Hulbert eyes developing markets

MIP NEWS – David Hulbert, president of Walt Disney Television International, has told C21 about his plans for cautious expansion into developing markets like India, Korea, China and Russia.

“China is interesting because it’s big and changing rapidly,” he said. “Nobody can ignore 1.3billion people even if the economy isn’t all that good. We’re in talks to launch a branded block on CCTV-6, for instance, as well as launching Disney Channel and Playhouse Disney into Hong Kong this week.”

However, “we’re not rushing in. Like the way we launched into Scandinavia, we’ll wait until mainland China is structurally ready to offer us a sustainable business.”

While plenty of Disney branded product is sold into the territory, Hulbert’s cautious approach has seen rivals News Corp and Time Warner steal a march, both beaming satellite channels – Phoenix and CETV – in from Hong Kong.

Viacom also has its MTV channel available in hotels and cable nets within the experimental Guangdong province, and recently revealed a major copro alliance with Shanghai Media Group.

While everyone here at MipTV is talking up China as the market of the future, Hulbert is more interested in India, where he is in talks with distribution companies about launching “two or three” channels into the market this year.

“We are in discussions with people like Star, ESS and Sony about distribution as part of their bundle rather than launching the channel as a joint-venture,” said Hulbert. Disney recently terminated its 10-year partnership with Modi Entertainment Network, and closed their joint venture, Walt Disney India Private Limited.

According to its application to India’s Foreign Investment Promotion Board to set up a wholly-owned subsidiary in India, Disney plans to spend some $10m in India over the next five years. Besides new channels, the company will explore other ventures, including production and distribution of local movies, branded merchandising, theme parks and resorts.

Hulbert added that, despite a “regulatory hiccup” over conditional access systems in India, he was confident that the new regulator would usher in a light-touch regime soon, and is already dubbing Disney programmes into Hindi, Tamil and Telegu for the new channels.

Over in South Korea, Disney is also planning to launch what Hulbert called “an integrated broadband television platform” into what is now the world’s most wired territory. Disney Channel also launched into Japan last November.

But while giants like Sony are steaming into Russia with major copro deals in place, based on existing scripted formats, Hulbert was again more cautious: “We’ve just signed a major free-to-air deal with CTC for our movies and series, but the format business is intriguing, not only in Russia,” he said.

“Our movies are universal product as they tend to play well everywhere, and our animation is also universal in its appeal. Our US scripted series like 8 Simple Rules or Alias are less universal and could perhaps have a local manifestation. But the format business isn’t really about licensing formats, its about selling franchises and skills.

“Options go for a few thousand dollars and formats are easily copied so, just like Macdonalds teaches its franchisees exactly how to toast the bun, format-owners should really be selling business systems. For us, that would really depend on good local partners and whether we had a channel in the market.”

Formats, he said, “would only ever be an extra string to our bow”. While Hulbert’s movies and US series continue to sell into Russia, any expansion into the channel segment there would likely “build out from our HBO joint-venture channels in Eastern Europe”, he said.