Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris
I think there is a difference between the availability of big ticket content such as sports and movies, and channels that have been available cross-platform for decades, and new products that have never been available outside of the Sky delivery platform, which is what Sky Atlantic is.
There is a reasonable expectation that Sky One will be universally available on pay TV precisely because it has been for a long time, the cable operator(s) have built business models around it in good faith and consumers have invested in equipment or contract tie-ins. Ditto sports and movies.
But it would be perverse to insist that Sky can't create its own exclusive branded products. Just as you can only buy Harrods branded goods from Harrods, so Sky should be allowed to develop new, premium services that are its own exclusive property to sell. It's not as if HBO shows didn't exist before Sky signed an exclusive carriage deal for them. Any other pay TV or terrestrial operator could have gone in and done what Sky did. But they didn't.
Sky is a commercial enterprise, it has shareholders who invest money so they can get a return. At present, Sky's judgement is that the best return on their investment in HBO programming is to use it as a means of attracting new customers to their platform, rather than retailing it through other carriers and trying to pick up higher viewing figures and ad revenues.
|
That is not at all how it works. Companies sign multi-year deals. If the deal is not renewed then the channel(s) will disappear.
The issue here is sky make the channel and sky supply the service. They externally want to charge others MUCH MORE for the channel rather than the internal charging. This is anti-competitive and is EXACTLY what OFCOM ruled on and why they introduced the rate cards.