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Originally Posted by Stuart C
Actually, that's not true. Not all content on VOD is charged, and Sky's broadband is only free if you take movies or sports channels.
Sky have several advantages over UK Cable, which allow them to innovate more easily.
- They have the backing of one of (if not the) largest multimedia corporation on the planet. News Corp.
- They have less hardware/software to upgrade. Even ignoring the STBs, to launch a new service, Sky may have to upgrade a few uplink sites (if any) and their broadcast facilities. UK Cable may have hundreds of sites to update (all the head ends need upgrading for VOD for example). It's also worth noting that if the service requires extra hardware on the STB (such as a hard drive), the Cable Co's have hundreds of STBs to replace. Sky tend to require that the user buy their own. Admittedly, UK Cable could also require this, and save themselves a whole lot of money, but they don't seem willing.
- Satellite is (by definition) a relatively cheap way to reach millions of viewers (all you need is some comms hardware and a transponder or two on a satellite). Cable has a few downlink sites, hundreds of head ends, thousands of street cabinets and tens of thousands of miles of cable.
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Stuart also ntl are having to support different types of networks/services because they wont integrate their services into 1 universal service, which is ultimately raising their costs and reducing quality of service.
---------- Post added at 18:26 ---------- Previous post was at 18:24 ----------
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Originally Posted by Stuart C
True, NTL's interactive services do lead an awful lot to be desired. However, I don't think that is *entirely* NTL's fault. I think the broadcasters have a lot to answer for there.
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are ntl to blame if the customer has analogue only service tho? would be interested to know if interactive is possible on analogue.