CNBC is one of the leading broadcasters in the arena of business news, an area where there is not much push to move to HD, but instead the focus is on innovate in other distribution areas, such as the iPad. Justine Powell, CNBC’s vice president of distribution, EMEA, spoke about the channel’s capacity needs in Europe as well as bringing its news content to other platforms.
 

Powell: I think it gives us a massive advantage being so niche. We launched 12 years ago in Europe with a niche product, and we are benefiting from being so specialist. A lot of channels that had broad content are now losing audiences. I think by remaining niche, we can keep our audience both across TV and take it to new online and mobile platforms.
 

Powell: We have an HD channel in the United States. We don’t have one yet in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. We are reviewing the options. What we are seeing in the market is that news channels, except for Al Jazeera and Sky News, are not moving across to HD. My question is, “Does our audience actually want to see business news content in HD?” You also have to consider that HD takes up a huge amount of bandwidth, so will the platforms that we are working with really require us to be in HD? I think probably not. Being a business and financial news channel, is HD is really the right way to go? I think HD really works for nature programs, drama, sports and movies, but I am not really sure it works for financial news. We review going HD on an ongoing basis, but there are no immediate plans to introduce anything in Europe.

Powell: If we decide not to go HD, then we won’t need much more satellite capacity. If we do go HD, that situation changes. As part of our strategy to aggressively grow our distribution, we became unencrypted in the United Kingdom in May and launched on FreeSat in February.
 

Powell: I think the major challenge is that we are a TV broadcaster, and we are, therefore predominantly working within linear. We are trying to take that content and make it work across a multitude of different platforms, so obviously, it is understanding an audience and, for example, understanding that there is a different demographic on different platforms. So it’s about issues such as the length of the video and making it very relevant to our audience. We have conducted some research and we have seen some differences in terms of the audience coming to television and those coming to online platforms, so we’re looking at producing new types of content and content areas that appeal to those audiences. We are seeing much more interest in terms of interactive content, blogs and viewers getting responses back from our presenters. This is very different from a TV audience, who often prefer to have a more passive interaction with the channel.
 

Powell: There are a few things that we are doing to boost the amount of content on our European news pages. CNBC.com is the global web site, but what we want to do is increase the amount of content in the Europe, Middle East and Africa section and drive more traffic there. We are looking far more at digital. We want to work a lot more with other online partners, either in terms of syndicating our content, and working with other broadcasters or newspapers, doing content swaps. With mobile, we really want to push our product to other mobile devices.

Powell: We currently have our linear product available streaming live via mobile on a number of networks across Europe, and we also have CNBC Real Time app, which provides top news stories and videos. We also launched a live feed to iPhones and iPads via Livestation in May. We are going to be launching CNBC Pro in September, which is very much geared to someone who is working in financial institutions. It includes live share price, market data and a searchable database of video content. For example, if you are interested in the latest on the oil market, you’ll be able to access the latest share prices and search a database of video content.
 

Powell: We are looking at a number of these new mobile platforms that are coming through. We are also looking at “TV apps,” which we see as a growth area with more and more people buying TV sets that enable you to navigate around interactive content. We are looking to develop a TV app there. With digital media, once you have the applications and the content, it is really about tweaking it for the different platforms. We want to get that content to as many different platforms as possible. Doing video content on an iPad makes sense. You have to use the platform to bring the best of the content you are providing.
 

Powell: We are looking at both. The benefit of subscription is that you can bring in the revenue, but you might reduce your audience. My gut instinct is to go down the subscription route. We are bringing something to the market that does not exist on the mobile platform, and I think with the content we are planning to have there will generate a lot of interest.
 

Powell: We think digital is really key for us. We want to increase the numbers of partners we are working with, whether online or mobile. We are looking at more product areas, including TV apps, more mobile phone apps. We will be increasing the number of news items covered in the Europe, Middle East and Africa sections on our Web site. Across the board, we want to make sure we are across as many platforms as possible.