Dick Parsons, the outgoing Time Warner CEO, has likened the Turner business to a thousand buckets on the floor all capturing little raindrops, and Casey Harwood Senior VP, Digital Media, at Turner Broadcasting System Europe, says the description equally fits the European market, where the company has 40 different deals with IPTV providers, 120 deals with mobile operators and runs 30 different websites.
“It’s a very bitty business, but the cumulative number is actually quite significant. It’s not the one size fits all solution that perhaps broadcasters have traditionally been used to, rolling out Cartoon Network into France Spain and Italy. It’s more complicated than that.”
Harwood told the Broadcasting Press Guild that digital was happening in an unstructured way and there was not one silver bullet that solved all the issues. Harwood’s challenge is to find the balance between free and pay, no longer black and white, and the use of syndication. “What Turner has always done is build channels, and we’re going to spend the next two or three years pulling those channels apart, syndicated branded products on these new channels, which are spin-off from our existing brands. When you get a platform like BT coming to you and say we want your brand, we want your programmes, but we don’t want your channel, that makes programmers sit up and think that something has changed”.
Harwood said that IPTV had enabled broadcasters such as Turner to have their own direct channel to their consumers. He did not intend to bypass the established platforms of Virgin and Sky, but with the ability to sell content direct to the consumer, Turner is considering customer acquisition more carefully.
“The remit for the digital business was simple: to get Turner into these new spaces as quickly as possible without turning the existing business upside down,” says Harwood. His overview also stretches across the standard distribution deals and consequently he is in regular contact with Sky and Virgin Media.
Harwood’s description of the UK is as “The Perfect Storm”, because of the overlap between distribution technologies. He says the company can afford to take bets in its international markets with a view to exporting the format back to the US or into other regions. “There is stuff happening in Japan and South Korea that would never breach their shores, but a lot of the things happening here have Uncle Sam written all over it, 3DTV or IPTV and we can trial those things here and make a significant amount of money”
While there is still some growth in the linear channel business – there have been some 40 channel launches in
Harwood’s time with Turner – the company is now turning to digital brand extensions. This would include websites, subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) and gaming, as well as entering into new genres. He says that this is well into Turner’s territory, given the entertainment background of the US parent as opposed to kids, news and movies, which have been the staple of its European activities.
Adult Swim has launched as a branded block in the UK, and there are general entertainment services in Spain and Turkey, where the company has partnered with the Dogan Media Group for a version of entertainment channel TNT.
In the UK, Turner used capacity it held on the DTT network to launch Nuts TV, a live four-hour studio based programme produced with magazine publishers IPC. Early next year Nuts TV will also launch on Sky and Virgin, where it will move to a 12-hour service. Harwood admits it would be difficult to fill a 12-hour live schedule, so it is possible there will be some acquisitions, and the use of some material from Adult Swim that currently has a branded block on Virgin TV’s Bravo.
“What it has done for Turner has been to move us out of our comfort zone. We’ve been very good at library channels, putting Cartoons in the right order, but this has put us in the live studio based format business. If we can take those skills and replicate it 40 times around Europe then it becomes a big business for us.”
Harwood admits it won’t necessarily be possible to rollout Nuts TV on a pan-European basis, something Emap found to its cost when trying to export its music channels. Nuts is just as much about the skillset required.
“What the headline brand is, that’s irrelevant, but by market. Adult Swim, which is a significant brand and a $200 million business, the strategy there had been to do programme blocks and syndication deals that generate interest and we can then develop an ongoing business.”
He identifies Adult Swim, TNT (which was the original brand in Europe for Turner Classic Movies) and local variants of Nuts TV as brands that will be rolled out on a pan-European basis. In addition, while admitting to have missed the boat on a CNN documentary and lifestyle channel, Harwood says there is a second chance through VOD taking advantage of some of the long form programming.
The steady investment in digital programming has enabled Turner to have the division profitable in Europe almost from Day One, though it is still the case that the company regards a digital dollar as being worth ten times that of an analogue one.
