UK: Google: pole position, Facebook: shooting star

News today that Google has managed to hold on to its top spot yet again in the rankings for most visited web property in the UK, bringing in some 28m visitors to its web sites in May 07, according to figures from comScore. Microsoft and eBay were ranked second and third, with 27.4m and 22.2m respective visitors to their sites. Yahoo was in fourth place with an estimated 20.6m visitors.

Interesting to note that Facebook had the biggest growth in traffic of all sites. Between April and May of this year, traffic on the social network went up by 30%, and comScore says Facebook's traffic has gone up by 2,123% over the last year. Despite this, with visitor numbers totalling 4.8m for the month of May, Facebook still doesn't make the top-20 rankings for the UK.

Part of the explosive growth surely must be down to the company having recently opened the site to new members--in the past it was restricted to people with college/university email addresses. That makes me wonder whether its growth will be sustainable in the longer term.

The way Facebook allows users to invite the entirety of their email address books in one click has definitely been used a lot lately. I'm not a high-volume Internet community type myself, but even I have had loads emails saying I've been added as a Facebook friend to other people's pages. (Each invite requires me to click in and approve the friendship, meaning more traffic for Facebook.)

When Google bought YouTube in 2006, there was a lot of speculation over whether Yahoo or a big media player would buy up Facebook. Founder Mark Zuckerberg has said he doesn't want to sell, but if this momentum keeps up beyond the 'signing up' stage, I won't be at all surprised if this actually happens.

Yahoo reshuffles, and Google follows it in Asia

Today's news, slipped in after the markets closed, was that Yahoo has finally reshuffled its top management, with Terry Semel out as CEO and Jerry Yang in. In an attempt to appease frustrated shareholders as Yahoo continues to lag behind Google in popularity (both for searches and for ad sales), Susan Decker has also been promoted up to the newly-created role of president to support Yang.

Jerry Yang, who was one of the founders of Yahoo, has in recent years focussed a lot of his attention on the company's growth in Asia. The search giant has struck some very fruitful deals in the East, for example partnering with Softbank in Japan to offer a hugely popular Internet and broadband service. And when things started to go awry in China, Yahoo decided to bank on a similar type of arrangement, striking up a joint venture with local partner Alibaba, of which it now owns 40%. It's also attracted controversy for complying with Chinese authorities to provide information about its users (with them subsequently landing in jail for making anti-government statements).

Human rights notwithstanding, if Yahoo was hoping that it had stolen a march on Google in the East, Jerry Yang might have to rethink the strategy. Last week, Google announced it would team up with the Chinese portal Sina to offer services on the mainland. Google already has a respectable portion of the market for search in China (some 19% according to Analysys International), but it has found it difficult to gain the same kind of dominance in China as it has in other (western) parts of the world. Now Google is following in the footsteps of its rival Yahoo in teaming up to target the market. Google has also taken a similar route in South Korea, and one wonders if Japan or other Asian countries might also be JV targets.

Chatting about this deal with our Hong Kong-based correspondent Craig, he relayed this anecdote: "I tried using Google inside China's great firewall and it was amazing how frustrating and useless it is as everything's blocked. The way China controls stuff, you really need a partner."

He went on to say that the Sina deal makes sense as China will continue to focus on holding up national Internet champions. China doesn't have laws enforcing joint ventures for foreign Internet companies that want to do business in the country (as it does for infrastructure-based businesses like telecoms). But the moves by Yahoo aligning with Alibaba and Yahoo teaming with Sina demonstrates that this seems to be the de facto route anyway.

Google Zeitgeist Europe 2007: Frenemies become friends of me

[this was originally published on www.totalcontentandmedia.com]

The days preceding a long weekend, especially in an early summer period, can be slow for news. This conversely makes it a good week for pow-wows among the titans of the media industry.

Monday kicked off with Google Zeitgeist Europe outside of London, a get-together for high-level executives—heads of industry, media giants, and leading technologists—to speak about Google and the latest in how technology and information will impact our lives. Of course, if the event's host has its way, those two topics will become even less mutually exclusive as time goes on.

Journalist attendance, according Google's European PR, was restricted to a "handful of general columnists" (meaning I was not invited). This also meant there wouldn't be lots of press coverage.

So, I decided to use Google Zeitgeist as to test of the search giant's usefulness in information gathering today.

The advances of social media and online video are such that many of the event's speeches were posted around the Internet. But there was a lot less 'chatter' about the event than I thought I would find. Perhaps this is a testament to attendees' loyalty to the big G.

Most of the speeches were quite high level—eg, the CEO of Orange, Sanjiv Ahuja, spoke about the need to extend communication to all parts of the developing world. He also pointed out that Orange's year-on-year revenue growth in Africa is 'north of 30%' and its margins in the region are some of the highest. "As human beings, we should be doing business everywhere," he concluded.

Stelios Haji-Ioannou, founder of Easy Jet and its affiliated companies, talked about climate change, chiding his executive audience for using private jets to get to events like Google Zeitgeist.

Among the info-bytes I came across, Google makes 40% of its advertising revenue outside of the US, with 19% in the UK alone. This is interesting information because in the past the company's not broken out these figures. (I found this on a Twitter entry from Loïc LeMeur, a social media entrepreneur and obsessive-compulsive user of its many tools.)

I also found an interview between Google's chief Eric Schmidt and the editor of the Economist, John Micklethwait. This had originally been posted on YouTube by Google, but curiously the first result for it in Google's weblog search was on what appears to be a Ninja-fan blog called Mung Ning Ryu. I'll leave it to you to make the connection between Ninjas and Google.

(Google incidentally has posted a number of other videos from the event on YouTube, many of which focus on topics like the environment.)

Schmidt uses public appearances to articulate what Google's ambitions are as a business. But he also spends quite a lot of time acting frankly surprised at the company's impact.

"We're beginning to see significant issues about our role in the world," he said during his interview at the Zeitgeist event. "We're trying to be more transparent and clear [about] how information is being used and what is available. "

Acting wide-eyed is not a bad way of deflecting negative attention Google might get as a result of its newfound power. But this doesn't work all the time:

Dylan Thwaites, CEO of search marketing company Latitude, he writes in his blog: "The audience got the chance to ask [one panel of advertising executives] questions – ostensibly about the panel topic “branding”. Zero interest in branding - two of the three questions were on the theme 'Is Google the enemy?' [Martin] Sorrell [WPP's CEO] says he invented the word 'Frenemy' to describe his $200m relationship with Google. Nikesh Arora, CEO EMEA for Google, pretended to mistake this for 'Friend of Me', so Sorrell now uses Froe (Friend /Foe). All very light hearted, but at the root of this there is an earthquake of change."

More specifics on change were not spelled out by attendees, but there has definitely been a shift in how Google thinks about itself. Back in his Economist-editor interview, Schmidt said: "One of the key messages [to Google employees] in the last month or two is that we want people to be focussed around the core business of Google, which is textual advertising." Note that he did not say "search," which used to be what Google would say their core business was.

What about the future? Danny Rimer, general partner at VC firm Index Ventures, served as the moderator for a group of European entrepreneur panellists who spoke on the second day of the conference. Speaking with Nathalie Massenet, the founder of online retailer net-a-porter.com (a video I also found on Loïc LeMeur's blog), he made a distinction between exploration and fulfilment online: some sites are good at one, some are good at the other, but it's very hard to be good at both. He seemed to think that net-a-porter.com was succeeding, though.

Facebook: a new social media ad model

Following on from Rob's post on the growth of Internet advertising, a lot of people have been noting how ad spend online is still wildly disproportionate to the amount of people surfing the net and spending time online.

One area this is particularly true is social networking, where sites like MySpace and Bebo are drawing in huge crowds but not the ad dollars to match it (although this is growing I hear).

Now one of their newer competitors, Facebook, is getting ready to initiate a new spin on how to promote brands and products on social networks: sell pages to partners like Amazon and Apple and Ebay (I guess...), where they can create portals to sell their wares, and then make it possible for Facebook members to embed into their pages links/portals/widgets to links to these. According to this article Facebook won't be taking a cut from the sales so presumably they will be charging a pretty penny for the privilege of accessing Facebook users (anonymously of course).

(I'm still waiting for a reply from Facebook about all this directly. Will post it here when/if I get it.)

From what I understand this isn't being done by the other sites yet but if the premium on these sites is their dedicated eyeball count, then this could be a good way of capitalising on it.

And it positions a social network like Facebook in a new position as a portal of sorts, like Google or Yahoo but more recommended.

The week in review: Fast moves

This was last Friday's week in review from the web site...

The week kicked off with an interesting series of M&A news items coming out of Italy. Swiss incumbent operator Swisscom has made a €3.7bn bid for Milan-based Fastweb, the triple play pioneer. It’s an interesting move from the usually staid Helvetic republic. Swisscom has itself been trying to make a business out of IPTV, not terribly successfully: after many technical hiccups, it launched its own Microsoft-powered service a year behind schedule. The company now says it has picked up some 30,000 users since launching the service in November. But a tie-up with Fastweb could inject Swisscom with some expertise from a veteran of the IPTV/triple play model. And it could mark the establishment of one of the first international IPTV players in Europe.

That is if Mediaset decides to sit back after all. The Silvio Berlusconi-owned concern, which is Italy’s largest media company encompassing television, film and publishing, is also reportedly interested in Fastweb. Although the company denied such interest, late Thursday another report emerged that seemed to say Mediaset wouldn’t rule anything out as far as Fastweb was concerned. Mediaset is also figuring very strongly in speculation about possible buyers for TV production company Endemol, which seems to finally, finally be getting ready for a sale by majority-owners Telefonica.

The executives that ruled out a Fastweb buy said that Mediaset wanted to focus its attentions on an Endemol bid, but I can see that if private equity houses and others start to look like more credible Endemol buyers, perhaps Mediaset might just pick itself up and look for a more local buy like Fastweb. In any case, both Endemol and Fastweb would add bows to Mediaset’s strings, albeit of entirely different tones.

On the subject of dominant media companies, ITV, the UK’s largest commercial broadcaster, had to take another big step down in interactive TV this week, as it formally lost its broadcast slot for its currently suspended ITV Play channel. ITV Play had been under major scrutiny by regulators for irregular accounting in its various interactive, money-based games. The issue of how consumers are charged for premium rate interactive TV phone lines, used not only for games like the ones on ITV Play but for all those popular voting-based shows like Big Brother and Pop Idol, is still not resolved and could have very far ranging repercussions in the industry, considering how popular the participation format has become.

In the UK, it’s not just the commercial broadcasters getting heat from regulators, though. The BBC said that it would suspend its BBC Jam educational web site from 20 March after complaints from educational companies that the site was putting commercial education publishers at an unfair disadvantage because of the BBC’s market dominance. It’s crazy that a non-profit company like the BBC can get in trouble for creating a good educational site—I’d always thought that the less profit-motivated educational tools are, the better.

The suspension of BBC Jam was also interesting because it’s one of the first instances in which the BBC has been taken to task for potentially stifling competition amongst commercial organisations. This is the same issue that is at the heart of other new initiatives that the BBC would like to pursue, such as its iPlayer, which some have said could put other content companies at an unfair disadvantage in the market. We should watch this space to see how this plays out.

Viacom this week took their dispute with YouTube one step further by filing a $1bn lawsuit for copyright infringement. Viacom’s argument is that Google’s YouTube has profited enormously from the traffic they’ve had over the site from people who come to view clips from programmes owned by Viacom—these include shows from Comedy Central, Nickelodeon and MTV among others. And, the argument continues, despite Viacom’s request earlier this month for YouTube to remove some 100,000 clips from the site, other clips continue to be posted and YouTube is not doing enough to stop the problem at the gate.

Various pundits think that the suit is more posturing than anything else, and that there might be a settlement out of court in the end. The outspoken Internet entrepreneur Mark Cuban, who himself is subpoenaing YouTube for the names of people who upload unauthorised clips from movies made by his production company, pointed out in his blog that whether or not Viacom settles or goes through with the suit, it will be a win-win situation, since at most the legal fees could be around $10 million but a settlement would be much more substantial, and certainly a $1bn award would be even more substantial than that. And in any case the company will most likely come out with an agreement not unlike the ones struck between YouTube and music companies. The upshot will be more proactive filtering from YouTube and/or legitimate content posts from Viacom itself.

I think that other companies may well follow in Viacom’s shoes, but just as many will continue to strike deals with this video giant, until the next virally popular service comes along.

The week in review: making mobile music

Hello. Two weeks ago I was holed up in the office putting to bed the launch issue of Total Content + Media magazine. Last week I was in Barcelona for the 3GSM mobile conference. Below is the Week in review that was published last Friday on the site:

This week, entertainment executives rode in to Barcelona to toot the horn of the convergence train at the annual 3GSM mobile conference and convention, which apparently drew some 55,000 visitors this year.

In amongst the various mobile operators and equipment vendors that normally dominate the conference schedule, there was a good dose of executives from the media and entertainment industries, including Edgar Bronfman, Jr, the CEO of the Warner Music Group; J.F. Cecillon, the new CEO of EMI Music International; Mika Salmi, head of global digital media for MTV Networks; and Lucy Hood, CEO of mobile content aggregator News Corp/Verisign JV Jamba.

The music contingent was particularly strong—Bronfman quoted uncited figures that mobile music will generate revenues of $9 billion in 2007, which would certainly make it the biggest mobile entertainment revenue generator this year if it comes to pass. There were lots of references to the Apple iPhone, which was the 800lb gorilla that didn’t actually show up to the party.

EMI’s J.F. Cecillon went great guns on the promise of mobile music and the future of EMI. On the subject of the company’s current problems, he summed those up in a simple enough statement: “EMI is doing great as long as our music is doing great.” Unfortunately for EMI, the currently skyrocketing sales of Norah Jones’ latest album haven’t been repeated enough in its other repertoire.

EMI issued its second profit warning, saying that in particular CD sales in the U.S. are still in a slump. The bad news prompted calls for CEO Eric Nicoli to resign. Nicoli has only been the CEO since January, although he’d been the company’s exec chairman prior to that. The news also hit other record labels hard, with shares of Warner Music tumbling. Aside from EMI, Warner Music is the only other of the four major record labels to trade as an independent company (Universal being a part of Vivendi Universal and SonyBMG being a joint venture between Sony and Bertelsmann). WMG had been eyeing up a merger with EMI, although European regulators seem to be looking on this idea unfavourably these days.

The presence of EMI, Warner Music, and other tunefully inclined companies at 3GSM underscores how labels are in a mad scramble to get a cut on the next generation of how music will be delivered.

And delivered, rather than sold, is the operative word in today’s world, it seems. At the end of January, EMI said that it had settled a long-standing dispute on copyright infringement with Chinese portal Baidu, with the result being that now all of EMI’s music is available on the site for free. The company hopes that it can instead now make money off of advertising that’s running alongside the tracks.

Cecillon told TC+M that he doesn’t think the free music model will be replicated elsewhere, at least for now. “We have put the system in place in China specifically because of the piracy issue. You have to do this to get into the Chinese market at some point. But we don’t have plans to extend the model outside of China,” he said. “Of course time will tell if that will change.”

Meanwhile, EMI is seeing small advances in its piracy battles. This week its Russian subsidiary Gala won a suit against a pair of Russian Internet sites, www.delit.ru and www.delit.net, who were selling EMI songs for 15 cents per track, without authorisation. As EMI only got the equivalent of about $2,300 as a settlement, the victory was perhaps more of a pyrrhic one.

“The music industry was worth $40 billion two years ago. Because of piracy, it’s now worth $30 billion,” said Cecillon. “That $30 billion is up for grabs.”

Indeed, back at 3GSM, Bronfman in his Wednesday keynote said that music execs weren’t there only to speak at the conference. Some of them were actually there doing business. He mentioned that one artist’s manager was walking around the stands. And if it really is true that the digital revolution is empowering artists to do more and more outside of the label’s reach, there may have been even more music managers walking around, unaccompanied by A&R men, in stealth mode.

(For a roundup of TC+M’s coverage of 3GSM and the iHollywood digital conference, type Barcelona in the search window at the top of http://www.totalcontentandmedia.com.)

The rest of the week…
In other news, the gaming industry got some attention, with Google apparently finally closing in on its purchase of in-gaming advertiser Adscape. The non-gaming media world is also taking a shine to the geek’s corner, it seems. This article from the WSJ says that publisher Hearst, among others, is incorporating gaming elements into web sites to grow traffic. Ladies mag Cosmopolitan is featuring a game called “Boy Toy.”

Baidu had a whopping fivefold increase in profits, but in what seems to be a theme at huge Internet portals, shares in the company traded down on the news. (Google too faced problems in its share price after reporting that profits had tripled.) In the case of Baidu, such is the boom in the Chinese market, that despite Baidu’s growth in profits, the company actually missed its ad revenue targets and didn’t take on as many new advertisers as expected. And analysts are very sceptical about its expansion into the Japanese market. Growing pains have never been so sweet.

Putting my convergence/telecoms helmet back on here to also note that Ericsson struck a deal with Turner Broadcasting last week to help reformat content for mobile phones, starting with CNN news—a very flashy interface for the service, I should add—and this week Huawei also got in on the vendor-as-content-aggregator act by signing a deal with the Orchard to develop a mobile music product. (Orchard represents smaller record labels.) Motorola was one of the first to move into this area in a deal in China several months ago where it effectively made itself into a label for non-pirated music.

Google faced a setback in Europe this week when a Belgian court ruled against it in the ongoing Copiepresse suit for copyright infringement when posting excerpts and links to plaintiffs’ news stories on its site without permission (the plaintiffs were French and German newspapers published in Belgium). The Internet giant is supposed to now pay a fine of E25,000 a day from when the suit was filed in September 2006, which amounts to E3.45 million. The sum is not huge for Google, but the implications of the suit are. Google is appealing the case.

Last but not least, this week a person at Yahoo told me that the company is getting ready to launch a new service that will combine the best of branded entertainment content with user-generated content and social networking. Given that Vaio Nation, a Sony-backed venture, seems to be promising the same sort of thing, this clearly will be the place that large media properties will hope to play in the year ahead.

Last week's Week in Review

This story was originally posted last Friday on TCM's web site

It's been a curious week for results reports. All looks very good on the surface, but not so great deeper down. Google said that for the fourth quarter, its net profit nearly tripled over the quarter last year to $1.03 billion from $372.2 million. But nevertheless its shares were sent down on the news and are still trading down two days later.

What gives? There were different reasons floating around explaining why: some believed the market's response was because people have become inured to the Google good-news wagon, and what they really need to see is wildly excellent news to be enthusiastically buying up the stock, which is already trading at sky high prices of just under $500/share.

Others in the investment community say they are getting concerned with Google's business model being too focussed on a single revenue stream. The reality of breaking into all the new markets that they'd like to tackle to grow their business - online video (with YouTube), online payments (using Checkout), and putting their advertising model onto other media like newspapers - could be more costly than originally expected.

The online shopping giant, Amazon, provides an instructive example for Google about what this can mean to the bottom line in the longer run. Amazon had beat analysts' expectations for the fourth quarter on sales of $4 billion, an increase of 34% on the year before. But while still profitable, with sales of $98 million, this number was down significantly on sales of $199 million for the quarter a year ago, and is its lowest profit margin since 1999. This rather huge drop has been attributed to shrinking margins: its traditional businesses of selling books, movies and other items online has matured, and it's been spending a lot of money trying to shift products in new areas, like toys and electronics.

The lesson here might be that Google needs to get some value creation in those new areas before the old, established ones start to really fade.

Comcast, the US cable operator, is another company that's reported a tripling of profits for the quarter. With a lot of their growth coming from a welcome triple-play boost of customer spend, Comcast is going to reinvest a chunk of their money on expanding their telephone services. Their new attention could not be coming at a better time: they were also in Washington this week filing an appeal with the FCC over a recent set-top box ruling that will force them to 'open' their STB's to competitors' services. With the huge influx of new companies out there offering video on demand and other TV-based entertainment, this could seriously disrupt Comcast's (and other pay-TV providers') bread and butter.

Over in the UK, the satellite broadcaster owned by News Corp., BSkyB, also reported some healthy numbers on the back of triple play excitement. We'll be providing a full analysis of what they are doing in our launch issue of TCM magazine, which will be out in a couple of weeks.

Yo space or Myne?
Emap is the latest media company to try to follow the News Corp. example of getting into social media by acquiring an existing user-generated content player. Today it announced it bought Yospace Technologies, for £8.7m, with a possible further £5.7m in deferred payments based on their performance between now and March 2010. Yospace is behind a number of social-networking sites like "See me TV," a video sharing site designed for mobile operator 3 (which happens to have a content deal with Emap…). Three has claimed that it has had huge success with its video service, thanks largely to See me TV.

The price that Emap's paying for Yospace is a tad less than the $580 million that News Corp. forked out for MySpace. Yospace made a loss of £480,000 in 2005 (no figures for '06 have been released), and it's not yet clear that MySpace is turning a profit, either. No matter how much you pay for social networking, it's still not clear whether it will pay back.

The week in review

originally posted last friday on www.totalcontentandmedia.com....

It’s a testament to the current market dominance of Google that every day seems to bring a new story about the company. This week the news flow included items on Google ads in video games, on billboards and music videos; Google partnering with the BBC; Google accidentally releasing user data; and Google on top in searches, again (it will report its figures on the 31st so next week is bound to contain more stories).

But more interesting, I thought, was the news coming out about its competitor-in-chief, Yahoo.

After a burst of dealmaking at CES earlier this month, things have taken a dimmer turn. The week didn’t start off too well, when on Monday a story emerged that Didier Lombard, the CEO of France Telecom, said that the operator was considering ending its Yahoo contract and potentially trying to develop services themselves. France Tel is one of Yahoo’s biggest customers in Europe and uses Yahoo advertising products on its Web portals. Even if we don't know the actual terms of their agreement, it's high profile enough to be a problem for Yahoo, which is trying to win lots of new customers in the telco space.

Things didn’t get any better when Yahoo reported that net profit was down 61% on 2005—largely because of one-off investment gains last year—and revenue rose a mere 13%, to $1.7bn from $1.07bn in the fourth quarter last year. To compare, online business competitor Ebay reported net income growth of 24% on the back of similar revenues of $1.72bn. To further Yahoo’s regional woe in Europe, the MD for the area said growth in the UK market, one of its biggest worldwide, is likely to stagnate. Suddenly that exclamation mark they use starts to look especially out of place, doesn’t it? Yahoo!

Yahoo tried to make up for any further grumblings, about its new ad system or anything else, by announcing that it would actually be coming on line earlier than originally promised.

The silver lining to all this seems to be that Yahoo’s joint venture in Japan with Softbank is still coming up strong, reporting a 20% rise in profits over the same period last year. There, a big appetite for online shopping seems to be offsetting stagnating growth in search advertising.

Japan made some other notable appearances this week. The European Commission released its latest report on the digital economy. Online revenues in the region will grow to E8.3 billion by 2010, it forecast, but Europe will still lag behind the US and Japan, where people have proven to be tech crazy. Plus, the connectivity that people are getting both for at-home Internet and on-the-go wireless massively outpaces developments in Europe.

As a juggernaut, however, nothing can compare to China. This week, the country’s ministry of information industry said that Internet users grew 23% to 137 million. In a country with a population of more than 1.3 billion, the potential is still largely untapped.

Back in Japan again to note that Nintendo, the games company, has reported that it’s reached its full-year profit targets in nine months, underscoring how aiming modestly can sometimes pull off magnificent results, particularly compared to its rivals in the games area, Sony and Microsoft. While the Wii was largely written about as a simpler, cheaper new games console compared to its competitors, Nintendo clearly wants to bring its own stamp onto the idea of convergence, launching a news service that can be accessed through an graphic map, a Wii player, a broadband connection and an Opera browser.

On the subject of Nintendo's game's competitors, Microsoft had some bad news this week: a drop of operating profit (tho still profitable!). In the area of new products, AT&T pointed its finger at the software behemoth for ongoing glitches in its IPTV services.

Endemol sell-off buzz continued to be pushed out this week, with rumours that Disney is interested in bidding for the company in the same consortium that includes the company’s founder John de Mol. Such a buy would secure Disney a major producer of reality TV and game shows, which have so captivated audiences around the world (and cost relatively little to put together, and definitely less per episode than an instalment of Lost).

No one has brought up whether Disney would come up against any shareholder problems stemming from how some of the Endemol shows’ content might conflict with its corporate image of offering family entertainment.

News Corp. is another big media player rumoured to be interested in taking a stake of Endemol, but the company has denied interest. One other M&A play the company hasn’t ruled out, though, is throwing its hat into the ring for the Tribune Group in the United States. According to reports, News Corp. would buy almost only for the purpose of consolidating operations between Newsday and the New York Post, two Big Apple dailies that are not keeping analysts happy with their numbers. I wonder if they might also be a little interested in some of their television stations and maybe a sports team or two?

Indeed, the connection between how sport can be used to drive media domination is one that Murdoch has played to perfection in other markets, namely the UK and Asia. Now in the latter market, sport is being used again to try to grow a business—this time around it’s HDTV. It looks like it will be a challenging game, though: so many people get their content through free pirated signals that some think it will be hard to get companies to ramp up investment in costly HD services that have little chance of being sold.