Quote:
Originally Posted by TheDon
Go take a look at America for an example of how much of a bad idea it is... oh wait their cable and satellite companies seem to have huge competition, with hundreds of channels (and hundreds of them in hd), and with local areas having their own providers which can still compete with the big players because of equal access to content.
Their channels don't seem to be doing too badly either! Amazing how they seem to be able to fund the likes of 24 and lost with no certainty of where they're going to find their return (except for ofc the same carriage contracts that every other non-sky and non-VM owned channel currently uses to gauge such a thing).
Obviously it's a terrible idea though and would never work.
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Ignoring the rest of it I recommend you yourself take a look at America. Local areas don't usually have their own providers who can compete with the big players, no idea where you've gotten that from. Usually the municipal / Ma and Pa cable companies have a more limited subset of channels and aren't competing with the Comcast, Cox, Time Warner and Charters. They tend to have ancient networks descended from old MATV networks from times long passed.
They don't get the content randomly, they negotiate with the content providers just as broadcasters here do. There have been cases recently of operator and content provider having disagreements over carriage charges.
Time Warner Cable have, in the last year and a bit, had disagreements over carriage charges with Viacom and Fox.
http://157.166.226.108/2010/01/01/ne...erry/index.htm
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/106212
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/99971
Cablevision in that same article dropped some channels due to not being able to agree carriage terms with a content supplier.
Hell Time Warner went as far as opening up a
campaign website to complain about the TV networks. I have no idea where you have the idea that the US is some kind of free content panacea but you are very, very much mistaken. If we took the US approach it would be for regulators to keep their noses out.
---------- Post added at 23:22 ---------- Previous post was at 23:17 ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by naeskydish
I was having a look at earlier reports last year. Something has to be done. Who has the b*lls to do it?
Anything that puts even a slight dent in the global media power of the arrogant tool Rupert Murdoch can only be a good thing. Something has to be done.
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It would appear that a lot of the support for this is based on Ofcom sticking it to 'the man', ignoring of course that Sky customers will likely end up paying more or service quality for everyone will go down, and that Sky while 39% owned by News Corp is not a News Corp company.
Sky give a good product at a reasonable price (IMHO), Virgin for all their complaints manage to compete with Sky on price and have better gross profit margin. Who's getting stitched up here exactly?