[jfman]

Originally Posted by OLD BOY

Now, that’s funny!

As I have said before, the TV companies will only continue to provide linear TV while it makes them money. Once it is no longer worth their while to run all those channels, with all the time and expense of scheduling and filling the gaps in the schedule with dross (which still has to be paid for), they will honour their commitment to their shareholders to maximise their profits. Uploading content to a streamer is far more straight forward than the alternative.

When you add up

- The number of staff required all in all for scheduling;

Eh? How many people do you think that takes?

- The building space they require;

Cant they use zoom?

- The cost of the rights to show cheaper programmes to fill the gaps (there are no gaps on VOD);

Introducing a new and unnecessary cost, nice.

- The satellite transponder space required or the costs of broadcasting space from transmitters, etc;

Cheap, given the thousands of channels being beamed down across Europe on shoestring budgets.

I think you will find it costs rather more than buttons to run TV channels.

Round and round we go.

The only considerations really are whether the government can ensure the rollout of broadband within their existing timetable, which now seems to be in doubt,

Heaven forbid.

and for how long most viewers will continue to give conventional broadcast channels the support they have now. Those are the real considerations, not some romantic view that some people have about watching TV the old fashioned way.

Nobody romanticises it.

I suggest next Sunday night you go onto this new fangled social media platform called Twitter about 10pm and see how popular BBC 1 was the previous hour.