Fox International Channels’ president and chief executive, David Haslingden, speaks about pricing, value, the huge optimism about Asia, and averting the biggest pitfalls and disasters of the digital age.

Fox International Channels (FIC) has come out swinging in Asia. Nine months after the News Corp unit swallowed up what used to be Star’s Southeast Asia business, FIC president and chief executive David Haslingden speaks fiercely about pricing, value, commoditising content, new and not necessarily welcome platform players, learning stuff the hard way, and... (a bit less publicly) an end to the days of playing second fiddle to Discovery and HBO channels and brands.

All this comes against a backdrop of “huge” optimism about pay-TV everywhere and unprecedented technological opportunity, which Haslingden implores pay-TV platforms to embrace wholly, totally and absolutely.

“Wildlife filmmaking has been revolutionised by a new camera that takes over 1,000 frames per second. Equally, new night vision lenses created for the U.S. military have been modified that allow us to bring a whole new world of animal behaviour to film. But the impact of front-end technology will only reach true potential as a result of extraordinary technical advances at the back end,” he says.

In his keynote address during the inaugural Asia-Pacific Pay-TV Operators’ Summit (APOS) in Bali in May, Haslingden also said that, despite consumers being bombarded with choice, “the power of the story and the importance of entertainment in the home is not only sustaining but thriving.”

On stage and off, he speaks about the “phenomenal growth in the last decade in the number of people who are prepared to pay to have superior TV services in their homes.”
But, he adds, “we need to temper our optimism with reality... Our competition is fiercer than ever. More and more TV is made available at better quality either free or for a nominal amount.”

While the future remains bright, and “the technology at our disposal has never been more powerful”, he adds that “we need to actively work together to ensure that pay-TV product is demonstrably better than what’s available elsewhere.”

Pay-TV programmers have to be wary of allowing two impediments to stand in the way of growth. The first is free or nominally priced multichannel services. The second is the dramatically escalating cost of piracy.

“In practical terms, both are competition for us and they drive us to a need to work very hard together to improve the value that consumers experience when they pay for TV content in their homes,” he says.

New platforms are not necessarily a blessing. Haslingden says content owners are “the first to line up and cheer when new distributors come along”, but that Fox and National Geographic had “learned the hard way” that new alliances had to be carefully evaluated to make sure strategic objectives were the same.

Strategic objectives vary widely, he stresses. “For some halting the growth of the pay-TV industry is an objective... some operators don’t see content as core to their business but as a means to another end. For these people, the commoditisation of content is a goal. For us, and we have to be clear about this, it’s a disaster”.

Although rights holders in some respects need to be much more flexible and liberal in how they let their content be accessed, Haslingden says they also have to ensure that their content is not commoditised.

He adds that the industry is “naive to believe that every new revenue source is additive. We must deliver meaningful exclusivity of our content to partners who will pay us fairly for this and eschew those who don’t”.

Haslingden says content providers and platform operators have to be “mindful of their symbiotic relationship”. Free services, such as Freeview in the U.K., are “hugely powerful”, he says. “From a content owner’s perspective, there are so many ways to access content nowadays. We have to be able to deliver meaningful exclusivity for the people who pay us for our content”.

Not all industry players view piracy – often seen as a “victimless crime” – in the same way. “Many, including telcos, behave as if they are oblivious to piracy. They are focused on the huge profits they can reap from delivering data... We should be very wary of supporting groups that tacitly support piracy in this way”.

Haslingden also said that while “ensuring that our content isn’t given away or undervalued is a really important objective, we can’t let it distract us from our principle objective – making sure that the content we deliver is good.” And that it commands the premium that it deserves. Which it doesn’t. Yet. Much to his obvious chagrin.

Haslingden insists that National Geographic rates as well as Discovery – or at least is regarded as having the same brand equity in Asia – but doesn’t yet command the same premium. HBO Asia has also been ahead of News Corp channels in developing a premium price tag.

“Our principle objective is to eliminate that price disparity,” he says, adding: “We need to be better at building premium pricing into our model”.

A tough one? Maybe. But, Haslingden says, “people acknowledge that our channels were under-priced in the market. We always thought that the channels were worth more than we were selling them for. If our channels get the same ratings and the same brand recall, we have an obligation to earn fair value.”