March 2, 2017 -- Thank you, and good afternoon everyone.
Thanks particularly to Claire and David for inviting me. I'm grateful to be included and thank you all for being here.
Actually, I've been looking forward to this - it's a great opportunity to talk with you all about the challenges and opportunities that our industries are confronted with, and also to share some thoughts on what 21st Century Fox is focused on, and to have a dialogue about the business, and the context for media and telecoms more generally.
First a little bit about our Company and the values it is built on
William Fox founded the Fox Film Corporation in 1915 - and he was a real pioneer. A leader in film exhibition as well as distribution, he brought an independent mindedness to the business, and a zeal for innovation. The acquisition of the Movietone patents in around 1925 ushered in a revolution in storytelling - and the creation of the first widely distributed audio-visual news service ever, Fox Movietone News.
After the stock market crash of 1929, Fox fell on hard times, but the merger with 20th Century Film Corporation, and the creation of then 20th Century Fox, in 1935, secured the company's future, and its commitment to great storytelling never wavered.
A new revolution occurred when News Corp -- and here's where my family, and our shareholders, get involved -- acquired the business in the mid-nineteen eighties. The creation of the Fox Broadcast Network, an effort nobody thought was necessary or a very good idea, but turned out to be both of those things, was just the beginning of a transformation into a global creative disruptor that stands apart from many of our competitors we like to think. We moved from Fox Broadcasting to here, in the UK, with the founding of Sky Television, which likewise nobody thought was very clever, and we bet the farm on it anyway. After the merger with BSB it was still a huge challenge, and the investments in digital TV in the late nineties, and the subsequent doubling down on our creative output and the broadband platform, proved to be good bets, but not without their costs. In the meantime, we had acquired Star TV in Asia, which until 2001 remained a huge drain on our resources. All of these things - this desire to create choice and serve customers and viewers better, come from the same place. And I would argue that there has been no other firm so committed, in deeds, to increasing plurality across the markets we operate in.
Indeed, it's the reason we go there.
Perhaps because of our roots in Australia and then the UK, this restlessness and comfort with roaming remains pretty unique. We have always taken a different view of what it means to be a global business, and every day we make choices about where to invest, where we can create experiences that matter to customers, and where we can create long-term value for our shareholders. I learned a lot when I was in Asia, trying to turn around our then-struggling investment in Star TV. We had to make hard choices, about where and where not to invest. It became clear to me that being everywhere wasn't everything, but being deep in the places that could really make a difference, was crucial. Our business today in India is a market leader, and is a testament to the team and to those choices we made years ago.
Our long-term investment horizon has paid dividends, and I haven't even touched on the Sky Italia or Sky Deutschland stories, which had also been projects that many thought were bound to fail, but succeeded because we never overestimated our customers' satisfaction with the status quo.
The next chapter of all of this, the separation from News Corp, and the creation of 21st Century Fox, is only in its infancy. And while we are a business animated by the values and culture of a 100-year old creative franchise, the zeal and curiosity of a founder-entrepreneur of unparalleled vision, and our universal commitment to our customers and the great storytelling they deserve, we are also a new company, only three years old, eager to help define what this business of ideas looks like in the next 100 years.
There's no question that this period we are in now is the most exciting and extraordinary period of transformation for our industry.
Over the medium term, and approaching quickly, all video entertainment and news will be consumed over IP streaming networks. That means that what we create is released into an unprecedented competitive environment, in which the customer can choose at any minute and on any device from all the things that have ever been made. We are in an era of ultimate plurality, where choices, sources, and access are multiplied, even from where we were only five years ago.
So first and foremost we need to be making better things all the time.
Better stories, better products, better experiences for our customers. We're immensely proud of the creative achievements of the business, and of the momentum that we have at each of our brands.
Our business has been an expression of the technological advances shaping our industry - from silent movies to talkies, from feature film exhibition to broadcast television and from broadcast to multi-channel cable and satellite TV. And the underlying technological advances today - ubiquitous high-speed connectivity, a continued proliferation of end-user connected displays, and the potential for unfettered access to creative assets in the cloud for customers globally - presents an opportunity for accelerated growth for new and existing video creators and platforms. We think this is only just the beginning, and the combination of strengths required to operate a high-volume, high-quality content business and a vast international video platform is precisely the combination of strengths that we're developing.
In short, if content is in
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March 2, 2017 -- Thank you, and good afternoon everyone.
