Astra Event – Pay TV and online communities

Current.tv has launched in the UK this week, picking up another 25 million subs. They are on Sky (Ch 229) and Virgin (Ch 155). For those who don’t know, Current.tv has 28 million subscribers in The States, runs on Comcast, DirecTV and TimeWarner networks, is user generated content driven – including the ads – and the sponsors include Sony, UniLever, L’Oreal. Oh and the Chair is Al Gore. I was able to grab a word with Kim Williams, Foxtel CEO yesterday, and ask if this piece of Citizen TV goodness was coming to Australia and he said … ‘we are in discusssions‘. Yay!

Lots and lots of interesting people and topics and talks at Astra. Some quote-y type statements (best as I can read my writing or remember ’em).

• Kids used to pass notes in class. Now they pass SMS. (Katrina, Nickleodeon)
• Can’t stop the changes, like trying to hold back the tide (James Packer)
• TV offers income streams other than the advertising model and the subscription model (I forgot who said it, but yay!)
• Last year’s buzz was IPTV and it went nowhere, this year its User Generated Content and it will go nowhere. (John Porter from Austar).

That last was correctly responded to (IMHO) by David Butorac who pointed out NowIPTV in HongKong.

I really enjoyed meeting with Dr Jeff Cole of the Center for Digital Futures. We trotted off for Japanese food after the conference and chatted about online communities and Web 2.0 stuff until really quite late. I think his work has not presented justly here in Australia – and the quote of his I used last year from a newspaper article was taken out of context. Naughty mainstream media. Why do they find user generated content and citizen journalism so threatening hmmm? Oh gosh, I remember why – because it is (threatening them). heh.