Cable Forum - View Single Post - remember the pay tv ofcom investigation

m419 · 27-04-2008, 16:26

Well Spectrum Interactive spent Ã‚Â£2 Million in 2005 on acquiring 1,000 Interphone kiosks and replacing them with new ones

Kiosk advertising rakes in about Ã‚Â£50 to Ã‚Â£100 per month per kiosk and most payphones are heavily used by those using international calling cards via 0800 numbers. All payphone operators are entitled to 8.1p per minute commision when 0500,0800 and 0808 calls are connected and this collected by BT Wholesale and the owner of the freephone number has to pay for it. Apparently 18.3% of Spectrum Interactive's revenue is generated through freephone number calling.

Furthermore, the Virgin Media,Smallworld Media and Wight Cable networks pass approximately 9 Million homes altogether. Between 1994 and 1998 the cable penetration level was much higher, this was because Cable was simply cost effective and very cheap in comparison to using BT and Sky.

Now the shoe is on the other foot, BT and Sky are much more cost effective and because NTL provided a service which was unacceptable in terms of poor customer service and persistant outages and long waits for Digital upgrades, customers got cheesed off and left! Now these customers are going to be hard to retrieve!

Smallworld Media, a very small Cable company in the North are in the process of upgrading its Digital TV boxes for ALL customers not just new ones and will probably advertise the service better once this has happened. My feeling is that it will be swallowed up by Virgin Media.

I suppose another way NTL:Telewest could compete with Sky is to make deals with BT. What NTL should have done is that they should have used BT's brand instead,move all phone customers onto BT and get rid of there cable telephone service as its costing a lot of money to maintain.

That way BT/NTL would be able to provide in about 40% of the country:

Cable TV
Cable Broadband

BT Mobile over Vodafones network
National Telephone service to 97% of the country
ADSL Internet and BT Vision for outer cable areas.

However BT would only have a small percentage of this company and Ntl:Telewest would be leasing the brand for a cheaper price than what they pay for Virgin.

Then there would be no competition issues between Cable and BT and would compete successfully with Sky.

27-04-2008, 16:26	#47
m419 Inactive Join Date: Jul 2005 Location: London Services: BT Broadband,BT Anytime calls,Sky entertainment extra HD,Vodafone pay monthly Posts: 1,512	Re: remember the pay tv ofcom investigation - turns out SKY missed the deadline Well Spectrum Interactive spent Ã‚Â£2 Million in 2005 on acquiring 1,000 Interphone kiosks and replacing them with new ones Kiosk advertising rakes in about Ã‚Â£50 to Ã‚Â£100 per month per kiosk and most payphones are heavily used by those using international calling cards via 0800 numbers. All payphone operators are entitled to 8.1p per minute commision when 0500,0800 and 0808 calls are connected and this collected by BT Wholesale and the owner of the freephone number has to pay for it. Apparently 18.3% of Spectrum Interactive's revenue is generated through freephone number calling. Furthermore, the Virgin Media,Smallworld Media and Wight Cable networks pass approximately 9 Million homes altogether. Between 1994 and 1998 the cable penetration level was much higher, this was because Cable was simply cost effective and very cheap in comparison to using BT and Sky. Now the shoe is on the other foot, BT and Sky are much more cost effective and because NTL provided a service which was unacceptable in terms of poor customer service and persistant outages and long waits for Digital upgrades, customers got cheesed off and left! Now these customers are going to be hard to retrieve! Smallworld Media, a very small Cable company in the North are in the process of upgrading its Digital TV boxes for ALL customers not just new ones and will probably advertise the service better once this has happened. My feeling is that it will be swallowed up by Virgin Media. I suppose another way NTL:Telewest could compete with Sky is to make deals with BT. What NTL should have done is that they should have used BT's brand instead,move all phone customers onto BT and get rid of there cable telephone service as its costing a lot of money to maintain. That way BT/NTL would be able to provide in about 40% of the country: Cable TV Cable Broadband BT Mobile over Vodafones network National Telephone service to 97% of the country ADSL Internet and BT Vision for outer cable areas. However BT would only have a small percentage of this company and Ntl:Telewest would be leasing the brand for a cheaper price than what they pay for Virgin. Then there would be no competition issues between Cable and BT and would compete successfully with Sky.