I have limited experience as Channel Manager, only a few titles, but I’ve dealt with many as a moderator, so I have started to have an idea of what it is or what it should be in my mind.
A Channel Manager is not an enviable role, it comes with more responsibility than fun.
First of all, the choice of managers, in languages you know nothing of. You have to have a large network of people you trust and ask for their opinion. And even then, how do you build that network of people you trust? Maybe they are nice, active in the community, consistent in their work etc., but do you really know about their language skills?
One of my languages is Greek, a language nobody knows except for Greeks. So I see very often Greek moderators who don’t even know how to speak and write good Greek - so how can they choose and correct subbers?
A Greek person who doesn’t know good Greek, an English person who doesn’t know good English, a French person who doesn’t know good French? Of course it’s possible! We’ve all met those people. Who during their 12 years at school were looking at their window, at their cellphone, or chatting with their deskmate, barely passing from one year to the next. People who never read books but only the Astrology section of TV magazines. People who belong to a family of people who don’t speak the language correctly in the first place.
Those people are native, but they are not proficient. Especially with the written word.
But the poor Channel Manager, how on earth can s/he know all that?
So that’s a huge burden.
Then of course finding the segmenters and the native subber team (Korean, Chinese etc.) who will translate into English. Ohoho! More trouble here. They are so few, and precious, and stretched thin, full of other projects. You’ll have to beg and coax them, and even then, they may join the team but come rarely.
Finding a page designer in case you don’t know how to do it yourself is another headache. These people are also few, and making such cover page takes time, so they may not like to take many projects.
You also have to send spam messages to all people who had the bad idea of “following” your previous channels, in order to get support for the license.
Thinking about it, a Channel Manager’s main job - and a difficult, tiresome job it is - takes place before the show starts airing. Then, if the mods are chosen wisely, everything will go on smoothly, with just some little intervention here and there in case a problem arises. But if some languages lag, you have to become unpleasant and send reminder messages, up to the point that you may have to replace a mod.
So yes, the CM position has power of decision, but the responsibility that goes with it is so huge that it’s not always an enviable position.
It’s like being a building administrator. Yes, you get to decide some stuff on your own like choosing the elevator walls colour, but you also have to wait for the petrol tank to arrive and check the level to make sure they’re not putting less than you pay for, you have to call for the electrician and the plumber, change light bulbs and face tenants who don’t pay their dues every month. In my mother’s building we used to do this in rotation, all the owners by turn, in alphabetical order. I did it for one year enthusiastically, but the next year I was glad to move house, to a place where as a tenant I didn’t have to do it.