This column was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on June 22nd, 2021. Only one and a half years in its possession – but already Telia is rumored to want to dump the Swedish broadcaster TV4. Surprising? Not at all. The world’s telecom companies never seem to learn from history – and all indications are that Telia will soon buy a “new” TV4. A giant deal valued at almost SEK 10 billion. Transformative for both […]
“The investment strategy at the time was to find a replacement revenue source for its traditional print media business – which it forecast would decline in the advent of digital media” That’s a quote from an article describing Naspers, a South African media company, in the 1980s. Koos Bekker – now the Chairman – had suggested that there was potential for a new type of pay TV in South Africa, similar to HBO. The narrative […]
May 2015. Tim Armstrong, the CEO of AOL, is on CNBC. He is wearing a navy blazer, no tie, blue shirt. He’s talking fast, and in bursts of excited management speak. He has a lot to be excited about. It has just been announced that Verizon is going to buy AOL for $4.4 billion. This is of course good news for Mr Armstrong. CNBC anchor, Andrew Ross Sorkin, asks him the key question for the […]
For over 15 years the newspaper industry has been looking for “the right business model” for digital. Think about how many hours have been spent by bright people at New York Times and all the other fancy places. The smartest people in the industry have been thinking about this for over one and a half decade. And yet they have not found anything that works well enough to even be able to keep their colleagues […]
