Q&A: Ward Platt

December 5, 2011 World Screen Interviews

 

Asia’s largest pay-TV channel operator with almost 30 brands, FOX International Channels (FIC) is employing a variety of methods to further expand its reach. As Ward Platt, president for the Asia Pacific and the Middle East at FIC, tells TV Asia Pacific, the company is rolling out more feeds for English-language pan-regional brands like Star World, FOX, FX and National Geographic Channel, among others; building local-entertainment brands like tVN; delving into the premium channel space; and, most recently, unveiling an online authenticated video player. The results have been increased viewership and strong ad-revenue gains region wide. He tells TV Asia Pacific about his priorities for 2012.
 
TV ASIA PACIFIC: What has been driving FIC’s success in Asia?
PLATT: When News Corp. invested in STAR TV back in the early ’90s, that early mover advantage really helped to get a presence in these markets for some of our brands. But it’s more than that. We happen to be blessed with great brands in general. And then getting a lot of support from News Corp. management [for] investing in and growing the business in Asia really helps. When we’ve wanted to launch new channels or invest in local production or acquire more rights, we’ve gotten a lot of support. That has been coming for ten-plus years. Fox International Channels as an organization has some 300 channels worldwide, of which 70-something are operated here in Asia; having that scale really helps us. With scale, you can go into each market and actually hire a person to run that business [locally], hire good salespeople, good finance people, make investments in the local level that might not be possible if you only had one or two channels. A bit of luck probably helps along the way!
 
TV ASIA PACIFIC: You have a huge slate with several channels that are very well distributed. What’s the next stage of growth in terms of the expansion of the bouquet?
PLATT: We’re still working with operators to grow pay-TV penetration. We have many channels, so whether we’re trying to distribute them in basic tiers or extended basic tiers, there are a lot of the basics we need to do, [including] building local advertising markets in some of these markets which are still underdeveloped in that area. But we are also forward-looking. We have 15 brands in the region in high definition. It’s not just in the markets you’d imagine, like Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan—we’re also seeing a big uptake for HD in the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia. We’re expanding even further online, merging the linear and nonlinear propositions. In some markets we rolled out a STAR Movies On Demand service through the set-top box last year. We’re taking that a step further to give that catch-up on-demand service on the PC and tablet and mobile devices. If you can authenticate with your operator that you’re a subscriber to our STAR Movies service—in some cases we’re rebranding that to Fox Movies Premium—you can then go to a website and get access to those on-demand movies on your PC, and soon on your tablet. Rather than developing an independent digital strategy, it has to be an integrated digital strategy that complements our linear business rather than competes with it.
 
TV ASIA PACIFIC: What opportunities do you see in the premium channel business?
PLATT: In a lot of parts of Asia, it hasn’t really succeeded. Based on our learnings elsewhere, we realized we needed to make a new aggressive push in that space. In order to do that you need to have a pretty big bouquet of premium services. We’ve got Fox Movies Premium. (In some places—in Taiwan and The Philippines—we’ll still have STAR Movies). We’ve got Fox Family Movies in many of our markets. We’ve got the HD versions of those channels. We’ve got the online player. When you combine these channels and their extensions, that starts to create enough value for the affiliates. They’re pretty keen because they’re also looking to grow their ARPU and launching more channels in basic doesn’t really help them make any more money. Launching premium, if it’s a compelling enough product, means they can earn probably 50 cents out of every $1 they collect and share that 50 cents with the program provider.
 
TV ASIA PACIFIC: Are you seeing growth in pan-regional and local ad sales?
PLATT: We are seeing growth. The whole global economic situation was a little worrying, but so far it’s been a good year. We’ve seen growth at the local level, a lot of markets where we’ve only recently launched more local feeds or built up our ad sales team—like the Philippines, Indonesia, even Vietnam. And then the more traditional markets: Australia had a bit of a tough go but it’s still tracking on our budget, Taiwan is a strong market, Japan has been very strong, oddly enough. We launched a free satellite business, a BS channel. Agencies and clients have been lining up to sponsor shows or buy slots.
 
TV ASIA PACIFIC: How much are you doing in terms of local content creation?
PLATT: Within FIC, our CEO, Hernan Lopez, said about a year ago that one of the key goals is to create and own more content. And that’s at all levels—The Walking Dead, global things, [and] very local productions. We can have channels that are 100 percent full of local content [such as tVN]. Even brands like FOX and STAR World, they may be 90-percent foreign content but they should always be 10 or 15 percent local content. In Asia, we’ve been quite advanced in creating a lot of local content for National Geographic Channel—we produce 50 to 60 hours a year in Asia. In Latin America and Europe, FIC has developed drama and other local productions more advanced than we are here in Asia. But in the last year we’ve been really pushing to ramp things up. STAR Chinese Channel in Taiwan produces about 1,500 hours a year of content already. It’s mostly variety, reality, game shows, a little bit of drama. It’s nice to have that base there because we’re already looking at ways to copy some of the things there and use that approach, which is relatively low cost and reasonable quality. We’re looking to introduce those types of productions onto our BS channel in Japan. And then we’re looking to greenlight some drama productions for a couple of markets.
 
We don’t really believe in the concept of making pan-Asian productions. We’re much more into making productions for Malaysia or for the Philippines or Japan specifically. Trying to make a show that satisfies seven or eight countries in Asia is something I don’t think we would be successful at and I don’t think there are that many examples of that succeeding.
 
In a market like Japan, there’s only so far you can go with Hollywood content or international documentaries. If we really want to push the dial further, we need to be investing more in local productions. It’s expensive because local production costs a lot in Japan. But we have little choice but to find ways to do it. We’re prepared to take a couple of million dollars a year and just make bets with it. As we start to have some success, we’ll increase that number.
 
TV ASIA PACIFIC: Can you tell us about your business in the Middle East?
PLATT: We have a good business in the Middle East. It’s evolved quite a bit. Like a lot of foreign players, we used to have a traditional strategy of, let’s take one of our existing feeds and throw some Arabic subtitles on it and beam it in from Europe or Asia and sell it to the pay-TV operator. We changed that approach about four years ago. We started to launch free-to-air satellite channels and we invested further in our pay-TV channels. We have a Fox Movies free-to-air Hollywood movie channel, we have a FOX free-to-air international TV series channel, all dubbed in Arabic. We have FX, another FTA channel with edgy TV series, all subtitled in Arabic. We have Nat Geo Abu Dhabi, in partnership with Abu Dhabi Media, 100-percent dubbed in Arabic, and we just launched Nat Geo Farsi. At the same time, we’ve been able to grow our pay-TV business. We focus much more on the HD strategy there.
 
It’s a much more vibrant business [now] because we’re earning money from the advertising on the free-to-air channels, the subscription is starting to grow as there’s been consolidation in pay TV, and [the clamp down on] piracy.
 
TV ASIA PACIFIC: What are your goals for 2012?
PLATT: We really believe in building strong local businesses in each and every market. Even FOX, STAR World and STAR Movies end up being better products that connect better with the audience if they [have] more people at the local level involved with creating and assembling them. What’s exciting is we’re launching more feeds of existing channels, in Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines. We have a deal with FOXTEL to launch FX in Australia. That’s a hard market to get into with new channels. It was a long, hard slog. We made a big investment and now we’re launching in March. It will have The Walking Dead exclusively and some great product from Sony, Twentieth Century Fox, CBS, BBC, quite a few different suppliers. That will be in HD. We launched this BS channel in Japan, which is a big focus. The BS channel is in more homes [than] our pay-TV channels. In markets like Thailand, we launched FOX last year into a nominal-cost, almost-freeview tier that has 2.5 million households. All the other foreign players, including our other channels, are only in 400,000 homes. So we want to be in all ends of the spectrum, from free satellite in places to low-cost, entry-level tiers, all the way up to the high end. We’re excited about the premium business. If we do it right, with the platform or even our competitor HBO, [we can] go out there together and create a really good premium-value proposition in a market where premium hasn’t succeeded. We’ve got HD, the [online] player. If you’ve got enough tonnage, let’s say 6-7 movie channels in a package and the price is affordable, maybe we can get in there and create 10, 20, 30 percent penetration. That’s huge found money for the platform and ultimately for us.