In This Age Of Cutbacks Reuters Is Launching A New Financial TV Service – Say, Didn’t Current Management Kill Reuters Financial TV Just Seven Years Ago?

Philip Stone March 4, 2009

In all of the announcements in the US and British press about Reuters launching a new financial TV service in June, there wasn’t one word that the company actually had a very successful financial TV service which current management killed off seven years ago as a cost savings. Just goes to show, what goes around, comes around!

Several former Reuters colleagues have taken great delight in ensuring this writer was aware of Reuters new TV plans, Reuters Insider, for they know only too well that this writer was on the core launch team for Reuters Financial Television (RFTV) back in 1994, and reading from the Reuters announcements a lot of what was done then is going to be done now, but with the passage of time there are some great improvements afoot, too.

RFTV was really ahead of its technical time. In those days there was no video delivery via the Internet so there was a complex system in which the originating analog signal was converted to digital for satellite delivery to be converted back to analog at the client work station. The service, frankly, was a real pain to install and only the biggest banks undertook the chore, but the editorial product itself was superb. Then, as under the new system, access to the service was as simple as clicking onto an icon on the terminal.

A major decision made back in the 1990s which the new service is also following was that this would not be a continuous 24-hour service. There is the memory of the day when, still in the planning stages, RFTV’s editor produced a 24-hour rolling schedule for approval, really pleased with himself. It was left to this writer – from the marketing camp – to tell him that dealers had better things to do all day than watch TV, that we didn’t want a continuous schedule but only breaking news as it occurred – the users would get a Reuters alert that a TV transmission was soon coming. After the service was up for a while a survey indicated we had hit that nail precisely on the head.

There were set-time market reports in the pre-market opening hours from Europe, Asia and the US -- about 15 minutes long – and closing market reports that were very popular, but otherwise it was programming as needed.

And what now seems so natural but was a first back then was that Reuters placed cameras at many banks and invited their top analysts to pontificate on the events  of the day with delivery from their trading room to the studio via ISDN  -- similar to web cam quality delivery today — no satellite upfeeds in those days. Those analyst interviews are an everyday occurrence these days, but in those days it was leading edge with the banks “fighting” to ensure their analyst got ample air time (branding was important to every bank even back then).

And there were valuable lessons learned on coverage the financial people actually wanted. It wasn’t just financial news. There was a time, for instance, when the Italian Parliament was in turmoil (actually, has there been a time when it wasn’t in turmoil?)  and it was very possible the government could fall and RFTV carried live coverage of the proceedings with English translation (always live translation on events that were not in English). Dealers said later how valuable that type of news coverage was – for investing in government bonds and the like depended in some part on the stability of governments and they wanted to see those proceedings first-hand.

But in 2001 Reuters then headed by Tom Glocer – the same Tom Glocer in charge of Thomson Reuters today – decided RFTV just plain cost too much and it was brought to a close in June, 2002, with a loss of jobs around the world and the closing down of studios.

Because of the delivery/installation problems it never had the big viewership it deserved. In today’s world of Internet delivery, video on demand – back in those days it was something wanted but technically just not possible – getting the transcriptions is a great new feature, and feeding the service to a Blackberry is even better – in those days there were no Blackberrys – these are all features that should make the new service a huge hit within the financial community. And it’s encouraging to see that in Reuters today you can’t keep a good idea down.

In Reuters there have been many missed opportunities on the video front. The most prevalent came in 1992, two years before RFTV. If it hadn’t been for a strategic Reuters decision CNN, according to none other than Ted Turner, might not even be here today, and there are still former Reuters executives who were around at the time who question whether this wasn’t one of the company’s biggest mistakes.

Reuters at the time held a majority interest in the Visnews television news agency with NBC and the BBC together owning a minority. Reuters decided, well before any other multimedia news organization, that it needed to fully own its video content and so it bought out the NBC and BBC shares and renamed Visnews as Reuters Television. Reuters never really said at the time why it had bought Visnews and everyone in the industry was asking, “Are they going to start their own 24-hour news channel?”

Not long afterwards Ted Turner and then-wife Jane Fonda hosted senior Reuters executives at a big dinner in Atlanta and Turner then asked that question directly. Silence around the table. And then the senior Reuters executive answered that Reuters was NOT going into the 24-hour retail news business but rather it would stay as a wholesale news supplier. Sighs of relief from the CNN contingent and Turner then said words to the effect, “If you had answered ‘yes’ to that question then we would have continued here tonight to enjoy our meal and one another’s company, but the likelihood would be that within the weeks to come I probably would have had to close down CNN.” In other words Reuters, with all of those Visnews services and with people around the world would have been too much for the then Chicken Noodle Network.

Today, Reuters is locked in fierce competition with the AP in supplying video footage to the world’s TV stations and to Internet sites. Margins are small, profits, if any, are slight. What might have been if it had gone retail?