was not necessarily just a vehi-cle for derivatives.”

October, 2002Greg DykeDirector-General, BBC“This is the only job in the worldwhere you get criticized if youwin and criticized if you lose! I

think most American media exec-utives would struggle to under-stand the pressures of winning!Here there are real pressures ifyou start winning! Everybodystarts complaining! When it gotreported that we had overtakenITV, I got lots of notes fromfriends in America saying, ‘Reallywell done.’ Everybody here saw itas a problem.”

October, 2002Jeff ZuckerPresident, NBC Entertainment“I think HBO’s series have been anoverblown story in the media.Themedia is fascinated with HBO.Thefact is they’ve had two successfulseries one night a week for 13weeks a year.Those series…deserveall the plaudits they get [but] it’s anentirely different game that hasnothing to do with the networktelevision business.”

October, 2002Ken AulettaBest-selling Author/Media Critic“When you are a guest on a cablenews network, you feel this imper-ative to rush, hurry up, make thepoint, make it sharper. You feel thislevel of impatience in the studiothat is quite extraordinary.Andthere is the assumption that theworld is divided into left and right.It is just preposterous. It’s silly.”

October, 2002Shashi TharoorUnder-Secretary-General forCommunications and PublicInformation, United Nations“News has to earn its keep. Newshas been a profit-making venturefor all of the networks, but it doesn’tnecessarily make as much profit assome alternatives.As long as thatbottom line is there, people aregoing to keep guessing what thepublic wants to see, and it may befar more soft news stories aboutthe latest trends in the kitchenthan about a war that’s claiming1,000 lives a day in Angola.”

October, 2002George BodenheimerPresident, ESPN“The cost of sports rights is gov-erned by the marketplace. Pricesrarely go down, [although it hashappened] that packages have beenrestructured….We would certainlylove to pay less. But we look tobuy rights that add value for ourfans and our distribution partners.”

October, 2002Dick WolfCreator, Law & Order“In many instances, the only waypeople are exposed to issues isthrough dramatic television. Mostpeople get most of their newsfrom TV today.And in terms of


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October, 2002Christiane Amanpour

Chief International Correspondent,CNN

“One of the casualties of theproliferation of media and

outlets is that real journalismhas been lost in the mix.

Now [TV news] is too muchof a shout-fair, opinion-a-

thon—a personality contest.And real journalism, in my

view, can be fascinating,entertaining, informative

and really watchable. A lotof what’s on right now is just

eye candy. We do have aresponsibility, we are theself-appointed guardians

of the public’s right toknow.... And if anything

was an example and the clarion call for that, it was September 11.”


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real in-depth discussion of ideas,shows like Law & Order or ER orThe Practice, in many instancesoffer the only time people haveheard of these problems. I dothink television drama has astrong influence on people’sthinking.”

January, 2003Chris AlbrechtChairman/CEO, Home Box Office“The work that has been doneat HBO has changed the waypeople look at television, thinkabout television and think aboutwhat’s possible on television.The broadcast networks that arein the daily, minute-by-minutebusiness of attracting eyeballsthrough the use of televisionprograms are obviously going tobe affected by that.”

February, 2003Jack Valenti President/CEO, Motion PictureAssociation of America “Whatever a country wants todo, it has the sovereign right todo it. But I think that somecountries—not all, but some—believe that if they can exile,bar or restrict the Americanmovie, their own movie indus-try will leap forward likeAthena springing full blownfrom the forehead of Zeus.But it doesn’t happen that way. No prime minister canforce somebody in his countryto see a movie they don’t wantto see.”

April, 2003Nickolas Davatzes President/CEO,A&E Television Networks“In the last quarter of 2000, almost10 percent of the advertising dollarsspent on cable- or satellite-deliveredtelevision were directly related tothe Internet companies.And somany of them were spendingmoney like drunken sailors.We arejust beginning to adjust to that.”

April, 2003Herbert KloiberManaging Director/Owner,Tele München Group“Many American TV movies aren’tselling the way they used to.Andmany other [elaborate] mini-seriesdon’t sell anymore at top prices.But features, by and large, still getsold and you still have 500Germans flocking to the AmericanFilm Market in search of those twoavailable independent movies!”

April, 2003Aaron SpellingChairman/CEO, Spelling Television“I hate to talk about that, but, boy,where some of the shows are goingtoday, it’s amazing. I’m ashamed ofmy wife seeing some of theseshows, much less making them.”

May, 2003Laurie YoungerPresident, Buena Vista WorldwideTelevision Distribution“I hate the statement,‘Americanproduct is not selling.’ It’s just nottrue. I’m sure Fox isn’t havingmuch trouble selling 24, and maynot be having trouble selling TheSimpsons.And CSI is doing well allover the world. It’s an easy general-ization for people to make, toexplain that broadcasters are a bitmore selective. I think that’s reallywhat it is, but the flip side to that isthat there are more buyers. Seriesare now being sold to basic cable.”

October, 2003Philip KentChairman/CEO,Turner Broadcasting System

“In places like Britain, cableoften out-performs the terrestrialcommercial broadcasters.Thathas not gone unnoticed byadvertising agencies.”

October, 2003Bob WrightChairman/CEO, NBC;Vice Chairman, General Electric“When a show doesn’t have someinitial positive response, you knowthat it will take a very long time forit to become successful.And oftenyou take a show off the air, notbecause you think it won’t becomesuccessful, but because you just don’twant to produce it for two yearsbefore it becomes successful. It’s justthat these shows are very expensive.”

October, 2003Judith McHalePresident/COO, DiscoveryCommunications“We think HD television is a hugeopportunity for us. Our producttranslates really well into that.... Ifyou look at multichannel-televisionhistory, the first to launch in aparticular category or genre is theone that ultimately succeeds.Youdon’t have 42 MTVs,VH1s orDiscoveries.There is a great advan-tage [to] being the first one out ofthe box.”

October, 2003Gerhard ZeilerCEO, RTL Group“The key is decentralization andcooperation:TV and radio are localbusinesses.The RTL Group hasnever tried to influence program-ming or scheduling of its opera-tions. Rather than try to interfere,we prefer to have the best possiblemanagement in place, and toencourage our businesses to talk toeach other and to share informa-tion and experience.”

October, 2003James MurdochChairman/CEO, STAR Group“Making television for peopleisn’t about grand strategies andlots of business plans and politics

and all that stuff. It’s really aboutmaking good TV....You put ahigh-quality production on, youfocus on it, you drive it, youmarket the hell out of it.”

October, 2003Mark ThompsonChief Executive, Channel 4“The main thing is to make indi-vidual commissioners feel that theyare in a climate that supports andrewards bravery, including whenbravery doesn’t work.…You need aposture that is sufficiently relaxed,that allows what are quite sensitive,creative people to feel they canstick their necks out.”

October, 2003Markus SchächterDirector-General, ZDF“We are not afraid to offer popularand entertaining programming.These often provide the essentialpull needed to lead the audience tomore serious TV programs.”

March, 2004Mel KarmazinPresident/COO,Viacom“Product placement will always bea small piece of the business.Youdon’t want to clutter up programsor think that it will replace tradi-tional advertising. But we’ve doneit interestingly in Survivor.You don’twant to put a Coca-Cola can inEverybody Loves Raymond, becausewhen you are syndicating it you’renot going to be able to sell [theshow] to Pepsi because they are notgoing to like that there’s a Coca-Cola can in there.”


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October, 2002 David Attenborough

Documentary Filmmaker“I have never met a child

who was not interested in animals. I certainlywas…. Most children,

I suppose, have had to driftaway from such interests in

order to follow their careers.I was lucky to find my wayto a job that allowed me to

stick with them.”

April, 2003John de MolChairman/Chief Creative Officer,Endemol“Even when I talk to the cleaning ladies in my house, I want to know, ‘What did you watch yesterday? Andwhat did you like about that program?’ Directly or indirectly, I’m always working.I don’t see it as work because it doesn’t make me tired.”


_410_TWOFOUR54 3/19/10 7:15 PM Page 1

March, 2004Dawn AireyManaging Director, Sky Networks“The sophisticated interactivity onthe Sky platform is open to every-body and offers a range of func-tions: you can vote to evict a BigBrother housemate; you can watcheight different news screens behindSky News; you can express anopinion on whatever question wepose each day; you can place a beton a live football match; or you canpress the red button to access livestreaming of I’m a Celebrity, Get MeOut of Here!”

March, 2004Mark BurnettMark Burnett Productions“America gave me an opportunityI never would have had back inEngland.Americans are willing togive almost anybody a chance, andthat’s what makes this countrysuch a great place. I thought anunscripted drama in which some-one gets to learn from a masterwould be a great idea, because Ialways learned so much from cer-tain people.”

March, 2004Robert Halmi, Sr.Chairman, Hallmark Entertainment“I like to go into fantasy worlds,mythology and dreams, becausethose let you be free and let you doanything you want to do. Real lifeis a pretty sad thing, especially ifyou read the newspapers these

days. I don’t want to deal with real-ity. I want to escape a little bit intoliterature, and into another world,so I create my own monsters!”

May, 2004Roberto Irineu MarinhoPresident, Organizações Globo“There is no competition withvideo games or the Internet. Myson is able to use three differentmedia at the same time. He’s ableto pay attention to all of them, andif I ask him what happened in aparticular TV program, he can tellme exactly what it was about.”

October, 2004Richard ParsonsChairman/CEO,Time Warner“[If there’s a blurring line betweennews and entertainment, it’sbecause] there is proliferation ofcompeting news purveyors.You’vegot to have something that givesyou a competitive edge.… Peoplewho are entering a marketplace aretrying to find a way to grab a shareand make some money.You canchallenge the capitalistic motiva-tions, but that’s what comes withcapitalism.The fault, if there is afault, lies not in the consolidation ofmedia…[but] in the nature of ourfree-market economy…where peo-ple compete to make money to jus-tify the capital that is invested.”

October, 2004Stan LeeFounder/Chairman/Chief CreativeOfficer, POW! Entertainment“Thirty years ago, there were oneor two styles of animation.Today,anyone with any imagination cancome up with a whole new style.There are so many ways to ani-mate.You don’t have to be in thesame rut.”

October, 2004Gary KnellPresident/CEO, Sesame Workshop“We like to think that the Muppetsare saving the world! But kiddingaside, I think there are certain uni-versal lessons that need to betaught to children around the

world, and they have to do withliteracy, numeracy, respect, under-standing and tolerance.”

October, 2004Michael GarinCEO,Central European Media Enterprises“I don’t think scale has been afriend to anything but the ownersof companies.You hear people inthe industry talk about how muchmoney they make.They don’t talkabout how much fun they are hav-ing. It’s a business where, except forone or two people at the top, indi-viduals cannot make a difference.”

December, 2004Michelle GuthrieCEO, STAR Group“I do expect that in five to tenyears there is going to be a massrollout of digital set-top boxes[in China and India].They’renot going to bother with ana-logue, they’re just going straightto digital.”

April, 2005Ted TurnerFounder,Turner Broadcasting System“Today there are already hun-dreds of channels. Remember,when I started there were veryfew channels. Right now, sixcompanies own 95 percent of allthe channels, and the first twocompanies own over half ofthem. And they are not going tolet an independent network getstarted. If they put a network on,it’s going to be one that theycontrol.”


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THE MAGAZINE OF INTERNATIONAL TELEVISION • MARCH 2004

MIPTV EditionScheduling WizardsInteractive TelevisionNBC’s Jeff Zucker

KarmazinAn Inside Look at Viacom

A Conversation with

October, 2003Anne Sweeney

President,ABC Cable Networks Group and

Disney Channel Worldwide“Kids today are usingtechnology. They are

multitasking. They arecommunicating with a

number of friends at thesame time. That’s really

not so different from whenwe had pajama parties and

we’d call a friend on thephone who couldn’t make it.”

October, 2004Steve HillenburgCreator,SpongeBob SquarePants“You can’t start making a show about a sponge and think it will be a huge hit. Ithought it would have acult audience but nobroad appeal.”


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April, 2005Tom FrestonCo-president/Co-COO,Viacom“MTV has changed the visualvocabulary of television and hasgiven people more of a sense ofwhat was possible in terms of edit-ing and the style of promotion. Itintroduced the era of nonlinearprogramming to television. It’s hada big impact on the music world inthe sense that it took music andput it right smack in the middle ofpeople’s living rooms.That was avery big boost for the music busi-ness, and I believe that music andthe stars of the music business havebecome much more central in thepop-culture landscape. MTV hasalso been a place that has madecontinued innovation.The firstreality show was on MTV, withThe Real World.We brought a lot ofadult animation out with showslike Beavis & Butt-Head. It’s a net-work that tries to actively reinventitself every several years.”

April, 2005John de MolCo-founder, Endemol“Before Big Brother, viewers watchedtelevision from a distance.Theywatched what was offered,withoutever having a feeling of being part ofthe show.Nor were they able to

influence the show.Big Brother,whichstarted reality television, changedthat.With reality TV, television hascome a lot closer to the viewer interms of recognition, in terms ofbeing able to influence what happenson a show.Viewers can decide whichcontestants they like and which theydon’t and have to [be eliminated].Reality TV brought the mediumcloser to the viewer.”

April, 2005Jerry BruckheimerProducer, Jerry Bruckheimer Films“I love process. I love getting insideworlds you know nothing aboutand to show you how they actuallywork, and CSI is the ultimateprocess show.They take you insidethe world of forensics, which veryfew people know anything about,and really expose the brilliance ofthese individuals who do it for a liv-ing every day to solve crimes. If youlook at the New York Times best-seller list, I’ll bet you’ll find betweensix and eight of the Top 10 booksare mysteries. People love great mys-teries.We took an approach that isdifferent, that you hadn’t seen ontelevision before, by actually takingyou inside the forensics, and wedesigned the show differently.Andthen we hired really talented peopleto do the work.”

April, 2005Helmut ThomaFounder/Original Managing Director,RTL Television“In October of 1983, I beganpreparations, and I got some peoplefrom RTL radio, whose director Iwas at the time.We started the net-work with 25 people and a budgetof DM25 million.We were work-ing in a small space, a garage thathad been converted into a studio.The strategy was simple, but itworked. RTL had to be refreshinglydifferent. It had to be differentfrom the public broadcasters. It alsohad to differentiate itself from thecommercial station that theKirchGruppe was launching at thesame time, Sat.1, which launchedwith a library of 15,000 feature

films and 50,000 hours of televi-sion programming. RTL beganwith 12 feature films.”

April, 2005Don HewittCreator/Former Executive Producer,60 Minutes;Producer of the first televised presidential debate“Jack Kennedy was Cary Grant.That night, he walked into thatroom, he looked like a Harvardundergrad, perfectly tailored, he wastan, he was in command, he lookedlike he owned the world. Nixonhad a staph infection. He lookedgreen. He had banged his knee onthe car. He looked like deathwarmed over. So it was no contest.That night, incidentally a historicnight, we got the right guy for thewrong reason.You shouldn’t pick apresident according to who’s thebetter looking of the two.Youshould pick Mr.America that way,but not your president. But we didand we got the right guy.You knowwhat was wrong about that night?That was the first night that politi-cians looked at us in television andsaid,‘That’s the only way to run foroffice.’And we looked at them andsaid,‘That’s a bottomless pit ofadvertising dollars.’ From that dayon, no one can even think aboutrunning for office in the greatestdemocracy on Earth unless they’vegot money for television time.Andyou can’t get money for televisiontime unless you are doing some-thing with a lobbyist you shouldn’tbe doing.A word was born thatnight called ‘fundraising.’ I had neverheard about fundraising before. In politics it’s called fundraising, inbusiness it’s called bribery.You’regiving money at a fundraiser to getsomeone to do what you wantthem to do. Politics in America hasbeen ruined by television becauseit’s become a money game. If youdon’t have the money, don’t eventhink about it.”

April, 2005Steven BochcoPresident, Steven Bochco Productions

“In the early years of NYPD Blue, Iwas really getting thousands of letters,of all kinds.One of the letters that Iwould get [often] said,‘Your show isso wonderful, the stories are so terrif-ic, the characters are so great,why doyou have to use that language? Whydo we have to be exposed,no punintended, to all those butts? Is thatreally necessary?’ I answered everyone of those letters, and my answer tothat essentially was, it’s not necessary,there’s no rationale for that languageor those butts. It’s a creative choice,which in its entirety, contributes tothe full impact of what this showchooses to be as a creative entity.”

April, 2005Jeffrey BewkesChairman of Entertainment &Networks Group,Time Warner“One thing about [The Sopranos],besides the excellence of the writingand the acting, is that it strikes a truenote with the viewers because itdoesn’t have that much of what we’vecome to think of as the genre stylis-


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April, 2005Rupert Murdoch

Chairman/CEO,News Corporation

“A long time ago, theBritish always thought interms of their empire and

were pretty patronizingtoward us Australians, patyou on your head and say,‘You’ll do well,’ and when

you do well they kick you todeath. It was impossible tobe accepted as a competitor

there. We learned a lotthere and reached a critical

size to be able to thinkabout coming here [to the

U.S.], which has alwaysbeen open to everybody.”

April, 2005John HendricksFounder/Chairman,Discovery Communications“It was in the spring of 1982that I first began to seriouslythink about the Discovery Channel. It came about becauseI had signed up for cable and itwas offering these very valuablebut simple concepts—an entirecategory of content, likemovies, were put together intoa dependable channel. The firstwas Home Box Office. AndESPN came out in 1979, sothere was a sports channel. TedTurner started CNN in 1980. Itwas around the time that MTVwas starting as a concept. Ithought these were very simple concepts, but very valuable tothe consumer. My favorite kindof television was documentaryentertainment, and it justseemed to me so logical that the world needed a documentary channel.”


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tics that come from The Godfather. It’sgrittier, it’s more real-life. It’s not asoperatic in that sense.But in a way itis—if you follow the plot and therelationships, it does have that largefeel to it, and yet it’s very funny. Soyou have this show that at one pointcan be extremely hard to watch,withvery tough scenes and very strongacting in the way of conflict, angerand violence.But on the other hand,you may catch a scene that is reallyfunny and very normal and every-day that you yourself recognize.”

April, 2005Peter OrtonFounder/Chairman,HIT Entertainment“One of the things that happenedafter the third or fourth year afterstarting HIT, we’re talking about1992 or 1993, is that I was veryaware, since I was in America all ofthe time, that Nickelodeon hadstarted, MTV was exploding, aswere CNN and cable television. Ifelt that the fin-syn rule would berevoked.That meant that we neededto get into the ownership of pro-gramming. So, in early 1995, westarted to acquire the rights tosome of the exquisite literary prop-erties in the U.K. One of the won-derful things about being based inBritain is that we tell wonderfulstories and illustrate them beauti-fully in books.”

April, 2005Rupert MurdochChairman/CEO, News Corporation“When we came to the U.S. wewere still relatively small.We hadestablished in one sense a largepresence in Britain, with newspa-pers, but we were a company thatcame here in the ’70s as a fractionof what we are today. I had beenhere 11 years before I had theopportunity to acquire the firsthalf of Twentieth Century Fox.My partner and I were offered asmall bunch of important inde-pendent stations. I was keen tobuy and he was not, and our chiefexecutive, Barry Diller, was insis-tent that we buy.To cut a longstory short, we bought the wholeof Twentieth Century Fox. Foxturned out to be extraordinarilycheap, the last of the sensiblypriced studios.And of course thestations were expensive and sowas starting a network.We startedit very modestly, first one night,then two nights, then threenights, and made little impact for quite a while.And althoughwe were still operating on verylimited resources, in today’s termsit was not a heavy investment.Now we take much bigger gam-

bles: NFC football and sportscontracts.The cost of everythinghas skyrocketed.”

October, 2005Marc CherryCreator, Desperate Housewives“When you’re a gay guy youhave a lot of female friends, andthere is no agenda.When I sitwith women I don’t want any-thing other than their companyand their humor and their input.There are a lot of guys out therewho, when they spend timewith women, they’re trying toget something from them. Ithelps when you really look atwomen as companions. Also, Idon’t tolerate dumb women. If a woman is going to be myfriend, she’d better be smart andfun and funny. I’ve actually goneout with straight men who havethe most beautiful girlfriends,but they’re idiots. I just look atthe straight men and have such alack of respect: ‘If you can spendtime with this, then, wow—more power to you, because Ijust can’t!’”

October, 2005Mark KanerPresident,Twentieth Century FoxTelevision Distribution“A very good show will get a bet-ter slot.There’s no question about

that. Having said that (and I havesaid this so many times), ourbiggest competitor is not the otherstudios. Our biggest competitor byfar is quality local programming.The television business has grownup all over the world.”

October, 2005Nancy TellemPresident, CBS Paramount NetworkTelevision Entertainment Group“When we first got here, theykept calling us the geezer net-work, and they said, ‘You knowwhat? You shouldn’t even aspireto claim the 18-to-49 demo.’ Andwe won last year in 18 to 49among regularly scheduled pro-grams for the first time in 30years.We accomplished all of thatwith a schedule that had moreTop 20 shows than any othernetwork. But again, it was verymuch a building process thattook many years.”

October, 2005Stephen McPhersonPresident,ABC Primetime Entertainment“I can tell you, when you have this job, your sole objectiveis to put the best show on theair, and you really don’t carewhere it comes from becauseyou are a licensor.Where theshow comes from doesn’t affect


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THE MAGAZINE OF INTERNATIONAL TELEVISION • OCTOBER 2004

MIPCOM Edition

The Future of TelevisionMobile ContentEuro BuyersRTL Group’s Gerhard Zeiler

RichardParsons

Time Warner’s

Leading the World’sLargest Media Company

October, 2005Gustavo Cisneros

Chairman/CEO,Cisneros Group of Companies

“Let us not mince words onthis important matter. Thereare two types of societies inthe world today: on the one

hand, those societies in whichpeople are essentially free,

under the rule of law, wherethe rights of minorities are

protected and human rightsare respected; and on theother hand, those where

freedom does not exist or isarbitrarily restricted and

persecuted. The second typeof society may be totalitarian,or autocratic and authoritarian,

but the differences betweenthese two modes of life

are clear. I believe liberty isindivisible, but freedom of

the press occupies a particularly important place

in a free society. The reasonis simple: the press, and

the communications mediain general, are the routes andoutlets through which people

express their views, theirideas and opinions about how

they are governed. Withoutfreedom of the press there is

no free society. This is whyautocratic and totalitarian

regimes always try to eliminate or at any raterestrict press freedom,

for those regimes cannotaccept criticism. They are

averse to freedom.”


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your bottom line, it doesn’t affectthe success or failure of the show.The only thing that counts is howgood the show is. It literally doesn’teven cross your mind.”

October, 2005Chang Long JongDeputy Group CEO of Television,MediaCorp“I call it the three ‘E’s.’We need tocontinue to makeTV programs veryengaging, and engaging in today’scontext is not just being entertain-ing.You engage by getting theviewers to become part of thewhole TV experience, by voting,interacting, and being emotionallyattached to the show.The second ‘E’is really about how we can enrichthe audience.And, finally, we hope

to be encompassing.We aim toserve every community as well aspossible and as much as possible. Inthe whole range of programs,whether you are young or elderly,whichever age group, whicheverclass you belong to, there’s a placefor your TV experience here.”

October, 2005Emmanuel PriouCo-founder, Bonne Pioche“The only way to produce [TheMarch of the Penguins] was to releaseit theatrically.There was notenough money in television.Weknew no one from the cinemabusiness at all, so we attendedmeetings with Gaumont and Pathéand others, and explained the storyof the penguins for 20 minutes.Everybody was interested in thestory. It was more difficult to con-vince them to put money on thetable and be part of the adventure.Buena Vista International Francewas one of the first companies wemet and one of the first that wasinterested.We signed with themone year after we met. Before that,people would say,‘It’s a story [about]penguins—we won’t touch it.’”

October, 2005Morgan SpurlockFilmmaker“We had just submitted Super SizeMe to the Sundance Film Festival.After the screening, we went downto the front of the room to have alittle Q&A session, and in the mid-dle of it people started arguingwith one another and yelling,‘Youdon’t know what the film’s aboutat all.’‘You’re stupid.You don’tknow what you mean.’‘What areyou talking about? You’re an idiot.’It got really heated and it wasexciting.This is exactly what youwant to evoke in people—a realvisceral, emotional response.”

January, 2006Emilio AzcárragaChairman of the Board/President/CEO, Grupo Televisa“We are seeing that broadband isincreasing the quality of video con-

sumers can view via the Internet.Therefore, a niche service, insteadof being just a niche channel in theU.S., can become a niche channelwith global distribution and appealto, perhaps, 30, 40 or 50 millionviewers.Technology will also helpthese niche channels be bettermanaged than they are todaybecause it will be more economi-cally viable to launch and maintainthem. Compared to a worldwidepopulation of 6 billion people, 50million viewers is not very much,but having a channel reach 50 mil-lion viewers can be a very interest-ing business proposition.”

April, 2006Roger AilesChairman/CEO, FOX News;Chairman, FOX Television Stations“Bias is not what you say; it’s whatyou eliminate.We don’t eliminateanybody. Everybody gets equaltime.They do eliminate a conser-vative voice at many of these othernetworks, therefore we appear tobe more conservative, because wetreat the conservative point of viewwith as much respect as we treatthe liberal point of view.”

April, 2006Richard SambrookDirector of the Global News Division,BBC“With the explosion of blogs andpodcasts and opinion news, thevalue of a news service that worksvery hard to be impartial and objec-tive is going to increase. Now, youcan have a philosophical discussionand ask whether you can really beimpartial and so on, but the veryfact that being impartial is the targetyou are setting for yourself raisesstandards.And having a news servicethat sets out to be objective, basedon evidence, and tries to validatefacts and sets that at the heart of itsmission is going to be increasinglyvaluable. Because in the future, oneof the roles of a major news organi-zation is going to be validatinginformation as well as facilitating thediscussion [of topics] that are in thegeneral swirl of everything.”

April, 2006Werner HerzogDirector“It’s basically an ongoing argumentabout nature. I argue with mybrothers but I love them.There’s anargument about a basic view ofnature and the universe. It is notharmonious and it is not like WaltDisney films, good and friendly andanthropomorphic. It’s very hostileand very chaotic, so I do have anongoing argument.”

April, 2006Christiane AmanpourChief International Correspondent,CNN“One of the most powerful effectsof global 24-hour news has been incountries in which there is no suchthing as freedom of the press, and[news consists] mostly of govern-ment mouthpieces or propaganda.Being able to watch something likeCNN in these countries has given[people] a whole new view on lifeand on the world and on the infor-mation that they were being told.Another major effect of global


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October, 2005Bob Wright

Vice Chairman/Executive Officer,General Electric;

Chairman/CEO, NBC Universal“I didn’t know [Jean-Marie

Messier] personally that well.I think he was just too smart

by half and he was blindlyambitious. And that’s not a

good combination. Hethought he could just makethese things happen. Therewas no particular evidence

that he was a skillful operatoras opposed to a putter-

together. He went beyond thelevel of appropriate risk into

something that was quite difficult. His board was withhim to a point, and then hejust bypassed them. He didthings without giving them

enough insight to make gooddecisions. When we camealong, the board was very

unhappy and very angry. Theyfelt they had been betrayed.

Messier was a star of theFrench business, social and

political system, so it wasvery unnerving. The people

I’ve met that are withVivendi Universal have been

quite good.”

April, 2006James MurdochChief Executive, BSkyB“I grew up around the businessmy whole life, so I can’t tellwhat it would be otherwise. Ihave to say, just objectively,and my colleagues, who maybedidn’t grow up around themedia, would say this as well—it is the most exciting industryin the world. It’s the businessof ideas, of developing customer habits, of macro-societal change, of technologicalchange—it’s just fascinating.Being able to actually go outand make a difference in families’ lives and give themsomething that they value, andthat they can be enriched by, or entertained by, to be able toprovide that choice to them, isjust enormously exciting. It’s agreat business for anybody.”


TM & © 2010 World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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24-hour television news is thatthings just simply don’t happen in avacuum anymore. Let’s say there isa maniac as the head of a country[conducting] a terrible genocide.Well, he may be able to do that,but he can’t do it with impunity.He can’t do it in a vacuum, hecan’t do it without fearing theeventual consequences—becausenow everybody is watching.”

April, 2006Markus SchächterDirector-General, ZDF“The news operations in Germanyhave been strongly influenced bythe Anglo-Saxon tradition.Credibility and reliability are veryimportant and that is always fore-most in our minds. Our Heutenewscast is highly appreciated byour viewers.We differ from ourcompetitors in many ways.Weoffer accurate, well-researched andindependent reporting and we

always make an effort to put ournews reports in context.We thinkthat it is essential that the news beunderstood by our audience andthat they can relate to it.Weknow from viewer polls that alarge part of the audience thinksthat our journalists are especiallycompetent and independent.”

April, 2006Kevin LygoDirector of Television, Channel 4“Going home, I like doing that![Laughs] I do like watching telly. Ithoroughly enjoy the week in LosAngeles at the Screenings where Iam treated like some Russian bil-lionaire arriving in a limo.Theytake you to the theater and abouteight people greet you,‘Are youready to see our programmingnow?’ and you answer,‘Naw, Ithink I’ll have another latte.’You sitthere not believing you are beingpaid for watching the wonderfulnew dramas and comedies comingup on American telly.And thenyou go to some gorgeous hotelpoolside—that’s a tough job.”

April, 2006Michael AptedFilmmaker/Director“Without being dismissive oroffensive, the whole problem withreality is that it’s contrived—youmake a contrivance and then peo-ple play it out. Sometimes it’samusing and insightful, but basicallyit’s a contrived situation, and that’sthe antithesis of a documentary.And I just worry that as people gettired of reality television [because]it’s cheap entertainment, and as itdisappears down the bathtub, thatdocumentaries might disappearwith it in the public eye.”

April, 2006Charles AllenExecutive Chairman, ITV plc“I see ITV1 growing, but I see theother parts of ITV growing evenfaster.The way to see it is ITV1 isthe engine room.When we’ve got12 million people watching our topshows, then we can basically get

those viewers to go off and watchITV2 or ITV3 or ITV4 or, goingforward, we’ve launched ITV Play,where people can play along withour shows, or play games.We havethe ability to create new revenuesoutside our core business.As every-one moves from analogue to digitalit gets more competitive, as there aremore and more channels.”

April, 2006Rich RossPresident, Disney Channel Worldwide“I always say our programs are likedecoder rings for kids and tweensthat help them decipher the crazyworld they live in—a world that isever more complex. It’s a great thingto be able to sit down and learnabout everything including ethicsand morals in a world that is not thatcut and dried anymore.”

April, 2006Ben SilvermanFounder/CEO, Reveille“Docu-soaps are still workingeverywhere.What are not work-ing as well are the derivativecompetition shows. But then yousee something like Dancing withthe Stars and The Biggest Loser andthose are two huge global hits. SoI don’t know how much thegenre is waning. I just think it’slooking for fresh ideas, always.”

April, 2006Navin KumarDirector-General, Doordarshan“It’s difficult to arrive at a balance.India has millions of people livingin poverty.A large number of ourprograms on health, agriculture,welfare and minority issues targetthis cross section of the public. Notall public-health programs need tobe boring. Kalyani, a woman’shealth program, airs from 18 of ourregional centers. It has such a loyalfan [base] that 1,500 Kalyani clubsare functioning on a voluntarybasis. But we also need to come upwith an effective entertainmentmix, and in prime time we have avery loyal viewership.”

October, 2006Bill CarterReporter,The New York Times“What I have found, when I go tospeaking engagements, is that tele-vision has been a tremendousconnective tissue in the culture.You can say, He’s like a Kramer,and everybody would know whatthat means because they have seenSeinfeld. But that’s becoming moredifficult to do as time goes on.Yourealize there is not as much con-nective tissue out there becausethere is so much available and theaudience is very, very stratified.That is one of the things that have


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April, 2006Ken Auletta

Best-selling Author/Media Critic“Journalism is inherently

wasteful and expensive. Manytimes the people who are

running these giant companiesdo not come from the worldof journalism. So they don’t

appreciate how inefficientjournalism is and how much

time and investment it takes.At the same time, there isalso corporate pressure onjournalism divisions to bemore team players. Why

don’t you put some of our sitcom stars on our morning

show? Why can’t we do GoodMorning America from

Disney World? Oftentimes the business people prattle onand on about brand, but they

don’t understand that thebrand is about credibility.

And to have credibility, you have to do serious news,

you have to be accurate, and you’ve got to do

international reporting.”

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changed, and it’s a bad thing, in away, because, even though it’s greatto have choice, it’s also interestingthat we don’t have as much sharedexperience.”

October, 2006Peter RothPresident,Warner Bros.Television“Isn’t it Shakespeare who said,‘The play’s the thing?’That mustalways be the most fundamentaltruth: when the play is great, itcan be exploited in many, manydifferent fashions.And nevershould it be done otherwise.Tome it’s an anti-creative process tosay, ‘OK what can we do now toexploit the digital opportunitiesthat exist?’ No, the question is,‘What’s the show? What’s theplay? What are we trying to com-municate? Who are the charac-ters? What’s the story? Who arethe writers? Who is executing theproperty?’That’s what we concen-trate on, and then there are otherswho can exploit that and do itvery effectively.”

October, 2006David EllenderManaging Director,Fremantle International Distribution“We’ll see new-media demands onprogramming encroaching onsome of the old-media demandsfor exclusivity. Still, old media, ortraditional media, will remain amajor revenue source for the nextthree to four years, and obviouslythat needs to be protected. Butnew media will become the majorrevenue source in three to fouryears—there will be a tippingpoint. Understanding that symbioticrelationship is the key to success inthe new era.”

October, 2006Gary NewmanCo-president,Twentieth Century Fox Television“We really believe in the theorythat most of these shows startwith a great idea from a writerand we don’t really believe in giv-ing writers assignments.Theshows need to come from their

gut and be about something thatthey really understand and are sopassionate about that they can digdeep enough to get to the essenceof the relationships and theessence of the stories.We thinkthis is a key ingredient to mak-ing shows resonate for an audi-ence. So there’s nothing thatmakes us happier than when apitch starts off ‘I base this pitchon my family,’ or ‘I base thispitch on my first job,’ or somesuch thing.We find these alwaysseem to have much deeper emotional cores, and we’re fansof that.”

October, 2006Jonathan LittmanPresident,Jerry Bruckheimer Television“We have very good relationswith all the networks we workfor.They pay the bills.They’reputting the show on their air. Sowhen you go into the process,you have to be an adult about itand say, ‘Wait a minute, we’re on their network, they really getto call the shots.’ A good note isa good note, no matter whereit comes from.We’re there withour showrunners to help guidethem through all those voices,to really interpret the notes that are being given. But youknow what? It’s the network’sdime, and we respect that.Wework within their process.”

October, 2006Carolyn StraussPresident, HBO Entertainment“The difference between thenetworks and us is the fact thatwe don’t license our shows, weown them.We probably spendmore in...production values.This all goes into who we are asa network.We are not about selling soap, we are about selling ourselves. People cometo expect a certain amount from the production value ofHBO shows, and so, this issomething we pay a lot ofmoney for.”

October, 2006Joel Surnow & Robert CochranCreators, 24SURNOW: “I keep hearing thatmost of [the serialized dramas]over the past couple of years havenot been successful.There’s not alot of people who know how todo this.This is a very specific typeof writing.What I keep hearingnow as we’re going out into thedevelopment season is that [thenetworks] want more stand-aloneshows because they’ve been hav-ing lots of problems with the seri-alized format.”COCHRAN: “There are peoplewho say, I don’t want to getcaught up in something where if Imiss an episode or two, I’ll getlost. Generally speaking, despitethat one exception, people watchthe series because it entertainsthem every time they turn it on,and not because of the format. Sosome of these shows will work,some won’t. People may draw biggrand lessons from that, but Ithink the only lesson you candraw is that if a show works, peo-ple will watch it.”

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October, 2006Mark ThompsonDirector-General, BBC“One of the biggest dangers for a media organization is to accept a glib, stereotyped,patronizing perspective onwhat young people are interested in, and to underestimate who this audience is. There isn’t oneblock of young people. Thereare people in this demographicwho are in very, very differentlife stages, with very differentaspirations. There are somepeople in their late teens and early twenties who are parents of two, three or four children, and others who are still in full-time education, with very different socioeconomic andcultural perspectives.”


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October, 2006Anthony ZuikerCreator, CSI“If there’s a negative about theshow it’s the fact that it sometimesgives people false expectations interms of crime solving and thetime frame of a crime beingsolved. I don’t think that Americasometimes understands that thetechnology we have on the showisn’t the same technology thatmost labs have in the country.”

October, 2006David ShoreCreator, House“I had done some cop shows andwhat makes them interesting is themotives for why people do things,and I realized that was what wasmissing. If the germs are the badguys, germs don’t have motives.Germs don’t kill somebody andthen hide the knife under the bedof another germ, so it seems theother germ did it, because the othergerm is having an affair with thefirst germ’s wife! That’s not the way

it works in the human body.And toa great extent, that’s what makesthese cop shows interesting. So Irealized we had to invert it.We hadto find a way to get at human inter-action and motives and what makespeople tick. So we put this guy atthe center of it and it’s about whatmakes him tick, but also what makespeople tick.We solve so many ofour cases not based on medical tests,but based on some deduction aboutthe patient and what they are hid-ing—often from themselves.”

October, 2006Paula KergerPresident/CEO, PBS“Well, I think that the reason thatthe Ken Burnses and the DavidGrubins and even some of theyoung filmmakers come to us isthat we give people the freedom todevelop their projects.Young KenBurns came to public broadcastingand had this idea that at the timejust seemed so crazy—to do a ten-hour documentary on the CivilWar, and by the way, with no videoclips. He will tell you that the rea-son he stayed in public broadcast-ing is that he knows that we willgive him the ability to build out adocumentary series.”

October, 2006Ricky GervaisComedian“Monty Python was amazing in manyways. It gave me an inherent need todeconstruct and to look at context.There was a naughtiness to it, therewas an anti-establishment edge to it.The laughingstocks were judges andpolice and politicians.And also theacting was very natural.As mad aseverything was, there was always anormal one who said,‘What are youdoing?,’ which I liked, and noteveryone was mad at the same time.That teaches a certain context,really, that you have to have aneveryman in there.You have to haveTim next to David [in The Office].You have to have an Ollie next toStan.And the films were great.WhatTerry Gilliam did was never donebefore.And John Cleese came out

with Fawlty Towers, still consideredthe best sitcom from England.”

October, 2006Bill BordenCreator/Executive Producer,High School Musical“Some of the criticisms of HSMhave been,‘Well, this is a Disneyhigh school, the kids aren’t drinkingand smoking, they are not getting introuble, et cetera.’Yes, that is oneexperience in high school, but theexperience of being in cliques isone that I see as universal. In highschool you have to fit into yourclique.You have to feel like youbelong.And that is something thataffects all kids, including my own.They have that social pressure everyday in their school.”

October, 2006Mike DarnellExecutive VP of Specials,Alternativeand Late-Night Programming,FOX Broadcasting Company“Lots of different things serve asinspiration. Sometimes it’s a pitch,but if you get 100 pitches, maybeone or two are interesting enoughto produce.You know what it isabout pitches? I have heard somereally, really bad pitches, but I don’tget enough of those, because at leastthose are funny. Generally, pitchesare just kind of mediocre, and youfeel apathetic about them.They’re


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October, 2006Steven Spielberg

Director“Television is entertaining usand informing us in ways that

were unimaginable a decadeago. It goes without sayingthat the news has given us

bigger windows on the world,but TV is pushing the envelope

like never before with serieslike Lost and 24 and The

Sopranos, that involve us up to our eyeballs and make usangry when our hour is up.

When I was a kid I thought Iwould never laugh as loud as I

did when I watched with myfamily Sid Caesar’s Your Show

of Shows, and later on, ErnieKovacs and I Love Lucy. But

I have to admit, I’m laughing a little louder when I watchCurb Your Enthusiasm and

My Name Is Earl and TheOffice. TV is truly better than

ever before.”

October, 2006Richard ParsonsChairman/CEO,Time Warner“When I became CEO weintentionally turned the dialdown on the rhetoric and thehyping of the future, becausewe’d done too much of thatbefore, and it also happens tobe my personal style. A newthing comes along and it’slike nirvana, this is going tobe the salvation of everybody.China is a super-tough market. Nobody is makingmoney in China, except the Chinese. In India, thegovernment isn’t as involvedin the media. And they dohave a rule of law. But theyhave no infrastructure. So,for example, how do we sellDVDs? We sell DVDs to 1,000Wal-Mart or Best Buy stores.They don’t have those inIndia. So how do you getthem out? It takes time forthese things to develop, andjust because you have someheadline-grabbing numbers—20 percent of all humanity is in India—it doesn’t meanyou can translate it into dollars. You don’t hear themtalking that much about itanymore, right? Because it’s a slow build.”


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just the next generation of the sameidea.A lot of times if something hitsbig, you get the same idea ten times,like when the movie Hitch cameout, ten people in a row came inpitching,“This is the real-life Hitch,where a guy will teach someoneelse how to pick up women.”

April, 2007Mark CubanPresident/CEO, HDNet“I think handheld devices will be asource of a lot of excitement.Wewill be able to carry our livesaround in our pockets.All our pic-tures, home movies, favoritemovies,TV shows, even the voice-mail message your girlfriend leftyou when you asked her out forthe first time, can be saved.We areno longer an analogue country.Welive a digital lifestyle, and the futurewill bring more ways to take ourlives with us wherever we go.”

April, 2007Gunter ThielenCEO, Bertelsmann“I think the most importantissue in this area is that lots ofpeople using the Internet feelthat everything on the web isfor free.Therefore they don’tfeel like they are doing anythingwrong when they download

music for free. But in the endit’s stealing! We have to changethis mind-set.That is not onlyup to Sony BMG orBertelsmann or the music indus-try—it’s a huge challenge. Iguess we all agree that it iswrong to take a product and notpay for it. On the other hand, Ithink music companies have tochange their business model. Atthe end of the day, it’s very con-venient to download music fromthe web. It will be the distribu-tion channel of the future—there is no doubt about it.”

April, 2007Steven LevySenior Editor/Writer, Newsweek“Steve Jobs works by setting thebar very high, sometimes evenimpossibly high, and by doing thatpeople try to play above theirgame. It’s like a sports team know-ing they are playing the best teamin the league. Even though theyare not up to the best team, theyprepare for it and play over theirheads. I don’t think there is any-one as good as Jobs is in havingtalented people exceeding whatthey can do. Sometimes, evencapriciously, he’ll reject thingsknowing that people will comeback and try to top themselves. It’srare in life to have a manager whowill take your A- work and say,‘That’s not good enough, I wantan A+.’That is the standard hesets.And that is why Apple is con-sistently able to deliver productsthat give people a ‘Wow!’ experi-ence when other companies veryseldom do that.”

April, 2007Bram CohenCo-founder/CEO, BitTorrent“The initial thing I did was thatthere was this very difficultlogistical problem of how do youuse the bandwidth of peers whodon’t trust each other and mightgo away at any time? It wasn’teven clear if that was a solvableproblem, but I solved it. Morerecently, we got out of what was

a very scary legal situation, wherelots of people were predictingwe’d be sued into oblivion and I’dbe thrown into jail. Now we’reworking with Hollywood andbringing a lot of their contentonline and really preparing themfor the inevitable shift of every-thing to being done online.Thetraditional television model isgoing away as Internet capacityincreases and the limitations ofthe old medium [are eliminated].”

April, 2007Blake KrikorianCo-founder/CEO, Sling Media“What we all want as consumersis a seamless and familiar living-room television experienceregardless of what display we hap-pen to be looking at and regard-less of what location we happento be in.The other trend is thatmore and more people are gettingDVRs, so more and more of thecontent that they want to watch isstored on a hard drive in their liv-

ing room and all these displays areconnected via the Internet, right?So there’s got to be a way—aslong as we’re connected to theInternet—that we can access ourliving-room TV programming onany device in any location.Andthat’s really how the idea of theSlingbox and place-shifting cameabout.Then we started creatingprototypes and one thing led toanother, and here we are today.”


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April, 2007Ridley ScottDirector“In the last few years, therehas been a rise in standards oftelevision. I’m seeing creativework, and creative thinking,and looking at things in a different way, [to the point]where you are getting reallyprogressive thinking in the bestlevel of television today.Which I think would competewith feature films.”

November, 2006Jon Feltheimer

CEO, Lionsgate“Obviously, there are a lot ofnew players, Amazon, Apple

and Blockbuster.com, whoare all turning into online

retailers. We’re going to bein business with them, as are

the other studios. It’s clearthat we are at the beginning

of what is going to be a pretty steep revenue spike

from digitally delivered content. And I have said

publicly that I believe it’sgoing to be added high-

margin revenue and not solelyreplacement revenue. It will

be additive and incremental.”


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April, 2007Hans-Holger AlbrechtPresident/CEO, Modern Times Group “We have a philosophy that welaunch products, not plans.Thegood thing is that we have a long-term view, so we would not jeop-ardize our potential for growth forthe next three, four or five years.Wealso have a long-term Board andshareholders, which give us the pos-sibility of thinking long-term andto evaluate various options and tobuild the business.We have to

deliver returns to our shareholders,but if it takes investments becausewe see an opportunity, we will doit, because long-term growth is veryimportant to us.”

April, 2007Ken BurnsDocumentary Filmmaker“Let’s not even call it reality televi-sion, because it’s the last thing fromreality. Nobody proposes [to hisgirlfriend] in front of 30 millionpeople. Nobody eats bugs in frontof 30 million people.This is notreality; this is unreality.We’ve justfound a more inexpensive way topromote consumer products andlifestyle decisions. It has nothing todo with documentary.That ofcourse is the horrible news.Whatyou are seeing parallel to this is that[reality television] makes everybodywant to be famous for 15 minutesand sends them into—are youaware of Nathanael West’s The Dayof the Locust [a novel aboutHollywood and its corruptingtouch]?—a collective day of thelocust.We’re supposed to be ademocracy, but we’ve replaced ourdemocracy with the great tyrannyof those with bold-faced namesover the rest of us, and that is a ter-rible thing.”

May, 2007Michael LyntonChairman/CEO, Sony PicturesEntertainment“As far as local-language televisionproduction is concerned, we’vebeen probably the most successful ofall the U.S. studios. I think there’s aways to go judging from the workof companies like FremantleMediaand Endemol.We have to get moreinvolved in the formats businessbecause that’s really where themoney is.”

June, 2007Robert Halmi, Sr.President/CEO, RHI Entertainment “My relationship [with broadcastnetworks] is that I don’t like to seethem too much. I come up withgreat ideas and I make a presenta-

tion and usually they order it. I putsome money into art. Every time Idream something up I draw it outand I try to explain what the storyis [in pictures].When we lay thisout it’s easier to sell when peoplesee it.There are mostly stupid peo-ple there (at the networks) so theydon’t understand things.They haveto see them.”

October, 2007Philippe DaumanPresident/CEO,Viacom“We invented fragmentation in thecable world.We challenged thebroadcast networks when we cre-ated MTV, Nickelodeon and ourother networks, and our brethrencreated their networks.We believethe same will occur online whereyou start with the MySpaces andthe Facebooks, and then you go indepth to smaller, more focusedcommunities.”

October, 2007John de MolOwner,Talpa Media Group“It is still the same problem.Broadcasters still tend to take acopy of something that is successfulinstead of a risk with somethingthat is really new. So unfortunatelythe market—at least as far as myexperience goes—has not becomemore open to new and what I call‘against the flow’ shows.”

October, 2007Anne SweeneyCo-chair, Disney Media Networks;President, Disney-ABC Television Group“We learned that the majority ofthe online viewing happens in thefirst 24 hours after a show has airedon ABC.And we also found out,because we’ve been tracking thisquite carefully, that 77 percent ofour audience watches the showsonline because they missed themon television and they wanted tocatch up.We also found out that 85percent of people who watchedthe shows on the player were ableto recall the advertiser, so not onlywas this a great convenience forour viewers—giving them a chanceto catch up—but it was a wonder-ful boon to our advertisers.”

October, 2007Gerhard ZeilerCEO, RTL Group“Our philosophy is that in thedigital age, when consumers canchoose between hundreds ofchannels, you can’t really be suc-cessful with just one channel evenif you have the biggest one inyour market. Like any otherindustry, you have to offer morechoice to the consumer, which iswhy we started our family ofchannels approach.”


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October, 2007Brian Roberts

Chairman/CEO,Comcast Corporation

“We reached our five billionth on-demand order this

year. It’s been very popular.In July alone, we had 245 million orders through on

demand. Pay-per-view revenue has also increased

about 20 percent per quartersince we’ve launched free on-demand. Consumers have also

gotten used to not just changing channels, but are

now surfing on demand,clicking, watching, fast-

forwarding and rewinding TVprograms. They have becomemore comfortable paying for

movies on demand and arenow looking for more HD on-

demand content. That has ledthe movie studios to be moreinterested in experimenting

with shortening the windowsof when movies will be made

available on demand to consumers in their homes.

On-demand really is the mostconvenient way to rent

movies—it is instantaneousgratification for the

consumer. Customers love it.It’s adding value to content

companies, keeping televisionahead of the Internet—and

it’s more secure, and it is an economically stable

business model.”


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October, 2007David HaslingdenCEO, Fox International Channels and National Geographic ChannelsU.S. and International“The golden rule that we follow,which traverses both business andproduct strategy and neatly bringsthem together, is that we need tobuild a strong, engaging and lastingconnection with our viewers.Andthere is no doubt that, if you have aportfolio of channels, you havegreater weapons in your arsenal tomake that connection stronger,deeper, more engaging and morelasting.”

October, 2007Darren ChildsManaging Director,BBC Worldwide Channels“We made a decision that wewouldn’t [launch a channel] just toreplicate something that existed.Wewould only do something if we saw,in a specific genre, that we couldeither be number one or numbertwo in a market.That’s the strategywe put in place. One of the keythings [about] the uniqueness of theBBC when you compare it to otherstudios or other content producers isthe sheer volume of its high-qualitycontent.We make 20,000 hours ayear of content: 12,000 hours ofentertainment and 8,000 hours ofnews.There isn’t another companyon this planet that I can think of thatcan offer a six-channel bouquetfrom preschool kids’ content to thebest news channel on the planet.”

October, 2007Thomas ValentinDeputy Chairman/Head of TVChannels and Content, M6“The young, as all of our viewersdo, expect from M6 first and fore-most innovation and creativity.M6 has in its DNA a love for tak-ing risks and for innovation.Thisis what our viewers expect: achannel that knows how to sur-prise and astonish.”

October, 2007Mark BurnettCreator, Survivor“Just as Survivor and The Apprenticeare very simple to understand—you’re being marooned likeRobinson Crusoe in one, and theother one is just a televised jobinterview process—5th Grader isalso very simple in that most adultsstruggle with fifth graders’ home-work. It’s amazing really.We alllearned how to calculate the area ofa triangle.We all learned the planetsin the Solar System—basic stuffwhen we were 10 years old—butsince then our brains have becomeso full of information that we can’tremember schoolwork. So here’s ashow that really brings that to theforefront and allows the kids to cel-ebrate being smarter than theadults. It’s really empowering tokids. I think 5th Grader is driven inlarge part by the kids who watch itwith their parents, and love the factthat they know more answers thantheir parents do.”

October, 2007Dan SchneiderCreator, iCarly“I’m not concerned about compe-tition. I remember when I was akid there was a McDonald’s my dadused to take me to and I rememberwhen they opened up a BurgerKing across the street.And I said tomy dad,‘Wow, I bet McDonald’s isreally upset about the Burger King.’And my father said,‘No. It’s good, itjust brings more people to the areaand it makes more people interestedin coming to this place. So in a way,yes, they’re competitors, but it helps

them both because there’s moreactivity around them.’ I feel thelive-action [tween market is] likethat. Disney has helped show howprofitable and how mainstream itcan be.”

October, 2007Len CochranePresident,TELETOON“Listening to our audience andconstantly adapting [is the key toremaining competitive].When ouraudience told us that our brandingwas no longer as fresh, smart, andsavvy as our shows, we listened andundertook a re-branding process.Throughout the entire creativeprocess we consulted not only ourstrategic partners, but talked andlistened to our 1,000-strong onlineyouth advisory panel. Now ouraudience owns our brand morethan we do.”

October, 2007Justin BodleFounder/Chairman/CEO, Power“Private equity is now a very seri-ous part of the independent filmbusiness that is dwarfing almostevery other sector outside theHollywood studios.We’re seeing thestart of that in television. Substantialprivate-equity players are [investingin television companies], and whenthey start making some very bigfootholds in the market we will seea considerable change in the inde-pendent television sector as well.That will have a significant impacton the way the business is done andon some of the strategy that is putinto play by the indie sector goingforward, [because private equity willlook for] consolidation, high rate ofreturns and a much more struc-tured, competitive edge to the stu-dio system.”

November, 2007Paul AielloCEO, STAR Group“We’ve had great success in thepast.You can’t be comfortable withthat. Indeed, we need to be para-noid and need to realize that thesuccess of this company has

[occurred] when we’ve changedthe paradigm of the way business isdone in different markets.We needto continue to reinvent how view-ers watch [our content] and howwe sell it to our advertisers and ouraffiliates.We need to listen and behumble about it and then come upwith really creative programmingand solutions for our clients.”

January, 2008Don BrownePresident,Telemundo“The principle and the vision is thatthe lifeblood of what we do is theU.S. Hispanic audience we serve.And it’s very complex, very diverseand rapidly evolving and growing.So the more you understand that,and if that is the raw material youuse to produce your content, andyou create a diversity of platforms—broadcast, digital broadband,Internet, cable and international andyou are open to the next form ofdistribution—and you are populat-ing these distribution platforms withrelevant content, you are going tohave a good business.”

April, 2008Guillaume de PoschCEO, ProSiebenSat.1 Media“Basically, to make TV you alwaysneed a unique combination of peoplewho are more creative and peo-ple who are more business-oriented.


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January, 2008Joe UvaCEO, Univision“The fact is, Hispanics are not only the fastest-growingpopulation segment in numbers, they also representthe fastest-growing in terms ofpurchasing power. That meansthat every dollar spent againstthem is a dollar spent on growth,not on defending sales againstthose non-Hispanic segments ofthe population whose numbersare declining as a percentage ofthe whole and whose buyingpower represents less than itdid in the past.”

October, 2007George Bodenheimer

President, ESPN, Inc.and ABC Sports;

Co-chairman,Disney Media Networks“What I find amazing

today is that 30 coupleshave told us they namedtheir babies after ESPN

with variations like ‘Espen.’Very few companies can

claim this affinity withtheir customers or as we

like to say—fans.”


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The one doesn’t work without theother.You can’t just have creativepeople, nor can you have only busi-nesspeople, and my job is to makesure that within the group at everylevel, we always try to have that bal-ance between creativity and thereality of the business.”

April, 2008Robert GreenblattPresident of Entertainment,Showtime Networks“The mandate is that we needshows that have some kind ofextraordinary hook to them.They’vegot to be inherently provocative orsurprising.There is a lot of clutterand we are on the smaller end ofthings.We can’t get away with just agood cop show, or a really good lawshow.We have to do something thatin its very description makes peoplesit up and lean forward.We have tohave an idea that immediately makesyou cock your head and go, ooh,how is that going to work? Thenyou have to figure out how to makeit really extraordinary—that’s theeasier part!”

April, 2008Jeremy AllaireCEO, Brightcove“We’re seeing an evolution in thekind of TV product that people aremaking available online.The lasttwo years were about clips, short-

form content that people couldsnack on through the web. Mediacompanies are now making the ‘fullmeal’ available instead of a snack.We’re working on products thatsupport that, to allow people tomore easily offer mid-form andlong-form programming in a veryhigh-quality way, up to HD quality,on the web.”

April, 2008Christie HefnerChairman/CEO, Playboy Enterprises“The basic idea of a post–feministrevolution, post–sexual revolutionmentality of ‘I expect to have acareer. I expect to be treated fairly.I expect to be treated seriously. Iexpect to be with a man who isgoing to share responsibilities.AndI also want to dress sexy and havefun when I go out,’ seems verymuch to be the point of view ofthe majority of young womentoday. I think it’s a healthy perspec-tive and in a self-interested way avery good point of view fromPlayboy’s perspective.”

April, 2008Jana BennettDirector, BBC Vision“Britain is marked by a lot moredebate about public-servicebroadcasting.The press some-times contributes a lot to it. Atother times they don’t necessarilyrecognize or celebrate thestrengths of British broadcasting;instead, they spend an awful lotof time on slightly negativeactivities, that sort of interrogat-ing—they’re navel-gazing, really.America looks more at how doyou end up being world class,Britain worries more about howwe regulate.”

April, 2008Elisabeth MurdochChairman/CEO, Shine Group“Strong producers will put theirproduct where they know they’llget the most return. I think that’sa huge testament to an inde-pendent distributor, who can benimble and a superb salesman. It’s

an alternative to the studios.Youlook at FremantleMedia orEndemol, and they’re makingworldwide successes out of prod-ucts from the U.K. that they ownthe IP to and distribute interna-tionally. [The studios] can’t insu-late [themselves] from the impactof that kind of producers’ eco-nomic success.”

April, 2008Martha StewartFounder, Martha Stewart LivingOmnimedia“We have marthastewart.com andwe’re tweaking it daily.About twomonths ago we had the Marthalogo and its pretty colors on thehome page, and it said ‘TheMartha Stewart Show.’ But it didn’thave the heading ‘Television.’Everything is at a glance on theweb.You have to be very obviousto get the traffic, to get the eye-balls. So I said, Change the headerto say ‘Television.’Well, the nextday we had a 57-percent increasein traffic just by changing ‘TheMartha Stewart Show’ to‘Television! The Martha StewartShow,’ and it has continued tobuild and build and build. So youmust experiment with the wordsyou use on a website to attractthe eyeballs, which are beingdrawn in a billion different[directions].”

April, 2008Bonnie HammerPresident, USA Network and SCI FI Channel“We’re looking towards the net-works as our competition asopposed to looking over our shoul-der to see who is catching up to us.It’s no fun looking backwards just tosee who’s nipping at your heels.Thefun, and the challenge, is lookingahead to see where you can go andgrow.The goal for USA is not nec-essarily to be the fifth network. It’sreally to be the most respected TVbrand out there. Lose the word‘cable.’ Lose the word ‘broadcast.’When you look at the kids growingup, they don’t know the differencebetween a broadcast network and acable channel. Our goal is to be themost respected television brand or,frankly, media brand.We have suchgreat online sites as well.”

April, 2008Abbe RavenPresident/CEO,A&E Television Networks“AETN is a global media enter-tainment company, so I feel it iscritical to invest in original pro-gramming. It helps us direct ourcore channels like A&E to be notonly a top ten network but a topfive network. It helps The HistoryChannel continue to grow and it’swhat makes our brands successful


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April, 2008Jeff Zucker

President/CEO, NBC Universal“We’ve greenlit a lot of showsbased on seeing the pilot and

that hasn’t really gotten usanywhere, except to waste alot of money. The greenlight

decision in many instances willhave to be based on our gut,our knowledge of the writersand actors who are involved,

and our belief in the concept.But frankly that’s no different

than what we do on the filmside. We don’t make a pilot of

a film before we decide tomake the film.”


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around the world. It’s all aboutbeing a content company.We’rereally one of the few companiesthat produces and airs both nonfic-tion and drama.We’re unique inthat regard and that has helpedbrand us as who we are.”

April, 2008Sheila NevinsPresident, HBO Documentary Films“Well, I have a particular passionfor people who wouldn’t beknown unless we embraced them.So a bio-pic or a bio-doc isn’tunusual for us. I think commonmen and women have uncommonthings to say. Just human survivalhas its own eloquence and fame isnot necessarily any more worthy oftelevision or of a documentary’sattention than anonymity. I likeanonymous people a lot. I like thestories they have to tell.

The uncommon in the commonis just so incredibly interesting tome. I like to talk to people and Ilike docs that talk to people.Andit’s so odd to be in a fame business

and find that the best docs are usu-ally about unknown people.”

April, 2008Shonda RhimesCreator/Executive Producer,Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice“I definitely would say [characters]inhabit my head on an ongoingbasis.That’s been the toughest partfor me—they don’t go away! Theyfeel like they’re a part of my lifeand in a very strong way I feel likeI have these friends, who are doc-tors, who live in this world in thishospital and I spend a lot of time[with them] and nobody elsespends that kind of time [withcharacters]. So in a weird way thereis this whole imaginary world thatis very, very real to me.”

April, 2008Lynda La PlanteFounder, La Plante Productions“Nobody is actually looking at ashow and saying,‘This was a reallybeautiful, artistic piece of work.’What they are saying is,‘Whoops, it

got a million viewers, we’re down2 percent in our viewing figures.’Viewing figures have now becomeof such importance.And the sadthing is that if the BBC has a ter-rific show, they will put it againstITV’s best show. If two prestigiousdramas are on at the same time,viewing is cut by half.”

April, 2008Hisashi HiedaChairman/CEO, Fuji Television“Compared to other content pro-ducers, the production personnel ofour entertainment programs arevery young and authorized tomake big decisions.This leads tothe production of programs thatrespond to the times.As a result,advertisers value us as a broadcasterthat’s supported by the youngergeneration, a group that [is a maintarget for advertisers].”

April, 2008Li RuigangPresident, Shanghai Media Group“Last year, we took the lead inChina to acquire formats from anumber of international compa-nies.The formats acquired provedto be very successful after beinglocalized properly.We are lookingforward to more involvement inthe international media industry.”

May, 2008Amy PascalCo-chairman,Sony Pictures Entertainment“The nice thing about a franchiseis that you can rely on it in yourschedule. If you have somethinglike a Spider-Man or a James Bondyou can organize your releaseschedule around that, which isgreat. But the challenge is to keepeach film in your franchise freshand original and make each picturea stand-alone movie. It isn’t neces-sarily true that the same peoplewho go to see the first one also seethe second one.You want to acti-vate a whole new audience.We’vedone it successfully and we’ve doneit unsuccessfully, and the times thatwe’ve done it successfully are when

we understood why the first movieworked and we tried to emulatethe emotional intention of themovie and we stayed with the storyand with the characters.”

June, 2008Alexander RodnyanskyCEO, CTC Media“You can definitely see how impor-tant television is in Russia, becausegiven the sheer size of the country,there is no national distribution fornewspapers, for magazines, for radio,so television is the only trulynationwide medium. If you are anational advertiser, and want tolaunch your brand in Russia, youwould definitely go to TV.And ifyou look at ad prices on a cost-per-thousand (CPM) basis, you wouldunderstand why television has suchpotential to grow even morebecause it’s cheaper. I know itsounds strange for people from theWest, but television is cheaper thanradio or newspapers or magazines.”

June, 2008Michael GarinCEO,Central European Media Enterprises“In the United States, as new tech-nologies evolve, [the networks]

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April, 2008Simon SchamaHistorian/TV Presenter“In Britain, there is so much talent, [although] inevitably,even in Britain, once you get a hit there is a sort ofunderstandable craving to reston your laurels and do the samething over and over and overagain. Obviously, I wish therewere more money to actuallyproduce original documentariesin the U.S. I do think we are suffering slightly fromblockbusteritis. The big commercial sponsors are willing to sponsor the namesthat have become monumentalin documentary-making, andthat’s sort of the arteriosclerosisof the creative [process].”


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have the talent to create programsbut [they] don’t have the resourcesbecause the revenues are gettinglower and lower and lower.Theaudience gets fragmented, theadvertisers are going to stop payingfor this stuff at a certain point, andnobody is going to buy it on asubscription basis. One of the rea-sons [they are] not going to be ableto satisfy the advertisers is because[they are] not going to be able toprogram—people will choose whatthey want to watch, when theywant to watch it.There’s no abilityto let one program lead out intoanother one.And no promotions—there’s not going to be a network,so you’re not going to be able toair all those promos saying, comingup at 10 o’clock, watch so-and-so. Ijust don’t see the networks beingviable over time.”

October, 2008Michael EisnerFounder,The Tornante Company“I can’t decide whether it’s goingto be evolutionary and will happenover time, or someone will createsomething like The Sopranos or Sexand the City or Happy Days orSeinfeld, that everybody in Americajust has to see and then the aggre-gators will say, Hey, wait a minute,this is more important than search.This is more important than user-generated.And that is on the hori-zon. I don’t know if it will happenfrom our company, but the likeli-hood is it will happen from some-body we never heard of.”

October, 2008Hernán LópezCOO, Fox International Channels;President, Fox Latin America and U.K.“Almost the majority of our rev-enues come from either emergingmarkets or mature markets with arelatively low cable-and-satellitepenetration. So even if we didnothing, which as you know, is notin our DNA, our channels stillhave a lot of upside from havingstrong ratings and being in a mar-ket that has 25-percent penetration[with the potential to grow to] 80-percent penetration.There’s no rea-son why rich markets around theworld wouldn’t be able to get tothe levels of penetration that yousee in the U.S.And at the sametime, we will continue to launchchannels wherever it makes finan-cial sense. Most of our channelsbreak even within six quarters oflaunch.And again, we have man-aged to do that because of ourscale and our very sharp attentionto margins and operating costs.”

October, 2008Armando Nuñez, Jr.President, CBS ParamountInternational Television“There are many more pipes outthere that need content. Have themodels been worked out? Are theysignificant revenue generators at thispoint? No, they are not.Are we

spending a lot of time trying to fig-ure out how to best exploit ourcontent on these new distributionpipes? Absolutely.We are optimisticthat there are going to be someviable revenue models via these newdistribution platforms, and mostimportantly, that we are able to do itin a manner that is complementaryto our traditional business.To canni-balize the traditional piece, particu-larly at a time when internationaldemand for our content is thriving,might be counterproductive. Somost importantly we have to find away that is complementary.”

October, 2008Ynon KreizChairman/CEO, Endemol“It’s not an exact science.Wemake a lot of shows, not just thebig giant tent-poles. Last year weproduced more than 500 differentshows in almost 60 countries.Weactually do a lot more than thevery big shows. Some of them areonly made by the Endemol teamsin the different countries for thelocal broadcasters. Others travelto just a few countries, whilesome of the shows surface andrise above the others to becomeglobal hits.When we start theprocess, we never know howstrong the show will be and wemake decisions about the showson a case-by-case basis.”

October, 2008Marc CherryCreator, Desperate Housewives“You know, there are momentswhen I marvel at the things I’msupposed to give my opinionon! When they handed me theDesperate Housewives perfumeand asked me to smell it, Ithought, what in my back-ground prepared me for thismoment, exactly?”

October, 2008Tim KellyPresident/CEO,National Geographic Ventures“We have had a number of bigdiscussions internally to makesure we are focused on what wethink is important.We’re notreally a media company.Wehave media capabilities, but weare a nonprofit institution.Wefund research, exploration and alot of educational activities, andmedia is one of the ways wereach people. But we have toentertain people before we caninform them.

We are really focused on thebig urgent issues of the day, andit’s not just the gloom anddoom.We want to look at whathappens in the long run basedon the different choices we canmake and focus on some of thesolutions.”


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October, 2008Philippe DaumanPresident/CEO,Viacom

“Over this ten-year periodthat you describe, we have

maintained a presence in China. Clearly, it is an impor-

tant market for the future.For the media business,

though, it has not been a veryprofitable market. We need to

see improvement in the legalstructure there, includingenforcement of copyright,

which we anticipate shouldimprove over time. As the

country sees more indigenousbusiness development, they

will want this protection. Butwe also need greater access.The entire U.S. film industry

is limited in the number ofmotion pictures that can beviewed in China. There are

only 25 Western movies thatcan be exhibited in China on

an annual basis for all studios.So you don’t have access andyou can’t choose which films

go in; the government decideswhich ones are allowed.

And as we all know, there arepiracy problems.”


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October, 2008Tim KringCreator, Heroes“There are literally a half a dozen ofus at the top who share a tremen-dous amount of responsibility, andbecause of the size and scale andpace of it, it’s almost like being inwartime! You’re making decisionson the fly and in hallways and onthe stairwell on the way to a meet-ing.You cross paths every once in awhile and bark out orders to eachother and then go in differentdirections. It’s a real three-ring cir-cus! But the truth is there are divi-sions within the ‘company,’ if that’swhat it’s called! [Laughs] What’sinteresting for me is that I didn’tcome from a background of run-ning a large enterprise. I didn’t goto business school.There was liter-ally no training at all.You justinvent the wheel every day.”

October, 2008Linda McMahonCEO,World Wrestling Entertainment“WWE is really about human emo-tion and passion, whether the storylines within our programming cap-ture business rivalries or professionaljealousies or sibling rivalries.Andsometimes there has even been theMcMahon family involved with

husband and wife rivalries! And theyare acted out on our stage, which isa 20-foot-by-20-foot ring.There arethe interviews that take place back-stage that set the tone for what’sgoing on, then there’s the actualmatch that adds the sports element,then there is the contact side in thering, but it’s still all entertainment. Ittranslates across every language andacross so many ages because therereally is something for everyone at aWWE event.There’s action, there’spyrotechnics, there’s music, there’ssome vaudeville.We even have wed-dings in our shows.We captureevery aspect of human emotion andfor all age groups, and if we’ve doneour job well, we’ve put a lot ofsmiles on people’s faces.”

October, 2008Carol MendelsohnExecutive Producer/Showrunner, CSI“CSI has been the catalyst for aboom in procedural dramas. It hasreinvented the cop drama.WatchLaw & Order.At every crime scenethere are now forensic investigatorsin jackets and latex gloves.Watchany cop show or film for that mat-ter, and you will see CSIs.Watchany stunningly visual film today, andyou will see CSI shots.AnthonyZuiker’s pilot for CSI, directed byDanny Cannon, created a newvisual language for the screen.”

October, 2008Jeff DunnCEO, HIT Entertainment“In our business, unless you havecritical scale of audience awarenessand fondness for the characters,then it’s really tough to be in anybusiness off screen.The cost ofmaking toys, the cost of makinghome videos, certainly the cost ofcreating theme-park attractions,requires that you have a bigenough, loyal audience to makethat pay off.The attractions busi-ness, however, has a different [com-ponent], which is, the people whoown theme parks are spending mil-lions and millions of dollars tobuild the structure and it’s going tolast a long time. So you don’t want

brands that are going to be a fad,here today, gone tomorrow, nomatter how popular they are.”

October, 2008Andy DuncanChief Executive, Channel 4“As is happening in a number ofcountries, the traditional terrestrialbroadcasters are seeing their shareeroded as you get multichannelgrowth and the fragmentation of[the audience] and therefore of adrevenue.And while we’ve had avery successful portfolio strategyand we’ve built up a number ofchannels—notably E4, More4,Film4 and 4Music—in [terms of]ad revenues they are not as lucra-tive as the traditional core channelhas been.Therefore, we are seeingerosion of revenues.”

October, 2008Claude SchmitManaging Director, SUPER RTL“The target group has shrunk.Today there are a lot less German

kids.A couple of years ago we had9 million, now we have 7.5 million,so it is a huge decrease in the targetgroup.And at the same time, thecompetition from other channelshas increased.We have Nickelodeonin the German market again, whichis playing a role. Obviously, thepublic channel KI.KA is playing arole.And there is a fragmentationfrom other media as well.”

October, 2008David ZaslavPresident/CEO, DiscoveryCommunications“We have 20 years of programmingin our library and it’s like a firehose.We don’t have to have thatfire hose wide open right nowbecause we think our content isreally valuable and we are monetiz-ing it by building channels aroundthe world.We are [showing ourcontent] on a lot of platforms butwe haven’t opened that hose wideopen because, on a number ofthese platforms, it’s a balance.There


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October, 2008Chad Hurley

Co-founder/CEO,YouTube“What happens on YouTube

is a reflection of what isimportant and relevant in the

world. YouTube provides aforum where people gather

and express themselves,share experiences and reflecton what they think about and

care about moment tomoment. And we’re the onlybroadcast medium that canprovide this group with therelevant mix of mass, niche

and personal media theydemand. In other words,

every user on YouTubebecomes his or her own content programmer.”


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are people consuming content onthese new platforms but we alsohave to be careful that there is abusiness model on those platformsthat makes sense.”

October 2008Ronnie ScrewvalaCEO, UTV SoftwareCommunications“The uniqueness of India is that itis going to be a very high-growthdomestic market plus it’s going tobe an excellent hub for growth inAsia. Some Indian companiesunderstand working the Westernmodel almost as well as the Westerncompanies. I think, therefore, wewould be able to grow exponentiallyin size and footprint.”

November, 2008Laureen OngCOO, STAR Group“I find it amusing how many newpan-regional channels are poppingup here in Asia. It’s a tough marketto play in, because there’s not a lotof money to go around to support

the channels.There are more andmore players, so it’ll be interestingto see how that shakes out in thefuture.When I got here I killed acouple of channels that [STARwas] thinking about doing thatwere going to be pan-regional innature, in the English language.When you actually looked hard atthe P&L [profit and loss statements]of these channels, they were nevergoing to make money.At the endof the day, you have to remindpeople, we are a business!”

January, 2009Ted HarbertPresident/CEO, ComcastEntertainment Group“Sure you can make the show avail-able on your website or on Hulu,but I have to again question that.Though NBC is struggling withHeroes, which is a well-made pro-gram, they’re saying it’s down to 7 million viewers, but another 2 million viewers watch it on thedigital offering.And I say, howhappy are you with that? Are you

monetizing that? Is it cannibalizingyour network run? We don’t streamfull-length versions of our showsbecause our affiliate deals don’t per-mit it, but if I could, I’m not sure Iwould, because we’re still in thebusiness of trying to deliver highratings to the advertisers.And if afew households with people metersare watching a show on Huluinstead of watching it on NBC,doesn’t that affect their ratings? Anddoes the monetization come out thesame? I don’t think so.”

April, 2009Jon FeltheimerCo-chairman/CEO, Lionsgate“At the end of the day, I would saythe key is that the economicdownturn is a great wake-up callfor all of us to look at the businesseswe’re running and how muchoverhead we’re spending and justmake sure that we are employingour capital as efficiently as possible.I gave the keynote speech atNATPE and I said,‘A bad economyis the best critic on the planet.’Atthe end of the day, consumers arebeing a lot more selective abouttheir entertainment, and that saysto all entertainment executives thatwe have to be particularly disci-plined and selective about the waywe run our business.”

April, 2009Matthew WeinerCreator, Mad Men“I wanted to show how differentthings were back then but also mynature is to show how similar thingsare [today].And even though theattitudes are less institutionalized andthank God there is legal protectionat work, for the most part I find thata lot of these things haven’t reallychanged. I really wanted to showthat when we look at history andwhen we look at people’s livesbefore us, we act very wisely andjudgmental because we know whathappened and how things haveturned out. But it’s kind of foolish,because to some degree peopledon’t change and you should recog-nize these people and recognize a

lot of their desires and hopes andobstacles from your own life.”

April, 2009Joe UvaCEO, Univision Communications“Univision Network is one ofAmerica’s top networks, regardlessof language and, in major marketsacross the nation, many nights beat-ing CBS, NBS, FOX and ABC.Over the past five years, Univision’sprime-time audience has increased17 percent while ABC, CBS, NBCand FOX have declined an averageof 16 percent.”

April, 2009Darren ThroopCEO, E1 Entertainment“We really want to get our threepillars [TV, film, music] of the busi-ness working collaboratively, so we

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April, 2009Jeffrey BewkesChairman/CEO,Time Warner“If we leave out the financial crisis that started last year, andlook at the preceding three orfour years, your question wouldstand: Why is it that mediastocks during those years—2005, 2006, 2007—didn’t goanywhere? If you look at most of that period, we were growingearnings around the 8- to 12-percent range quite regularly.In a normal long-term average,the value of your companywould go up somewhat in linewith the growth in your earnings, 8 to 12 percent. Butthat didn’t happen for most ofthe media companies, eventhough they were hitting expectations. And the reason isthat when investors looked outthree, four or five years, theyassumed that the earningswould stop and go flat. Theythought that media earningsfrom advertising on networks,movie tickets, DVD sales, etc.,would go flat because piracyand digital convergence wouldhollow out the revenues.”


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can unlock any synergies or anypotential for additional revenueopportunities.What we’ve built is amajor alternative where you cantake a single piece of visual, audioor television content and plug itinto an infrastructure and we canmonetize all of those rights acrossthe group. Everything from pub-lishing and merchandising andlicensing to toys to whatever rev-enue streams can be derived fromthat piece of content.”

April, 2009Tony CohenCEO, FremantleMedia“FremantleMedia has made the stu-dios, along with U.S. broadcasters,far more open to material thatcomes from outside the U.S. Manyof the leading TV executives cometo places like London in the weeksbefore MIPTV and MIPCOM tosee what the local market is generat-ing, because the material is verypowerful and, in particular, the U.K.market has been the leadingexporter of entertainment and realityformats for many years.The U.S. isnow drawing level with it. It’sopened their eyes to what’s possible,

but it has also intrigued and whet-ted their appetites as to what thepotential of operating locally inmarkets around Europe might be.The only issue with that is that theexecution of those ambitions can bevery tricky, because in each of thelocal markets around the world youneed credibility and relationships,the same as you do in the U.S., tomake a really strong business. Oneof the reasons why FremantleMediahas been so successful is the strengthof its local companies.They do havethat credibility in the local markets,and that’s a real challenge for theHollywood studios.”

April, 2009Bonnie HammerPresident, NBC Universal CableEntertainment and Universal CableProductions“We as cablers developed a certainprogramming savvy and learnedhow to come up with a level ofquality that the networks have hadfor all these years, and they’ve pro-vided a super learning curve for us.Now, I think it’s time for the net-works to turn around and learn alittle bit more about promotingand marketing from a brand-centric point of view.”

April, 2009Sophie Turner LaingManaging Director for Entertainment, Sky“We’re about giving people choice.There’s a slight snobbery that multi-channel is only repeats, or low quality.And low quality is such a subjectivething, because a lot of what getstalked about is how much youspend on the programming. It’s nothow much you spend; it’s what youspend it on. So, this [idea] thatmultichannel is all cheap TV is actu-ally wrong, because what we’redelivering is lots of programmingfor peoples’ various passions.”

April, 2009Emiliano CalemzukPresident, Fox Television Studios“What we tried to do was hedgethe financing risk by creating

another mechanism of producingU.S. series that doesn’t rely onspending tens of millions of dollarsevery year on pilots, 90 percent ofwhich never see the light of day.There is a lot of waste in that tradi-tional big-studio model.We cameup with this more cost-efficientway.We go directly to 13 episodesso the series doesn’t get cancelledon episode four. It’s an asset thatwe can sell around the world; wecan also sell DVDs.”

April, 2009Lorenzo PellicioliCEO, De Agostini Group“Growth, in every sector, isachieved through research andinnovation.We therefore wish to setup, as soon as possible, a network ofcreative talent that is able to developideas that can be exported to themarkets where we already are pres-ent as well as in those in which wewould like to operate. For that rea-son, besides focusing on creativity,we are also intent on distribution, aswe are present in many countries,mostly European.”

April, 2009Herbert KloiberChairman,Tele München Group“The classic Fox, Sony, Paramountoutput deals, you would have tocherry-pick too much to be able toreally fulfill the needs of what our

clients are looking for.We are look-ing to spend more money on sin-gle projects than to just be at thereceiving end of a big output deal.”

April, 2009Nancy DubucExecutiveVP/General Manager,History“I think we’ve done an excellentjob of being everywhere that theconsumer is.We’re in the gamingcommunity.We’re one of iTunes’top nonfiction brands.We’re a globalbrand, a new-media brand, a digitalbrand, a traditional linear brand, apublishing brand and a consumer-products brand.We have one of themost robust factual DVD businessesin the industry, and we are in educa-tion. I feel confident that we areeverywhere that the consumer is.And we’ll continue to follow them.If they find new places to go, thenwe’ll find new places to be.”

April, 2009Cyma ZarghamiPresident, Nickelodeon and MTVN Kids and Family Group“When a property like iCarly,which is now almost a householdname, gets an incredible audienceevery week and has this other ele-ment that is extremely popular, thewebsite iCarly.com, then it feelslike there is an opportunity to givethe consumer more in multiple


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April, 2009Wadah Khanfar

Director-General,Al Jazeera“I think the next phase of ourreporting should concentrateon bringing hope to the newgenerations. Unfortunately,this region has seen a lot of

blood, a lot of conflict and alot of sadness because of

many wars and many confrontations. Since Al

Jazeera is widely seen by theaudience, it should have

programs and a philosophy ofreporting that encourages

hope for youth and hope thatthe new generation might be

prosperous and open. Withoutthat kind of hope, extremism

and radical views arise anddesperate people may think of

various ideas that could destabilize our future.”


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places.That is how we go about it.Then you have to stay true to whatthe property is.Again, it is a showthat is steeped in digital. It’s a com-edy and it has characters that arereally resonating, so we take thecombination of those three thingsand try to make the best possibleproducts that we can and put themin front of the consumer.”

April, 2009Shigeo FukuchiPresident, NHK“Because a single TV network facesconstraints on budget and produc-tion capacity in making majorseries, international joint produc-tion involving multiple broadcastersis one important approach.Wewould not be able to make a six-part series on our own. Movingforward, we want to account forthe demands of overseas marketsand international perspectives rightfrom the program-developmentstage, with our goal being to makeprograms that will be more appeal-ing to the global market.”

May, 2009Bruce RosenblumPresident,Warner Bros.Television Group“In addition to our scripted suc-cess, we have more than a dozenunscripted/reality programs on theair or scheduled to premiere thisyear. So, it’s not a matter of all of asudden beginning to compete withFremantleMedia or Endemol.We’ve been in this business and arehighly successful at it. In fact, Ithink you see Fremantle andEndemol now trying to competewith us, in terms of trying toexpand their programming toinclude scripted series.”

June, 2009Adrian SarbuPresident/COO, Central European Media Enterprises“One of the pillars of our businessmodel has been to develop and pro-duce our own content—and that’snot only news but also local nonfic-tion and especially local fiction. Ourlocal content sets us apart from the

competition because it delivers suchgood ratings for us. In addition, overthe last 15 years, we have succeededin changing the whole perceptionof commercial television.”

October, 2009James MurdochChairman/Chief Executive for Europeand Asia, News Corporation“Only five years ago, when I firstwent to the U.K., people said themarket was mature, that it couldn’tgrow anymore, that the BBC wastoo strong, et cetera, the same thingsthey’ve been saying for a long time,and yet we’ve managed to grow thesubscriber base in the U.K. enor-mously since that time.That is con-trary to what anyone would havebelieved possible, and the same goesfor Italy, where people said that tomerge Stream and Telepiù would bevery difficult, and the marketplacewas too challenging, and Italian cus-tomers were very happy with RAIand Mediaset.We disagreed, and wethink that customers around theworld like choice.They like a com-pany that cares about them.Theylike great programming and theywill pay for a great offering andthey’ll pay for consistent innovation.We’ve seen that over and over againand I don’t see a major reason whyGermany should be any different.”

October, 2009Anne SweeneyCo-chair, Disney Media Networks;President, Disney/ABC Television Group“Hulu has a different audiencethan the audience we get forabc.com.The Hulu audience ismore of a casual viewer, generallymore male.We know that theabc.com audience, while youngerthan the ABC audience, is olderthan the Hulu audience.”

October, 2009Octavio FlorisbalCEO,TV Globo“We believe that mobile phonesand digital television outside thehome will drive digital growth inBrazil. If we look at mobile phones

first, Brazilians adore talking on their cell phones and lovechanging their cell phones. In Brazilthere are 160 million cell phonesand we predict that in five to eightyears these 160 million phone own-ers will be able to receive televisionfor free,without paying anything.”

October, 2009Steve MoskoPresident, Sony Pictures Television“A while ago, some of us on thestudio side were in denial.Wethought that [reality TV] wouldcome and go and that it was justcheap programming that was goingto help the bottom line at the net-works.The reality is, no pun

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October, 2009Matt GroeningCreator/Executive Producer,The Simpsons“The density of the scripts onthe show are due partly to inse-curity and just thinking maybethis joke doesn’t work, but if wethrow three more jokes in there,that will help, and partlybecause that just became oursignature—we tried to do jokesfor everybody watching. That is,there are jokes that are verybroad and silly for kids, a lot ofphysical humor, which we like,going back to silent comedy likeBuster Keaton and CharlieChaplin. And we love animation,and with animation you takeadvantage of exaggeration andmayhem. And then we put inreally smart jokes for peoplewho have read a few books andseen a few films. And it turnsout that it doesn’t matter if youdon’t get every joke. You canstill enjoy the jokes that you dounderstand. There is a secretgoal in all of this, which is tomake the show watchable morethan one time. By having somany things going on on-screenat the same time, and so manythings go by so quickly, there isno way you can get every singlejoke in one viewing.”


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intended, that that’s far from thecase.These shows are not only partof network schedules, they are partof our culture here and around theworld.A lot of these reality showshave become watercooler shows.Whether it’s American Idol orDancing with the Stars or Survivor,those are shows that are top of mindfor folks.”

October, 2009Cathy PayneCEO,Endemol Worldwide Distribution“In this market [buyers] are moreselective and looking for reliabilityin programming—something thatis long-running and has a proventrack record. Networks are morelikely to buy a rerun of a provenshow, or buy an extra run, asopposed to something new—it’soften more cost-effective and reli-able as they know what they arebuying.While networks will alwaysspend their big money on thosebig shows that define their net-work, I do think that well-pricedacquisitions for the right producthave come into play. But without adoubt everyone is very selectiveand not buying anything morethan what they need.”

October, 2009Susan WhitingVice Chair/Executive VP,The Nielsen Company“We are learning that overall videousage is up.And the amount oftime that people are spending onadditional screens beyond TV—onthe PC and the mobile phone—isincreasing.The additional screensare actually complementary.Theyare building on top of TV usage;they are not cannibalizing eachother.We do see more simultane-ous use: when people are on theInternet, they are also watchingTV, and vice versa. However, theactual amount of viewing of videoonline and on phones is still rela-tively small; they are just growingat a faster pace.The average timespent watching video online permonth is 3 hours and 11 minutes,

while watching TV in the home is141 hours and 3 minutes per user.So 99 percent of the viewing isstill on the big screen.”

October, 2009Lee BartlettManaging Director, ITV Studios“I don’t believe that any one com-pany,no matter what its reputationor how creative it is, can have a lockon creative talent. I am interested increative talent, and as long as itmakes financial sense,whether it’sthrough partnerships, joint ventures,housekeeping deals, any name youwant to put to it, I want to havepeople present ideas that we canthen turn around and develop andproduce. I don’t care where theycome from.And I’m not a bigbeliever in having a giant staff ofcreative people, because I think cre-ativity is best done in small groups.”

October, 2009Jamie OliverCelebrity Chef“When I was doing School Dinners,I went into a lot of the kids’ homesand I saw them eating such rubbish.I realized that there’s a whole gen-eration who can’t cook and so theirkids aren’t eating any home-cookedfood. So it’s important because ifwe’ve got people growing up eatingrubbish every day and never learn-ing to cook for themselves, the situ-ation can only get worse over thenext generation and the one after.”

October, 2009Tom RogersCEO/President,TiVo“What we are now seeing is wherecontrol meets what I’ll call infinitechoice.That takes TiVo from beinga device that can record program-ming that is coming through lineartelevision and turns it into a devicethat allows you to get anything youwant whenever you want—andrecording is simply one way of hav-ing that choice.With the facilitationof broadband video to the televisionset and the integration of contentthat cable and satellite do not pro-vide, whether it is through Amazon

or Netflix or Blockbuster orYouTube, you have the ability toget to your television what youwant, when you want it, whether ornot it’s on linear television. So whatwe’re seeing is choice meets con-trol; control meets choice. It’s theinteraction of the amount of choiceand the ultimate control that youcan assert over that.”

October, 2009Dawn AireyChair/Chief Executive, Five“I’m never satisfied! I’m sort ofthe Oliver Twist of chief execu-tives when it comes to perfor-mance: ‘Give me more!’ I alwayswant more!”

October, 2009Andreas BartlManaging Director for German FreeTV, ProSiebenSat.1 Media“TV on demand is a very importanttrend among viewers and will con-tinue to be so over the next years.It’s not as big in Germany yet as it isin the U.S. But viewers, and espe-cially young viewers, have grown upwith the Internet and have becomeaccustomed to having what theywant immediately, anytime and any-place.This is also something we aredealing with and will continue todo so in the future.We are ready forthis development, and we take itvery seriously.”


October, 2009Ron HowardDirector/Producer“Every filmmaker or televisionproducer or director hopes thattheir story is going to be so riveting that people just can’thelp but drop everything andwatch it start to finish, but thatisn’t the way we live today. I dothe same thing. I watch stuff onmy computer. I haven’t quitetaken to watching shows on myiPhone yet, but my wife hassome favorite shows that shelikes to watch and revisit andshe has those on her iPod—andwe’re not kids.”


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