Simon Carswell discusses AIB’s record annual loss, Suzanne McElligot of IAB Ireland on the growth of internet advertising and Urban Frog co-founder Angie McMenamin on setting up a new sports clothing brand. John Collins presents.
“ITV1 HD will make watching the World Cup an unforgettable experience,” according to the ITV website. Adding the word “not” before “watching” in this sentence would be more appropriate under the circumstances. Legions of ITV HD viewers missed the sole England goal in last night’s clash against the USA when the channel accidentally cut to a car advert before fading to black. Never mind Robert Green, this was a truly massive blunder (which you can watch unfold here).
Football fans who didn’t upgrade their sets in order to see England’s underachievement in its full glory and instead watched the match on standard definition ITV can be forgiven for feeling a schmidgeon of Schadenfreude. But it wasn’t just early-adopter HD enthusiasts who were cut off from what could yet turn out to be the only highlight of England’s campaign. Unlike in Ireland, access to HD channels in the UK is widespread. Both the BBC and ITV’s HD channels are available on the digital terrestrial television (DTT) service Freeview, to which more than half of UK households are connected. It’s really best, at this point, not to ask about the current status of DTT in Ireland.
As of March, it was estimated that some 24 million HD televisions had been sold in the UK. Last week, as armchair fans prepared to settle in for the duration, British department store chain John Lewis declared it was selling a new set every 30 seconds. Every blade of grass, every bead of sweat, etc, etc.
So much cash, so much confusion. Why is Fabio Capello smiling all of a sudden? Why are people hugging Steven Gerrard?
Last night’s epic fail is not just catastrophically embarrassing for ITV, but for the UK broadcasting regulator, Ofcom, which has taken two years to find enough bandwidth to accommodate spectrum-hungry HD services on DTT. Its success in doing so meant the World Cup was billed as the first mass market HD event in the UK, with Ofcom’s pre-tournament press releases describing HD as the biggest development in World Cup viewing technology since 1970, when the Mexico World Cup was broadcast in colour for the first time.
“Back then, England were knocked out by West Germany in the quarter finals. This year, fans will be hoping for a better result from HD,” said Ofcom, tempting fate. Instead, England let in a soft equaliser and the HD howler has been gleefully replayed in full this morning on Sky News. (BSkyB, incidentally, has 2.5 million HD-enabled subscribers, but zero rights to World Cup live matches.) If I worked in Ofcom’s publicity office, I would be furious with the controllers of ITV 1 HD for screwing up so badly and – given a similar incident in an FA Cup match earlier this year – not for the first time either.
But though I was grimly amused by news of ITV’s transmission error, the joke is really on me and all other Irish television viewers – and not just because the ears of the Irish team have been deprived of the vuvuzela nightmare that is South Africa 2010.
To experience HD teething problems, you have to have HD content in the first place. Imagine if RTÉ had broadcast the World Cup in HD. Even with Ireland’s non-involvement, what a nice boost to retail sales that could have been. Now imagine a world in which RTÉ HD is part of a fully rolled out free-to-air DTT service. Neither event requires a technological revolution – just cash that neither RTÉ nor the commercial broadcasting sector appears to have anymore. The money, like the England midfield last night, is spent.
After months of intensive lobbying, fractious debate and last-minute appeals from the political big guns, the good people finally voted on Friday with a clear 2-1 result. That’s right, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) plumped for Rio de Janeiro as the hosts of the 2016 Olympics, knocking Madrid, Tokyo and bookies’ favourites Chicago out of the water. (For the post-Lisbon fallout there are other blogs.)
The Rio massive, led by national football icon Pele, was certainly happy with its victory over the Spanish capital in the final round. But the history of Olympic host cities suggests that the euphoria will subside sometime over the next seven years as the bills for all that stadium security, urine test analysis and ticker tape closing ceremonies start to mount up like hurdling steeplechasers. So what’s the damage?
Rio is ploughing $11.1 billion (€8 billion) into the staging of the games (which sounds cheap in Nama currency), with the Brazilian government having already stumped up for 70 per cent of that. As always, there’s a lot of housekeeping to sort out too. The shock of the IOC’s imperviousness to the Obama oratorical magic barely had time to fade before Bloomberg was busy speculating about the mammoth task facing Brazilian President Lula in ridding Rio of violent crime, improving its transit system, renovating its “crumbling” airport and doubling its hotel space. Not to worry, it’s got the 2014 World Cup for a warm up.
Hosting the Olympics is a notoriously high-risk financial game: the smokers of Montreal (1976) spent 30 years paying off the cost of its Olympic stadium through a special tobacco tax. But while the “debit” column may be scary, the infrastructure legacy can also be immense. By the time 2012 comes around, London’s transport map will have been redrawn several times to include the extra tube stations and overground lines constructed for the Olympics, while Rio is devising special Olympic routes linking four separate districts of the city in which its Games will be held.
According to a Sao Paulo business school study, spin-off revenues from the Games will inject more than $50 billion into the Brazilian economy and create 120,000 jobs a year. Meanwhile, the Games and the World Cup will each add 1 percentage point to annual economic growth, its finance minister, Guido Mantega, said this weekend at a meeting of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) economies: “It won’t be long before we’re growing too much.” Okay, there’s no need to rub it in.
The Olympics is an economic stimulus package wrapped in lycra and sweat. But you only have to look at how sponsorship revenues for London 2012 wobbled in the wake of global recession to know that seven years is a long time to be counting your cents. Brazil won’t find out whether or not its Olympics will be profitable until long after the athletes’ village has been converted into condos and the gold medallists have departed the Copacobana for Warsaw, Delhi or whichever emerging economy is passed the torch for the 2020 Games.
The prospect of the first South American Games is definitely cheering news though. I’ve never been to Brazil, and I reckon there’s still time to take up fencing between now and then. Failing that, some crowd called the International Property Directive, hot off the starting blocks, has already emailed me to enquire if, based on Rio’s victory, I would be interested in availing of their on-the-ground expertise for “investments from single units to entire resorts and land banks” in the shadow of Rio’s Sugar Loaf mountain. Hmmm. What a pity my credit cards are maxed out right now. Because otherwise…
Watchers of yesterday’s epic Wimbledon serve-fest may have spotted Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, soaking up Andy Roddick’s passing shots from the invitation-only confines of the Royal Box. King was no doubt silently ruminating about bank balance sheets and Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) tensions as the final set sank into its near-stalemate and polite conversation with such knockabout fellow guests as Pete Sampras finally dried up.
Over the course of the tournament, however, Centre Court’s best seats have remained remarkably free of financial types – evidence perhaps of just how far down the pecking order bankers have fallen. You could consider this guest list as a painful backhand slice from the All-England Club on behalf of the British establishment. The only two bankers to appear are Stephen Green and Dyfrig John, the chairman and chief executive respectively of HSBC.
The bank’s “in” is its status as Wimbledon’s official banking partner, which may have given it some kind of exclusivity deal, although one imagines that the Royal Box is the kind of place where protocols are more complicated than mere commercial arrangements. Conveniently, HSBC is also one of the only big British banks to avoid a bailout from Gordon Brown: its route to survival – a massive rights issue – makes it the acceptable face of banking in a respectability-free world.
Not that taxpayer-funded bankers stayed away from the tournament completely. But as this report from the London Evening Standard suggested, they kept a rather low profile.
At 3.45 next Saturday, 13 horses will line up at Epsom to contest this year’s Derby, the race that defines the thoroughbred.
All bar two of them can trace their ancestry directly to horses trained by the late Vincent O’Brien, who died on Monday at his home in Straffan, Co Kildare.
That, and the fact that it it almost certain to go to an Irish-trained horse, are probably the most fitting tributes to a man who is recognised as having been the greatest racehorse trainer in the sport’s 300-year-plus history.
But it’s also a reminder of something else - O’Brien’s enormous contribution to this country and most importantly its economy. On the back of his training skills, he became the architect of Coolmore Stud, the Tipperary-based breeding operation with divisions in the US and Australia, that is recognised as the world leader in its field.
To put this in context, Coolmore is to racehorse breeding and bloodstock what Intel is to technology. And the foundation’s of its success are laid on O’Brien’s ability to spot raw talent in the sales ring, mould it into a top class racehorse and ultimately a stallion, or in economic terms, an asset worth tens of millions of euro.
He also played a key role in globalising the both the sport and the breeding industry, which meant he was bringing US investors to Ireland long before the IDA.
The result was that he put Ireland at the centre of a multi-million, multi-national business, and not just Ireland, but rural Ireland, where there were few economic opportunities. This, combined with the stud-fee tax break, drew other bloodstock investors here. As a result, a broadly-based industry, whose influence can be seen throughout the world, sprang up here.
The seeds of the business were here all along, and good horses were always bred in this country. But there was nothing like the strength and depth that we have now, and much of that is down to O’Brien. Unfortunately there is little up-to-date information on just how much this business is worth, but one study carried out by consultants, Indecon, five years ago, found that racing and breeding employed 16,000 people and contributed 335 million euro to the Exchequer every year in taxes. These figures may have changed, but there is no reason to believe that they have dropped dramatically.
Despite this, plenty of people, mainly politicians in search of easy headlines, have in recent years lined up to knock this business. That’s not to say that it’s above criticism. But the problems were first, that the critics largely made statements that were plain wrong, and second, their main talent seemed (and seems) to be an uncanny ability to shout louder than everyone else.
Partly because of this, his legacy now faces the possibility that it will be eroded, and that much of its value will simply fade away over the next decade or so. This may be disappointing for people who want to cheer an Irish winner at Epsom, but it would be alot more serious for the country as a whole.
This is an indigenous industry which makes a substantial direct contribution to the economy, employment and the Exchequer. Despite the economic achievements of the nineties and the early part of this decade, we still don’t have enough homegrown industries that deliver value. Without them, our chances of cashing in on the global economic recovery, when it comes, are limited.
Keeping them alive should not take much effort and it’s not in our interest to allow any of them to fade away. The best memorial that Vincent O’Brien could have is that we ensure the one that he helped to develope continues to thrive.
Apparently the last five minutes of tonight’s Champions League final between Manchester Utd and Barcelona is not the most opportune time for your company’s computer systems to go kaput. A survey of 151 IT profeessionals, published today by Tufin Technologies (now we hadn’t heard of them either), found that 39 per cent said a technology problem in the last five minutes of the game would have to wait until after the final whistle before they looked at it.
Of course the last time the words “Man Utd”, “Champions League final” and “Barcelona” appeared in the same sentence the only drama of note occured in the last five minutes of an otherwise relentlessly boring game. Is is it any wonder techies think your crashed database can wait ten minutes tonight.
Paddy Power seems to think lightening won’t strike twice. It is offering a money back offer on a range of bets if there is a goal scored after 85 minutes in normal time.
Of course whoever wins tonight won’t just triumph on the sports field. Our colleagues in the sports department estimate that the winners will scoop €110 million in TV rights, sponsorship, prize money and other pay-offs. Other sources suggest that the English League Championship play-off (won by Burnley last Monday) is the most valuable single football game in the world adding £30-50 million (€34.5-€57.5 million) to the coffers of the winners in Sky tv money, sponsorship etc. Anyone care to resolve this one?
