James Bunn is an experienced professional executive, who for more than 25 years has been leading, developing, managing and advising profitable businesses in all sectors worldwide.

At the forefront of the media and adjacent industries, leading evolution over the last two decades.

Operating globally after cutting his professional teeth in The City of London, he went on to specialise in global trade with SE Asia, Australasia, the Pacific, USA, Latin America, Europe, The Middle East and Africa and the UK as a senior executive.

Having held leadership positions at market leading disruptive start-up companies (such as Fox Sports Australia & Digicel Play); he has had great success launching challenger brands then turning them into household names.

Other successes have seen him lead implementation of industry recognised strategic change for long established ventures looking to evolve into lean and cutting edge enterprises meeting the changing needs of customers (for example TX Australia for the $6Bn Channels 7, 9 & 10).

Born into an English family business in television & radio he established a successful international media rights and distribution business with clients in 140 countries worldwide and which by 2000 was a major content producer of 400 hrs per year for BSkyB. His Sky Sports Aussie Soccer highlights show was pivotal in the UK exposing English Premier League achievements by Australian sports stars off the back of his earlier Channel 4 “Aussie Rules” series, along with Grand Prix Sailing, Inside Sport and Getaway. Along the way he helped expose Australia and its sports prowess to the world as part of the Sydney Olympic bid. In 2000 he was a founding Director and Chairman of the France Telecom pioneering TV Streaming venture Channel Networks in the UK.

He has also led a media consulting practice working in association with industry leaders. Clients have included Telikom PNG where he led the acquisition of the dominant commercial TV network EMTV; the former Channel Nine affiliate. There he created the roadmap for roll-out of their cloud based multi-channel Pay service with multi-screen functionality across TV and mobile devices.

Previously, as Chief Content & Acquisitions Officer for the Dublin based Digicel Group, he oversaw launch of the Digicel Play platform across 18 Pacific nations including Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Nauru, Tahiti, Tonga & Samoa. This included three free to air channels including TV Wan along with a Pay tier of 27 pass through channels including TVWan Sports HD, Rugby, CNN, BBC, Comedy Central, MTV, Fox Sports, Fuel TV, The Premier League Channel, History, National Geographic, Trace Urban, Food, Da Vinci Learning, Nickelodeon, Zoo Moo, Travel, HBO, ITV Choice, MGM, CBS and Warner TV. Broadcast delivery used a hybrid of DTT, Satellite DTH and the robust Digicel telecommunications infrastructure to serve mobile devices.

Earlier from 2012 he was Chairman of TX Australia where he oversaw the digitisation of the geographically largest TV network infrastructure in the world. TXA is joint owned by Channels Seven, Nine and Ten and was established as the technology arm of the three ASX listed market leading commercial media enterprises with combined annual revenues in excess of $6Bn. While overseeing management of the business, he navigated executive leadership changes and drove a key strategic review and expansion of a wide range of shared services which were made available industry-wide including to the ABC, SBS, Telstra, the NBN, Vodafone and SingTel Optus. Examples of cost saving shared services included joint; playout, program scheduling, transmission (TX) infrastructure services (incl’ satellite), ENG electronic news gathering and outside broadcast facilities including shared helicopters and OB trucks. Hybrid Hbb, IPTV, OTT & SVOD services were established on his watch servicing Presto, Freeview+ and Stan. Also, CDN content delivery networks for Plus 7, Jump-in 9, and Ten Play catch up TV services for all networks and perhaps most importantly the FV Mobile broadcast app.

Unusually, he is genuinely experienced in all aspects of the media value chain (he's been on the 'buy' and the 'sell' side of hundreds of content deals) and he has a very strong intuition for audience demand. As CEO he led the market-leading TPL Worldwide distribution company for a decade from 1994 supplying content to Disney, Discovery, National Geographic, Travel, ESPN, Fox Sports, eX, Speedvision, Outdoor Life, Eurosport, Sky Sports, SABC, Channel 4, Orbit, TF1, Doordarshan & Star TV. Popular TPL Worldwide titles included Getaway, AFL Aussie Rules Football, V8 Touring Cars, The Sydney Hobart Yacht Race, Grand Prix Sailing and The Flying 18’s, National Soccer League, Inside Sport and The World Around Us.

At times in parallel, particularly through his consulting and contracting projects, past clients include all of the major media enterprises in Australia in conjunction with major consulting firms including McKinsey, Alexander Proudfoot, Boston Consulting and A T Kearney. His advisory work has also covered the Asia-Pacific region including the Peoples Republic of China. It has also led him back to the UK & EMEA regions and he is extremely well versed in operations, strategic change management, Lean, Six Sigma, HR and business improvement.

He has a very strong working knowledge of media technologies across broadcast and broadband. For example on behalf of iTV he previously advised Telecom of Thailand and Shandong Cable on delivery of their ground-breaking quad-play multiscreen IPTV deployments.

Many investment banks, fund managers and superannuation funds have sought his counsel with respect to industry trends and potential for returns on investment in the media & telecommunications sectors worldwide. Clients have included investment banks in the USA, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Europe the Middle East and the UK.

Recent Blogs can be found at:

Television: Is the darkest hour just before dawn:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/darkest-hour-just-before-dawn-james-bunn

Tetiaroa on business? :
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/memories-tetiaroa-james-bunn

TV: Disrupting the disruption:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tv-disrupting-disruption-james-bunn-1