ITV

Tag: Shivjeet

  • QUESTION AND ANSWER SESSION CHRIS DEERING AND PAUL MEYERS

    QUESTION AND ANSWER SESSION CHRIS DEERING AND PAUL MEYERS

    Member of audience to Chris:
    My question is that with the advent of gaming portals and onset of broad band internet do you see any threat to your business in future?

    Chris Deering: 
    Well, I think if our business doesn’t evolve in the direction where consumers want it to of course there is a threat but I prefer to say this is an opportunity with online components of games perhaps with pre recorded element, perhaps one hundred percent online. Online portals right now are multi-player. Online gaming and real time persistent worlds is rather a niche business and I know because Sony has one of the most successful online games called “Ever Quest”. It’s successful and it has about hundred and fifty thousand subscribers. One before online gaming can become huge, huge and a mass market context atleast with games as we currently define them fast frame rate, full screen foremost video is gonna need to be of lot more broad band out there and till that time the connectivity part would be just to update information or to play fairly a slow latency games like may be gold or tax games or persistent world games. 

    I am not sure I am answering your question but clearly the technology moves on everyday and I think as soon as you move with it and there will be a growing part of the gaming world that has real time online connectivity. 

    Member of audience: 
    Shivjeet, I have a question for Paul of Asiacontent, a case is made for personalization on the net, customization being a stage before that what do you say about that, I mean what’s the trend, where is it gonna be, what are the problems, how soon are you going to get there?

    Paul Meyers: 
    Personalization is certainly an important part of the internet especially on a content site whether it’s an MTV or a Yahoo or a sports site or any kind of a content driven site I think, we are seeing that happening increasingly in the States not so much yet in Asia, a basic technological reason in North Asia, many of the software products that allow you to do it simply cannot handle non-roaming characters ok, I think we will start to see that happen fairly soon but I don’t think its appropriate for all sites, I think may be with a MTV site absolutely you are gonna find out about the music you are interested in or a sports site if you want Cricket but you don’t want the NBA. 

    I don’ think it should be forced upon people because its not good for everybody I know I helped my dad get on the internet a couple of weeks ago back in Chicago, he didn’t wanted it all, he just wanted plain vanilla version he wanted what came out of the box it was good enough for him, he didn’t want to get into the personalization, yes its important yes we’ll see more of it I don’t think it will commute backwards anytime soon.

    Nisha: 
    Mr. Paul my name is Nisha and I work for Quantum, All the figures that we have been told today or shown today pertain broadly to Asia we haven’t seen specific figures on India. It appears to me that access to the internet is very widely split between in home and out of home access. 

    How does that impact on behavior of the internet do you think, in what way do we need to take cognizance of people that are going out paying for one hour of internet time and therefore are very conscious about how they are spending vs somebody who is accessing the net at home?

    Shivjeet: 
    I guess what she is asking about in-home vs cyber cafes vs these two users how does that effect content or does it?

    Paul Meyers: 
    Well, on one hand now it doesn’t effect content and on the other hand yes it does. So let me explain one of the things we have to be very very careful of is that access speed and band width varies with in a country and from country to country ok, certainly everybody want to see a video on the internet today, they wanna have the ability to do that sometimes the infrastructure is simply not there to allow them to do it or sometimes there are kids who are willing to wait 22 minutes to get a 30 sec clip of a video ok, so band width is an issue there, that we pay attention to so we don’t force a lot of eye candy and a lot of full motion video and music downloads on everybody who make them available so if you have better access you are connecting from your office, or university, or some broader band access plate you can enjoy those features but we don’t make it necessary because we loose in many essences the broad base of the audience.

    Vishal: 
    Hi! This is Vishal from India games the question to Asiacontent is you have not talked about conversions at all in your complete internet strategy conversions of media where you finally would be having the Internet the television and all this medias is talking together your thing was completely focused on internet but I think a lot of people over here would also be interested in knowing as to how a particular brand would position itself when conversions really happen because Asia is poised for a huge growth as far as broad band is concerned and if somebody can watch MTVS streaming on his website, so what happens to MTV as a channel on television?

    Paul Meyers: 
    Good question, good question, first we have plans off course in certain countries and we are actually doing it in some countries like in Korea and Japan to make more streaming available, to make actual paper view downloads of music or videos available that way as well.

    don’t think they were ever gonna conflict with the channel, the channel is a 24 hour stream and it has its own character and its own personality, and the way that it interacts with its audience I think its always gonna be there and there are some technological advances to it but I don’t see us competing with that. Again one of the key things in the internet is that it allows you as an audience member to do it when you want ok, and any portions you want so may be you are interested in J Pauper or may be you are interested only in Way Sis or may be only interested in boyband you can programme your own boyband channel even if the 98 percent of the rest of the world isn’t interested in doing that that’s what internet allows you to do and that’s how I see us moving to a broad band offering both on MTV and on other offerings as well. 

  • JULIAN GOULD QUESTION & ANSWER SESSION

    JULIAN GOULD QUESTION & ANSWER SESSION

    Shivjeet: 
    We’ll just get Julian back for a very brief round of questions on his fascinating brand and you’ll notice the ideal way to double your brand share is to make sure everyone wears two watches – so you can go for 1000 – 2000 so we’ll take  quantities. There’s a lady there. Give her a mike or something good. 

    Vatsala from Teens Today: 
    1) Swatch innovated with fashion, art & technology. So when times keep changing is there an average life span for Swatch in the market? 2) With technology racing so fast, has that age span lessened in the past few years? And the third question is: 
    3) Which is the most long lasting Swatch model in the past few years? 

    Julian: 
    I’ll take the 3rd question first. When talking about long lasting model, I would say the references are many if we look at the models we have. The plastic models started in ’84 / ’85, these references have been evolving in design, shape, colors, textures of straps. I would say the skin, plastic, Ivory’s and heat. The plastic is the one that’s really giving us brand awareness and is lasting longest in time. The volumes are the same over time. I did not get the first two questions.

    Shivjeet:
    Basically, how often do you keep changing the designs?

    Julian: 
    For fashion, we actually come out with two collections in the plastic range every year trying to keep up with this ever changing, fast changing fashion that we’re in. I think we do a very good job in following the colors and again the textures of the fabric of the straps. I think we do a very good job in following for the skin models in terms of the very thin metal straps or thin leather straps or again fashionable colors. In terms of technology, we’ve probably gotten off to a good start with the Internet.

     

    We are probably not at a good point yet as we should be in terms of the technology that interacts with our computers that interacts with our home site, the Internet. We need to probably put the foot to the pedal there because as you’re saying, things are changing so quickly and we have to stay behind it.

    Minty Tejpal:
    Hi, Shivjit. My name is Minty Tejpal. I have a background in advertising, Journalism and Television. Working on a Net right now. Fabulous presentation. A couple of points: Point A: The largest billboard. What does that line mean?

    Julian: 
    There is a palace in France the name of which means ” you are our museum”. So basically, we were showing everyone had a Swatch watch on and obviously there were those big metal frames that were being built that were then put on to the billboard to show the watch. The tag line being basically that all of you wearing our products become our walking museum.

    Minty Tejpal:
    So how long was the billboard up?

    Julian: 
    It was up I believe, for eight months. This was end of 1998 until mid 1999. So I have all those specifics, but I do not have them with me. I’m sorry I should but I have how long it was, how huge it was, how many tons it weighed, because it was a huge product.

    Minty Tejpal: 
    Where can one get a Swatch watch just now?

    Julian: 
    Oh well, I’m glad to hear that. Basically, now we have now roughly 24 points of sale between Mumbai and Delhi and maybe afterwards we can meet up and I can give you the addresses of where we are.

    Minty Tejpal: 
    Perfect, I’ll catch you.

    Sujata from HLL: 
    What exactly do you do in the Swatch Club? Presuming it’s more than after sales service or new product information to members of the club and how do you sustain something like this on a long-term basis specially when it’s global. 

    Julian: 
    The club basically has been setup in major markets where we have now very well established distribution chain communication plan and what we do is that there are club watches, which are made every year. It’s a specific watch with a slightly higher price and some extras that go with it and with this watch you automatically become a member of the club and are put on a mailing list with information twice a year/booklets, pamphlets stating information on what we are doing around the world. You are invited to Swatch events around the world and it’s basically a club of people that goes from LA all the way to the Philippines and it’s a point of discussion right now in terms of maintaining it. Obviously, club members are people who are fanatical about Swatch and who really want to be a part of the Swatch role everyday, they want to know the newest models, the newest trends, what we are coming out with? And it takes a group of people in Switzerland to follow all these requests as they come through email/fax/telephone and the discussion points now are how are we going to maintain the momentum and get people to the club? How are we going to get them into the Swatch world – it’s actually a point of discussion. So it’s good that you’ve asked, because you’ve touched on a key point, as the momentum has to be maintained and it’s a matter of understanding how we do it. Do we stick to a region and concentrate on that or do we go global and give the same service everywhere so that one country is not penalized while another is. So that’s what we are looking into. If you get onto the swatch.com site, you might find a portion as the club.