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BSkyB's Strangle on Hollywood
CitySlicker
Posts: 10,414 Forum Member
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Story in the Guardian this morning:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/25/bskyb-stranglehold-hollywood-films-risk?CMP=twt_fd
What sort of implications could this have? One of the first things that springs to mind for me is the Anytime+ service that is restricted to Sky Broadband and if the competition commission might find this unfair.
This sort of thing has been going on for years though, and every now and again we get a stirring from Virgin to say how unfair things are.
Will things really change?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/25/bskyb-stranglehold-hollywood-films-risk?CMP=twt_fd
What sort of implications could this have? One of the first things that springs to mind for me is the Anytime+ service that is restricted to Sky Broadband and if the competition commission might find this unfair.
This sort of thing has been going on for years though, and every now and again we get a stirring from Virgin to say how unfair things are.
Will things really change?
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It's a bit rich Virgin moaning who are not interested in procuring their own content, they merely want to make money from Broadband and Phone.
Someone else should show some balls, step up to the plate and compete instead of whingeing
In my opinion.
There is something missing from your post and that is what would be best for Sky/Bt/VM customers. Customers of all platforms are being charged too much because of Sky's dominant position and near monopoly. Other platforms cannot compete because Sky is so dominant and the other platforms do not have the money to compete. I assume that is why VM got out of content business? I believe they used the money obtained from the sale of their channels to clear some of their debt. The Ofcom report into this showed that Sky had long since gained full benefit from their original investment and were now simply charging far to much. Hopefully with politicians now doing there utmost to distance themselves from the Murdoch family something might be done about it.
Well then platform owners should procure their own content!
BT and VM are hardly small companies and in VMs case it isn't Sky's fault they are in debt. It's clear the real money these days is in content.
Sky only got out of debt by procuring premium content didn't they? They speculated to accumulate.
Now they are all moaning as they missed the boat
"One third of the UK's £15m pay TV households subscribe to Sky Movie"
Anyone else think "£15m" is a typo, and they mean just "15m", ie 15 million UK households have pay TV? That's a new number, I had though previous estimates were lower.
As for the gist of the article, I'm all for increasing competition, but at the end of the day, will this make much of a difference to any consumers, ie will the cost of Sky Movies come down, or will a viable, less expensive alternative emerge? Seems doubtful.
The commission has also decided that Sky has prevented BT and Virgin Media from developing a business selling films on demand via subscription. Since rivals first brought their complaint in 2006 Sky has been warehousing – or buying without using – the exclusive right to let viewers watch films on demand via subscription.
If you could get BT Vision via another BB Company, no doubt BTV sales would rise, but like Sky, BT have locked access itdown so you can't get it
So because they made that investment years ago the people of this country are now suck with a near monopoly with all the negative ramifications of that situation. You and Mersey70 are wrong and the competition commission and Ofcom reports, where they have looked into this in detail, show you are wrong.
It just how everything in this country works.
Freesat has gone up against Sky and is holding it's own, although the TV switch off, has helped them.
There is nothing stoppping another company renting space on a satellite and starting up, apart from the initial costs, and that is what they do not want to risk, they want to make money from day 1, instant profits, if that is not on the cards, then they will not be interetsed.
All that will happen is what has happened for sport. Once upon a time, you needed Sky Sports and whatever pack Eurosport was in.
Now, you may well need ESPN and Premier Sports/Setanta in Ireland as well.
In other words, rather than increase choice, the net result is a significantly higher cost to the subscriber to keep what they already have.
Other countries know that a monopoly situation is bad for the consumer. The USA also has legislation in place to prevent monopolies and companies misusing their dominant position.
Ofcom haven't don anything to force up the price of sportss to the consumer. Quite the opposite. They have found that Sky is overcharging competitors for sports and ordered them to reduce prices. The competition report in to movies found that competitors have to sell the channels at a loss to compete. This situation is unhealthy and should not be allowed to continue.
Tue, the more choice, the less that is in each pacakge, and will thus be a higher cost in the end.
I think if you have all 6 mixes it works out a 20p per channel per month ? if that all got split up, I think it would end up costing a lot more, no one would subscribe and the channels would close.
Virgin could be a big challenger to Sky, but they will not invest in cabling new areas or villages, which maybe they should be forced to do?
So Sky should not be forced to reduce subscriptions even where they have been found to be overcharging but Virgin should be forced to go in to areas where they would be unlikely to get a return on their investment? I think some sort of bias is showing here.
You are absolutely right.
This article mentions that a solution would be to limit the way that Hollywood studios are allowed to sell movies to UK TV services, basically limiting the percentage of content that each service is permitted to buy the rights to......WELL THATS JUST LOVELY
This MAY be a great idea for Virgin, so that they can buy up half the movies and make them available only to Virgin viewers.....great competition, especially as Virgin is only available in CABLE homes.....
So viewers go from being able to enjoy ALL the movies to only being able to see what their service is allowed to buy.......WONDERFUL
Does NO ONE give a shit about the viewers?
You can slag of Sky all you like, but at least they put EVERYTHING in one place for you, movies, sports, series, documentaries etc etc etc.....
Yes, it costs money, maybe too much, but you pays your money and takes your chance.....if these idiots get their way you wont even be able to do THAT!
They can't which is the whole point. Sky can bid so much more than Virgin because behind them is this behemoth News International - despite the latter owning less than 40%. Ditto for BT who are after all a telecoms company.
Companies in the Virgin group are run as separate companies so while the Virgin Group is large - Virgin Media is not - apart from the large level of debt
Further as the contracts end at various times it would mean that companies have to bid in a number of smaller auctions - increasing both the cost and reducing the service for consumers.
The simplest answer is to say that any platform provider with more than 33% of the Pay-tv market cannot also be a content provider - that would of course mean that both Virgin and Sky having to offload channels - but it would also mean that any company cannot use it's stranglehold on content to reduce consumer choice. It does not help that Sky is the biggest TV company in the country - even bigger than the BBC.
It is a bit more complicated than that - there would need to be rules regarding the amount of voting stock a platform provider had in a content provider - but that is something the regulator should be able to determine
Something like this is going to be more important - given that from next year there will be no analog signal and therefore for many channels the only source is Sky. Such a situation is never good for consumers.
BT VIsion do offer Sky, the DSO is such a shambles that no one will (or very few) will take the gamble subscribing.
We have just had DSO here, we did get a Sky Sports signal, then after DSO it went, not to come back until mid 2012!
To say BT have suddenly lost a few subs in this area is an understatement!
In other words, if they want EXCLUSIVE content for their business they SHOULD be forced to offer their services to EVERYONE.....
And if that means they have to spend BILLIONS on investing in expanding their cables to the 50% of the nation they don't cover then so be it......
With a few expections 100% of the country can get Sky if they want it......if they want exclusive then thats fine, everyone, or pretty much everyone, can access it.
Christ, the idea of exclusive content on cable is SICK......its like having the latest blockbuster movie and ONLY showing it in a cinema in Grimsby.....great if you live there, screwed if you dont.
They have forced the price up for comsumers, because you have to buy multiple packages.
It's different than sport which pretty much has to be shown live, and where to date, you very rarely see the same content on different channels at the same time. So, you end up with the results like the six PL "packages", which no one channel can have, so if you want to watch all six, you have to get Sky and ESPN, which as someone noted above, means having to pay more than if Sky had all six.
Last time I looked pay-tv was an OPTION and not manditory......
Yes, Sky IS expensive, and Yes I choose to pay for it..........
In the same way that some people choose to pay a lot of money for foreign holidays, fancy cars, fancy designer clothes, watches, perfumes etc etc etc
Should Ferrari be forced to reduce its prices so everyone can have one?
Should "The Fat Duck" reduce its prices down to match KFC so everyone can afford to eat there?
Should Thomas Cook be forced to slash its Caribbean All Inclusive holidays so that we can ALL go for two or three weeks?
There are a LOT of things that cost a lot of money, but for some reason we feel we have a God given right to have cheap tv.....
Well we do...BBC, ITV, Channel Four, Channel Five and a good number of other FTA channels that are available on Freeview at no cost at all, other than your licence fee.
People should stop thinking that they have this divine right to Pay TV and view it as a luxury and selective product.
I don't smoke, I don't drink and I can't remember my last foreign holiday, although I could go if I felt like it, but I don't......
I DO choose to pay for Sky TV, because that is what I want to spend my money on.
You spend yours where you want to, be all means, but please people, stop complaining that you can't afford to pay for Sky whilst at the same time blowing thousands of pounds a few on booze, ****, designer clothes, perfume and two or three holidays a year etc etc etc etc etc
And before you start about not having that many holidays a year, research shows that the average Sky viewer DOES take between two and three holidays a year.....NOT my figures, market research done by Skymedia for the ad sales....
So if Sky IS soo expensive, I suggest you stay home more and watch it lol
A full package with HD costs less per day than a coffee in Starbucks!!
I'm sure many who say they can't afford Sky, fritter £2 here and there in their daily lives.
The fact that you like Sky tv doesn't mean you have to support the Murdoch's mafia style business practices. Believe in better, just like the Competition commission, Ofcom, and now at last parliament who have now, hopefully been freed from the fear that the Murdoch organisation created.
Sky Movies etc should be independent of BSkyB the service provider so it is in Sky Movies interests to be on as many platforms as possible - there should not be a conflict of interests whereby they would want to be exclusively on BSkyB satellite as they would prefer at the moment.
We need a model for satellite that is more like Freeview albeit with a greater emphasis on subscribing to channels (channels not the service).
Yes I agree. A month ago that was impossible due to the Murdoch's political influence. Now, hopefully, anything is possible. Perhaps it is even possible that politicians might put the interest of their constituents before the businessmen they are having slap up dinners with. Or is that too much to hope?