Christine Fellowes

World Screen Weekly, December 20, 2007

Managing Director for the Asia Pacific

Comcast International Media Group

Hong Kong has long been referred to as the New York of the East, partly for its ability to attract immigrants from around the world, lured by the city’s hodgepodge of cultures and economic prosperity. Christine Fellowes’s love affair with the former British colony began as soon as she arrived. While visiting an old school friend who was working for STAR, which was just being launched, the Australian native knew she wanted her time in Hong Kong to be more than a vacation. “There was an economic boom and it was the beginning of the sense that China was the future and Hong Kong was going to be the economic golden gate to China.”

While her childhood aspiration had been to be a fashion designer, Fellowes began her career in Hong Kong in advertising, entering into a venture with DDB Needham to service the agency’s global clients, including Turner Broadcasting System, which tapped Fellowes to start its home-entertainment business in Asia. At the height of the dot-com boom, Fellowes made the switch to an Internet start-up, before being asked by E! Networks to begin its operations in the region. In those early days of pay TV, Fellowes says, part of her job was “to change consumer behavior, to change television-viewing patterns, to educate people that they could pay for choice in television. It was a pioneering time and a very entrepreneurial time, and there was a vision for the business; it was definitely long-term thinking and investment.”

The E! brand is now well established in Asia through a mix of 24-hour channels, program syndication and new-media deals. Fellowes will be employing a similar path with other brands within the recently formed Comcast International Media Group, including Style Network. “The mandate is to build our brands and build value for our brands in markets and to make money. In this digital world, [the entry strategy] can be linear television or nonlinear television or syndicated programming or mobile or a combination of all of those. We’ve used syndication as an entry strategy in markets where there were regulatory barriers or where the business plans didn’t make sense. Other markets, that are launching digital platforms and wanting new brands, we can put up a feed and distribute it over a number of markets quite cost-effectively.”

With all of those options, Fellowes says, “I’m able to be quite entrepreneurial. We don’t have a legacy of how we have to do deals. We have this huge brand wealth and I have such a passion for the brands we’re building. It’s all targeted toward upscale audiences; it’s pop culture and fashion and the outdoors and tech stuff, all of the things that have been a part of my life.”

—By Mansha Daswani