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Originally Posted by richmond
does any1 know if theres anything in the pipeline regarding playercam on the football with ntl..........and i bet the answer is no  |
It's perfectly possible to do on NTL now. There's just got to be the will to do it. And that's not a simple matter.
In the normal scheme of things, it's the broadcaster who pays for interactive content. For example, on their own platform, BSkyB have to rent more space on the satellite in order to broadcast extra streams. They have to pay a company to programme the application that controls it all. So it's not unreasonable to expect Sky to pay NTL for the extra space that their interactive streams would take up, and to pay a company (possibly NTL themselves) to programme an application that would work on NTL set-top boxes. But there is absolutely no incentive for Sky to do this whatsoever. I mean, why should they spend money doing something that would only benefit the customers of their biggest rival? They want people to get so fed up with the lack of interactive that they go over to Sky Digital instead.
So you could argue that maybe NTL should broadcast the streams, and develop an application for free. Which they might be prepared to do, if it weren't for this the fact that NTL don't make any money on Sky Sports packages at all. So there's absolutely no incentive for them either to sell it to their subscribers, or to put money into making the service better. It's simply throwing money away with no return -- all it would do would add more Sky Sports subs on NTL, so that their biggest rival got even more money. Now if Sky were to offer NTL a lower wholesale price, so that NTL made a profit on people taking the sports packages, it might be a different matter. But Sky won't.
IMO this is the classic example of why the most popular digital TV *broadcaster* should not also be allowed to run the most popular digital TV *platform*. BSkyB should be split up into separate content and delivery divisions. In that way, Sky The Broadcaster could be reasonably platform neutral, and offer the same facilities to both satellite and cable subscribers without worrying that doing so would hurt the DSat platform.
Of course, the regulator will never actually have the balls to do that, but it is a big stick they should threaten to use. It's only the threat of being split up into separate Application and OS companies that keeps Microsoft producing software for Apple Macs -- so that they can't be accused of using Office to force people onto Windows. Unfortunately here the regulator shows no teeth whatsoever to Sky, and so we're left with the situation where they can quite openly use Sky Sports Interactive to try to force people onto Sky Digital.
And that's a very bad thing.
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