For Broadcast July 17, 2008

It emerged this week that John de Mol, who recently bought back the indie he co-created - Endemol - is also a significant player in the move to delist RDF Media Group.

Endemol owns a large chunk of RDF (around 27%) and de Mol told the FT that it was time for the indie giant to remove itself from the stock market to avoid the "listed disease" that seems to be weighing on most of the indie production company stocks.

But de Mol's view is not the only one in mediatown. Chatting with Alex Connock of Ten Alps last week, I got a completely different viewpoint about whether indies should delist.

Connock has no intention of delisting (willingly at least) because, for one thing, he quite fancies his company being the last listed indie standing. "Let the others delist and leave the stock market to us" is his view. And it comes partly from the fact that Ten Alps has been on a diversification strategy that so far seems to have paid off - its share price may be down 20% on the year, but it is up 11.2% in the past six months.

If diversification is the answer in a media downturn, then Connock is leading the way. Recently his attention has been on buying up online video advert production houses. There is always some scepticism among media analysts about how Connock will tie all the different parts of the company together, but he believes the online video advert is just another form of production.

According to Connock there were 63,000 advertisers in print in 2007 in the UK which never bought an advert on ITV because they thought it was too expensive and not targeted enough. "That's our market," says Connock. For the moment at least, it looks like the stock market agrees.