Tivo killed themselves off by their bizarre sales policy, which meant almost the entire TV trade refused to sell it (once they were allowed to).

Ah yes those were the days - that is what I would love to see more of on FTA, Live cricket!


Patrick

I agree, I doubt Sky will succeed, although it won't be for lack of trying.

Your attitude to Sky users is ridiculous. It has nothing to do with Intelligence, and they are not losers. As Nigel says, you are not doing your arguement any good at all by carrying on in that vain.

I have the full Sky package willingly. Yes its overpriced but while I can afford it I will have it. I am not going into my viewing needs that is personal to me. Just to add though I am housebound. That doesn't make me a loser.

I also have Freesat, which I like. Picture quality is better for me than Sky+.They do need to get their finger out and get more channels.

That's an interesting point, I don't know about that aspect..what was the bizarre policy? Was it putting £KY in charge of marketing

Patrick

My attitude to Sky users is actually rather tongue in cheek. I tend to make comments like 'loser' when one of the Sky team wade into Freesat threads to do spot of Sky promotion.

Even the TIC comments should not be taken to include people who cannot get out as much as they would like and need more 'indoor' entertainment nor those who are forced to pay Sky's monopoly prices to get the sport they like.

Tivo was sold exclusively through Dixons group, initially for six months - so (like with Humax's PVR) the 'cream' was given to the companies less able to sell the product.

In Tivo's case it was an even bigger disaster, after only two weeks and abysmal sales figures Tivo decided to cancel Dixons exclusive deal and offer it to the general trade.

The trade overwhelmingly told Tivo where to stick their boxes, and despite lower and lower priced offers hardly any dealers in the UK ever sold any. I've never even seen a Tivo, and don't know anyone who has?.

3 x license fee would equate to £142.5 x3 = £427.50pa = £36.56pm - for that you could get sky+ and sky sports thus watching all the sport you want

Make more sports crown jewels - bbc recently stated they wanted no test cricket as a crown jewel - they can't be bothered to devote the time to it despite having 4 channels.

The last time test cricket was on terrestial - CH4 - we lost most of the afternoon's play to racing - as if they couldn't miss that for the 5 saturdays a year.

Until sky broadcast Test cricket abroad, we were limited to 1/2 hrs highlights at around midnight on bbc - even now bbc are not interested in the highlights package because they still want to put it on around midnight when ECB want it on at 8pm.

The last season they had the fa cup matches they couln'd even show it on the HD channel, open golf is also not on HD, but they can give you wall to wall tennis on HD for a fortnight

I can understand the trades attitude - however Tivo is without doubt the best and most reliable recorder I have ever had (1 failed recording in many years). I bought one of the first Tivo's sold and it is still going strong.

The only downside to Tivo is it can only record 1 prog at a time as it has only 1 analogue tuner and the facility to record output from a sky box. It also looks a little dated (quite large and silver).

If only the freeview recorders on sale were anything like as reliable.

How do they manage that?

Do they have a team of people monitoring what is actually being transmitted and somehow signalling the TIVO machines to tell them what's happening.

I've only had about 5 failed recordings since the Humax came out and I'm all but 100% sure 3 of these foulups were the fault of the TV companies rather than an error with the box. The other two I can't be sure because I got that brain-dead message: 'recording failed for unknown reason'

Sorry but I think your "Tongue in cheek" remarks are in very bad taste. Posters are not mind readers. I look at your posts and they go from one extreme to another. Very hard to judge the mood.

I for one am not promoting Sky in any way. Even though I am in the business, I would far rather have a Freesat system with a full array of choice and channels.

That's all right. Just try not to let it happen again.

So I can't have the films or HD.

Best part of £660 a year, or nearly five times the licence fee.

At the moment there is pretty much nothing to stop Sky from snapping up any sport, any popular series from the BBC/ITV/C4/Five. The BBC have to work within a set budget and can't charge an extra fee for each TV in your house, the others within realistic advertising revenue estimates. All Sky have to worry about is how high they think they can set the subscription charge. That's why we have ended up having to pay £55 a month for this service.

I agree that Channel 4 should not have put the racing on instead of the cricket. What was wrong with them using Film 4, E4 etc to have both on.

SKY have a budget, at around £800 million profit obviously they can not spend more on content or major investment elsewhere without reducing the dividend to the millions of shareholders or borrowing as they did to buy Easynet and fund other ventures.
SKY can not buy the next season of Heroes, the BBC have tied that up and that is one problem, a lot of channels especially free ones will not commit to long term contracts because they can not guarantee the audience for a show and this risk spending tens of millions and only generating a few million in advertising. Without a long term deal if a show gets big in the US or the UK then the rights holder jacks the price up (same way UK channels expect to be paid more for selling a show overseas if it's a big hit).

The BBC have to work within a set budget of around £4 Billion pounds and that figure can not be claimed to be insufficient. ultimately if they want to operate in the real world market like SKY, ITV, CH4 and Five etc they should be funded as such and not with the huge advantage of a guaranteed income while their PSB rivals see revenues fall through the floor.




At that time the reach of F4 and E4 were much lower than they are now plus the contracts for both racing and cricket probably stated CH4 coverage. If you are going to be shown on a FTA channel for the reasons many people use (audience reach and awareness) then it has to be on the flagship channel of the broadcaster.

I'm not sure what your figures are supposed to prove as for one you quote the profit they work to and the other you quote their total income.

Nor am I any the wiser why you mention Heroes. Have Sky ever taken a risk on a program that has went on to be a huge success? All I see them do is wade in with a high bid after the BBC/Channel 4/Five have established the popularity of a series.

Finally you'd have to think that whoever agreed the racing and cricket with Channel 4 were idiots if both thought they could be shown at the same time on a single channel.

I'm just pointing out that SKY do not have the ability to buy anything, they work to a budget just like anyother broadcast it's just slightly bigger and certainly generates more profit than anyother TV broadcaster.
The other figure is the BBC revenue from the license fee and commercial interests and since they don't need to make an operating profit that is their budget to spend on their PSB commitments. Unlike every other broadcaster they are not affected significantly by the real world market conditions so what they may lose it compared to their commercial rivals that make up for by being funded by a state approved tax on televisions.






I was just pointing out no matter how much money SKY has they can not buy Heroes because the BBC have bought a season in advance with the risk of paying for a turkey.
That investment is fairly unusual in terms of imports simply because if a show performs poorly they still have to pay the agreed price.

In terms of specifics that define success
Lie To Me and Bones are solid performers on FOX.
SG1, Atlantis, BSG and Eureka are high end performers on the multichannel TV arena and I expect SG:U to follow suit. Cold Case has been a staple of CBS for many years and L&O of course has been around for well decades and shown by many channels

House was dropped by FIve because after 5 seasons and securing syndication the actors and everyone else getting a bumper pay rise thus leading to a higher sale price. Five simply did not have the cash to meet the price and dropped the show and bought The Mentalist, SKY picked up House.
Twenty Four was at the time right in the middle of the FTV/FTA switch and it is perhaps the most honest example of SKY manoeuvring to get a show. I am sure FOX were happy with the BBC but there were FTA considerations and without SKY1 I am sure they would have been resolved but at the end of the day SKY offered more money for the seasons as yet sold so a deal was done.
LOST is even more simple, CH4 had first refusal and wouldn't pay $750,000 an ep but would for Desperate Housewives, SKY were willing so deal done. Ch4 probably made the right decision as DH was a bigger puller than LOST which was going through a rough patch.

The benefit of SKY was widescreen and recently HD plus closer to the US broadcast, hopefully these advantages will be negated over the next few years as Freeview HD appears and UK broadcasters realise downloading is a threat to them.

The whole PAY television saga can be shrunk down to PAY offering something Free didn't or couldn't either though cash or apathy.




No argument there.
Lets face it once again CH4 had first refusal at the next cricket contract at the same price they were paying and turned it down as they were losing money. Then England go and win the ashes and the TV audience rockets but they are not alone, ITV dumped F1 (needed the money for footy) and then Button gets off to a flyer

Most of the content (repeats)on the sky channels comes from the 5 main terrestrial broadcasters
I was with sky for ten years only the kids watched the childrens channels laterly , I gave up even watching sky news because of the bias reporting.
The problem is that most people think they are missing something by not having sky .
I can't think of a good reason to get it back as I can now watch the repeats on freesat for the price of a tv licence.

Whats the point in quoting one word out of context.

Humour.

I would call it sarcasm

I'd call it a banana.

Of course they can buy anything and they have always done that. To recover the cost they simply bump the subscription charge.





I'm certain that Channel 4 would still be showing Lost if the company they were competing with couldn't simply whack on a couple of quid to the monthly charge to recover extra outlay.

That's the fundamental problem with pay tv. They can outbid the competition as long as they believe that they can squeeze some more money out of their subscribers. That's why we've ended up having to pay a hell of a lot more money to watch very little that is worth watching in return.

Unless long term contracts were secured by the FTA broadcasters in the manner of the BBC who protected their access to Heroes by paying more or less in advance.

Of course just this last month we've seen Living take Supernatural and Medium out of the FTA market to partner up with Ghost Whisperer another show that used to be on free telly.

It all does underline that the future is PAY telly, advertising and the license fee business models are compromised bigtime.






Yes any broadcaster bids what they can afford and CH4 decided that they could not afford to buy LOST with it's ratings and SKY1 could.
Of course CH4 increases it's asking price for advertising if a show is bringing in more viewers and if the same amount of people had been watching LOST as Desperate Housewives I am sure with first refusal LOST would still be on CH4.

The fundamental problem with Free telly is that they don't get enough viewers anymore due to simply far more viewing choice both in the FTA market and PAY telly plus VOD and IP options and those they do watch linear telly watch less and less commercials thanks to the PVR.

We can play the blame game all day long and certainly the value of PAY telly in all it's forms but perhaps when you get right down to the nitty gritty it was the failure of the 100% market domination of the BBC, ITV and CH4 who let PAY telly get a toe hold on the market. If those apathetic broadcasters had been offering what people wanted there would not have been a way in for PAY telly or at least certainly a much harder and longer period to become viable.

It's a little ironic this is being discussed in the Freesat forum, if the UK had this sort of service pre digital and even hand in hand with the 28.2 service things could have been a lot different.

I don't even see a problem with pay TV per se.

The problem is that Sky have a grotesque monopoly that is not tolerated in any other market and they use that monopoly to completely distort the market they are in.

People complain about Microsoft but if they used their monopoly to act like Sky and charge £800 for a basic package with one of six mixes: Word processing, Spreadsheet, Business graphics, Development, Email and Web or £810 for two mixes, £830 for three, etc, the EU would be down on them like a ton of bricks.

I'd have no objection to paying a fee per channel as long as I could buy the channels I wanted and not be forced to buy them in packages.

Ultimately I hope that we will move from a package based payment system via a channel based system to a programme based one where people can buy the programmes that they actually want to watch, when they want to watch them.

Depends on how much that fee per channel would be though.

I cancelled Sly because the only thing I watched was the footy and to be honest it was overkill for me as I have a season ticket for my local team.

There is still quite a bit of footy on FTA and there is allways the pub.

I just buy the good tv series on DVD anyway, so I've not missed Sky at all, nor the £400 a year it cost me.