Ian Carroll

August 10, 2010 World Screen

This interview originally appeared in the MIPTV 2010 issue of TV Asia Pacific.  

The past year has seen tremendous growth for Turner Broadcasting System Asia Pacific. In February, the company picked up a majority interest in the Hindi-language entertainment channel NDTV Imagine. This followed the acquisitions last year of the Japanese networks Tabi Channel and MONDO21 and the Korean service QTV. In addition, Turner is starting to roll out the truTV channel brand on platforms in Asia, and has diversified its business with the launch of a content-syndication arm. Ian Carroll, Turner Broadcasting’s executive VP in Asia, is spearheading many of these new initiatives. Meeting with TV Asia Pacific at Time Warner’s Asian headquarters, Carroll talks about the growth opportunities ahead.
 
TV ASIA PACIFIC: How have operators responded to truTV?
CARROLL: We’ve been talking about truTV as a proposition for a little while. A number of operators have come to us and said, That is very interesting to us because we get that it’s different and that it represents a fairly unique proposition. We don’t have to knock on the door to talk to these guys—it’s part of an evolving conversation that we have with the operators. A number of them like it, they think it’s sticky; it’s got a slightly younger demographic. We’re working really hard to represent a fairly unique idea and a need for it in a space which is becoming increasingly crowded. Being able to announce in November 2009 and launch in early 2010—there aren’t too many other content companies that will do that, and I think it speaks volumes about the quality of the relationships we’ve got with platforms.
 
TV ASIA PACIFIC: You alluded to the crowded landscape—what’s driving this rush of channels to Asia?
CARROLL: There is a very big distinction between wanting to launch and actually launching. We’re hearing a lot of aspirational talk, a lot of hot talk, which is not necessarily being followed up with a great deal of action. There’s no one factor or one Asian trend. But we’re starting to see the payoff from digital investments by key platform operators in key territories. That’s really making a difference. And the telcos are becoming more sophisticated and very much more interested in this space, and, more importantly, that technology is now working. The only IPTV platform in Asia five years ago was Now Broadband. Now there are multiple platforms in multiple territories, all of which work and deliver a different proposition. It’s good news for content companies like us.
 
TV ASIA PACIFIC: What business areas are you focusing on?
CARROLL: The acquisitions in India, Japan and Korea—part of the responsibility we have is to cement those. The aim of those acquisitions is not to make them more like us, the aim is to increase the quality threshold of their output, ultimately make more money out of them. And secondly, taking the scope and scale that we now have in all of those markets and really making something of it is a big challenge. We know what the next step is, but the step after that and the step after that—we have four or five options in each case. We’re clarifying those and cementing those.
 
We have also launched a syndication business which we will really start to step up. That’s a significant initiative for Turner. We’re not just selling Cartoon Network and CNN to a DTH platform anymore. Our business is far more dynamic than that. The syndication element was the bit that was missing.
 
The best syndication outfit in the business is Warner Bros. International TV, and we’re not in any way attempting to compete with that. What we do have in the Turner family is a whole host of other content which is underleveraged on the entertainment side…things like Adult Swim content, the truTV content. And then on the news side, a significant amount of factual content from the CNN brand.
 
TV ASIA PACIFIC: What are the other growth opportunities for CNN?
CARROLL: It is very much about two aspects, leveraging the distribution we’ve got and increasing the stickiness and time spent on the network. CNN is absolutely everywhere and it will continue to be. Whether it’s on a mobile platform, PC screen or other mobile device or any other online environment, we will be there. That’s what CNNGo is all about. It is a really high-quality, very well-invested and marketed travel-and-lifestyle platform. And we’re looking at other streams of specialist news, including business news. And then HD.
 
TV ASIA PACIFIC: What about on-demand?
CARROLL: On-demand is something we have a dedicated infrastructure for and a sales force for in terms of the content. It’s something we consider to be one of our strengths, because we spend a tremendous amount of time owning and controlling our own content, which is the first step in any on-demand world. We are working with a lot of digital platforms with on-demand, unfortunately still as a marketing initiative for digital platforms. To my mind there really isn’t a viable business model in Asia yet for a paying VOD model, and if there is it certainly is not for news or kids’ and young-adult content. But we have it—in places like Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, we’ve already rolled out with platform operators, whether it’s a catch-up service or a subscription on-demand service or free on-demand.
 
There are two broader strategies that we’re trying to get our head around. One is increasing investment in content locally but leveraging that internationally. Our business has for a while now not been just about bringing in content made in the United States, which we’re very good at; now increasingly it is Hindi-language content or Japanese content or Korean content. Figuring out new business lines and very effective ways of getting that content shipped around the world and packaged to be locally relevant is really important to us. And then on the money-making side, our business models are increasingly not just about being paid by an advertiser per CPM or by a platform per subscriber. A lot of our business dealings now are in new business models. We are making money out of microtransaction models, so there’s this increasing sophistication now in terms of the number of buckets of money we need to fill up while figuring out new buckets, bigger buckets, and doing that efficiently.