From the Edinburgh International Television Festival, Star TV CEO James Murdoch’s thoughts about how Anglo-American broadcasting misses the boat on how to grapple with a global market:

If I have to read another article about “Threats and Opportunities,” “Surviving in the Digital

Era,” “The New Realities of the New Economy,” or some such other angst-ridden twaddle,

I’ll just have to shoot myself. Americans are worrying about declining standards.

Europeans are worrying about their standards becoming American, and everyone is

worried about the Internet.

But the obsession with the above comes at the expense of a broader discussion that

shouldn’t be given such short shrift. Modern, so-called “Big Media” needs to grapple with

the basic worldwide demographic trends that will shape our industry, and all others, over

the next century, and indeed, well beyond it.

The pressing problem, as I would like to argue this evening, is that most media companies

have failed to understand what it means to be a global company. No where is this more

true than in the Anglo and American countries that have assumed that simply

broadcasting around the world, CNN-style, or exporting English language films, is a

sufficient global strategy.