Thread: General No Sky Atlantic on VM for a "long long time"...
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Old 15-05-2014, 13:21   #33
OLD BOY
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Re: No Sky Atlantic on VM for a "long long time"...
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris View Post
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.
Sorry, can't agree with that, Chris. Sky Atlantic is just a channel filled with the content that others provide that Sky just suck up and put an exclusive tag on. How can this be fair when there are other companies (eg Virgin Media) who do not supply channels of their own? It's unfair competition.

I might have some sympathy with this argument if Sky were actually producing the programmes for Sky Atlantic themselves, but they are seeking to dominate the whole market.

Incidentally, the first episodes of Mad Men were shown on BBC2, and so it is not true to say that 'new products ... have never been available outside of the Sky delivery platform'. But even so, I don't see how it can be OK for one company to buy up content from all those providers and then hog that material for itself.

One big thing that Sky has not yet grasped is that we are Sky customers too. This behaviour sets people against the company, and so I don't know how some people think it is to Sky's commercial advantage to engage in these despicable practices. Considering the small audiences SA attracts, I think it is stretching things to describe this as a 'unique selling point'. They are having a laugh and the competition authorities are too lazy to do anything about it.
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