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Re: Faze TV
But every channel in the history of all things ever, bar those from the big terrestrial broadcasters, has launched on satellite (and I'm willing to bet it is FTA satellite rather than Sky) before cable.
A channel has to pay to be broadcast on satellite -- this money doesn't go to Sky Digital, but to the company who run the satellite (Astra or Eutelsat in Europe), and to the company who provide the uplink facilities (both Sky and NTL can do this, amongst others). If the channel wants to appear on Sky Digital, then they must pay a fee (£50k pa from memory) for an EPG number.
That's what it takes to just get a channel to get broadcast "free to air". In this model, all revenue for the channel comes from advertising. If a channel proves popular, then Sky may take an interest in including them in one of their channel packages. In this case, the channel is encrypted, and only viewers subscribing to the appropriate package can see it. Sky will pay the channel a fee, based on what package it will appear in and how popular it is likely to be. The position Sky aim to be in is that an addition to one of their packages will bring in more new subs than it costs them. (For the channel, the Sky payment has to be balanced against a potential reduction in viewers and thus advertising revenue.)
With cable, things are a little more complicated, as there is no concept of "free to air". It's all down to negotiation. On the one hand, adding new channels costs NTL money (hardware, maintenance, manpower), and so they are within their rights to charge a carriage fee. This is the equivalent of the sat-space and uplink fees on satellite. Conversely however, adding popular channels to higher packages is likely to increase the take-up, giving the channels more power. So in the case of, for example, shopping channels, the money goes all one way, as they bring no benefit to NTL's viewers. On the other hand, I would expect that NTL pay Nickelodeon for their channels, as they would lose many family pack subscribers if they dropped them.
All of which is a bit boring, but I hope it goes some way to explaining why minority channels have such a hard time getting carriage on cable, and why everything always launches on Sky first.
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