Originally Posted by OLD BOY
Well, those are the big questions, and contributors to this forum have different views.
Clearly, no-one can be certain, because all of this is dependent on human ingenuity in making things work. My own opinion is that the economics of it all will shift the existing content providers to streaming. Advertising revenue from the TV channels will fall the more people shift to streaming, ultimately rendering our TV channels unprofitable. None of us know how long that process will take, but you can safely bet that the younger generation will be streaming away in the near future and hardly bothering with scheduled TV, which is very restrictive compared with streaming.
As you will see from the posts on this forum, there are some who vehemently protest that our TV channels will never die, because they feel that they themselves will always watch this way. I understand that, but I'm afraid that progress is likely to prove them wrong. The truth is, no-one can be completely sure. I just look at the viewing trends and technological advances and draw my own conclusions.
As for VM, I don't think that this change will mean that they cease to exist as a provider of TV content. Liberty Global see themselves as content aggregators now, so instead of having bouquets of channels in the future, we will have bundles of streaming services. Hopefully, there will be a system in place whereby if you take them all, you will get a discount, just as we do with bundles of TV channels. That would be attractive to most people, I think.
---------- Post added at 11:38 ---------- Previous post was at 11:32 ----------
I completely understand your concerns about that, muppetman. My view, as you know, is that viewers will migrate to these services and ditch the scheduled pay tv channels. Therefore, if that happens, you can deduct the cost of Sky channels from your calculation, which means you would end up paying about the same for much better content, both in quantitative and qualitative terms.
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