VideoAge International October 2018

I N T E R N A T I O N A L www.V i deoAge.org THE BUSINESS JOURNAL OF FILM, BROADCASTING, BROADBAND, PRODUCTION, DISTRIBUTION October 2018 - VOL. 38 NO. 5 - $9.75 I n addition to a multitude of IP rights and windows, the inter- national television content sales sector is now faced with another is- sue — that of how to define several countries for content sales purposes which lack a standardized classifica- tion. Companies and international organizations are constantly redraw- ing the contours of said regions, ma- king everything seem much more complicated than it needs to be. For example, it is important to figure out what exactly constitu- tes Eastern Europe. Organizers of NATPE Budapest — the market that, for all practical purposes, caters to the region—would not touch the to- pic, but looking at a map, one could indicate (in alphabetical order): Bul- garia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. Not so, according to The Economi- st , which not long ago ran a piece saying that, in the post-Communist world, Eastern Europe has moved even further east and now includes Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Other experts refer to Belarus as TheMess &MazewithMENA, CEE, CIS, Balkans, and Baltics And let’s not get started with GAS, Benelux, and Iberia (Continued on Page 42) My 2¢: Ads have to be more creative to give TV outlets dual benefits Rosario Ponzio in the Int’l TV Distribution Hall of Fame Kids’ TV: When publishing aids a show’s success Landscape changes in Switzerland, Canada, and Italy Page 54 Page 48 Page 38 Pages 6, 32, 34 F racking, the technique to ex- tract oil and gas from rocks, has made the U.S. the world’s largest producer of natural gas, as well as an oil powerhouse that, according to The New York Times , is “ready to eclipse both Saudi Arabia and Russia.” Yet, wrote the Times , fracking’s biggest skeptics are on Wall Street. Why? Because the industry’s fi- nancial foundation is unstable. Wall Street’s Growth Over TV Profits (Continued on Page 44) (Continued on Page 46) O f the major U.S. entertain- ment companies, 10 are cur- rently traded on Wall Stre- et’s stock exchange. But that number will soon be reduced to nine and, in two years’ time, might even go down to seven. This current group of 10 ranges from a market capitalization of $165 billion, as in the case of Di- sney, to $3.5 billion for AMC. The above group excludes the FAANG giants (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google) becau- se entertainment is just one aspect of their businesses. Cumulatively, the top 10 entertainment compa- nies that trade on Wall Street have a market cap of $692 billion. The narrative of investment in the Hollywood’s Love Affairs With Stock Stakes

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