An often dished out soundbite is that competition is good for consumers because it drives down prices.

But that is clearly twaddle when it comes to pay TV. It used to be if you wanted to watch sport and the other premium channels you got Sky. They had everything that wasn’t on terestrial. No competition but so what, you paid once, you got what you wanted. And the price was kept reasonable by people being unwilling to pay full above the odds and instead choosing to do without.

But now we have Sky, BT sport, Netflix, Love Film, Blinkbox, etc all with their own exclusive content. All competing to drive down prices. But they all need as much exclusive content as they can get to entice us in, so they are paying top dollar for whatever they can get. The content providers are getting rich and the middle men are passing on the cost to us, so not only do we end up paying more, but we now get less.

This clearly sucks. No wonder people choose to get their content by more shady means.

So what is the solution? How can we the consumer force a change to the system. We are all quite happy to reward the content producers, the sports teams and players etc. but how do we get away from the horrible circle jerk that is exclusive contenet and delivery platforms? How do we cut out the middle man who isn’t adding any value but is bleeding us dry?

lol at the tv market being referred to as competitive

its not, here is wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopoly

which of these matches the situation you have described…

oh what you can do about it is pirate eurosport off the web (procyclinglive) and have freeview

Football, cricket and most boxing is shite to watch so save your money – not much else is pay-to-view at the moment

Pisses me off that we still have to pay for the shite at the bbc when they’ve basically let all the sport they ever had go!

Oh and whilst we’re at it I wish another electrical retailer would come to the high street as currys have hot the market sown up at the moment!

passing on the cost to us people who are prepared to pay for sport

FIFY

And I thought this was going to be about the utilities minefield…

not much else is pay-to-view at the moment

Yes you can snippets of most things but take the Rugby as an example.

The six nations is on the BBC – Good

but then

The lions and other internationals are on Sky
The premiership used to be on Sky but is now on BT Sport exclusively
The heiniken cup is on Sky but from 14/15 all games involving English clubs will be on BT sport.

So you can watch a very small amount for free but to be able to see it all has never been more expensive.

bittorrent. (-:

TBH, my beef with all this shenanigans isn’t exclusive content per sé, but the hoops you have to jump through to watch it legitimately. Having one universal on-demand delivery system rather than all these separate iPlayer / 4oD etc etc applications would be a good start.

I remember a while ago now trying to get a TV episode my OH had missed to download in some sort of sensible (legal) manner and stream to any one of the plethora of devices I could plug into the TV / amp. After losing most of the evening to fannying about with DRM and transcoding odd formats I went ‘sod it’, found it on the Internet in about five seconds, downloaded it in a few minutes, and then illegally watched something I was actually entitled to watch only with a better quality of picture and sound than the official offering would have been (if I ever managed to get it working).

I’m not advocating piracy, but it really shouldn’t be so much more difficult to enjoy something you’ve paid for than it is to watch a hooky copy. Contrary to what FACT will have you believe, home piracy isn’t killing the music / movies / games industries, the industries are doing a fine job of doing it to themselves.

See also,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopoly

Its not even one of them, each company is trying to define their own market and therefore have zero competition. Moblie phones or utilities may be an oligopoly but at least each of them sells phone calls or electricity, they try to confuse and obfuscate but in the end I can search out the cheapest/best.

But if I want to watch The Ashes or Arrested Development there is zero competition. Its a monopoly. I can choose to have Sky and Netflix or not watch it.

And while torrenting a film or TV show may be easy its still a massive ball ache to watch live sport via shady means. This is due to exclusive content.

My solution – Ban exclusive content. Then the middle men aren’t adding any value for the content makers so they may as well sell to us directly, so the content makers can still make boat loads of cash, but we can pay less but Rupert Murdoch gets less/no slice of the pie.

But if I want to watch the ashes I have zero competition. I can choose to have Sky or not watch it.

or go to the ground and watch it?

You can’t make all content available to all providers, because they’ve no other differentiator, have they?

or go to the ground and watch it?

I am doing, for one day. I’d quite like to watch the rest but thats then a min of £50 a month. But for that £50 a month I can no longer watch the rugby as well etc. etc.

Point still stands, exclusive content is bad for all of us so we should do something to stop it.

But what? Simply boycotting these services won’t work becuase a) we are cutting of our nose to spite our face and b) it needs everyone to do it and nobody wants to be first.

It does make me laugh (or you’d cry) that the government gets all huffy about ‘monopolies’ like Pay TV, which you have a choice as to whether you use or not.

Yet they couldn’t give a toss about real, genuine private monopolies and cartels in the public utilities, which everyone in the country has absolutely no option whatsoever but to use. And which they propose to do absolutely nothing to prevent them holding the entire country to ransom

The solution for the sport on telly stuff? Go to the pub with your mates, and have a couple of pints while watching the stuff you really want to watch. It’ll come in at less than a Sky Sports subscription, and is just more enjoyable

What you have there is each company trying their best at:

Product differentiation: Product may be homogeneous (steel) or differentiated (automobiles)

Its interesting watching BT spaff ridiculous amounts of money trying to enter the market.

I’m getting that feeling of Deja vu. Anyone remember ITV Digital? Anyone see any similarities?

I’ve got a freeview box with a recorder. If something I wan to watch is on, I’ll watch/record it. If it’s not on Freeview, i won’t. My knickers remain firmly utwisted about what’s on other chnannels that I don’t get.
Apart from some sport, but then i go to the pub for that.

You can’t make all content available to all providers, because they’ve no other differentiator, have they?

Exactly!

My point is we don’t need these people. They add no value. Before the internet you could argue we needed their delivery mechanisms but now we have absolutely zero need for them.

We fund iPlayer through the licence fee. Why not give every content provider the option to make their content available on iPlayer for a fixed admin fee (or even free since we’ve already funded the platform via tax) and let them charge what they want for it. Kind of like a highstreet for media. We can pay for what we want, when we want it, at the value the market decides it is worth.

Maybe I am being naive. Why wouldn’t this work? (assuming we had the power to change the status quo in the first place).

Contrary to what FACT will have you believe, home piracy isn’t killing the music / movies / games industries, the industries are doing a fine job of doing it to themselves.

this ^^

Tom Cruise got paid $11M for Knight and Day – now there’s a film that should have been killed.

Point still stands, exclusive content is bad for all of us so we should do something to stop it.

Is that really that much different to publishers, though? If you want to read Dan Brown’s latest you have to pay Doubleday money, nobody moans that they’d rather give their cash to Random House…

Perhaps what’s really needed is simpler pay-per-view, available without needing some separate box in your living room or a 12 month contract with Sky/Whoever. I imagine it won’t be long coming, as TVs increasingly come with internet connections.

You do realise that businesses exist to provide profits to shareholders right?

So you remove all product differentiation from the market, profits fall massively and you end up with a monopoly provider, and limited consumer choice.

I think its best you stay out of economic policy making 🙂
If you want to improve things I suggest you work on reducing barriers to entry, perhaps you could set up your own company to provide the sport you want to see.

Is that really that much different to publishers, though? If you want to read Dan Brown’s latest you have to pay Doubleday money, nobody moans that they’d rather give their cash to Random House…

I’d rather buy the eBook directly from the author’s website.

I do wonder if all this current DRM obsession is because the media publishers are wondering how long it’ll be before everyone wises up to the fact that we no longer need a middleman to get media from source to destination.

The solution for the sport on telly stuff? Go to the pub with your mates, and have a couple of pints while watching the stuff you really want to watch. It’ll come in at less than a Sky Sports subscription, and is just more enjoyable

Not really – You will pay more for your pint becuase of this, becuase Sky and BT have the pubs over a barrel as well.

Is that really that much different to publishers, though? If you want to read Dan Brown’s latest you have to pay Doubleday money, nobody moans that they’d rather give their cash to Random House…

It’s very different. If I want to read Dan Brown’s book I can go into Waterstones or Tesco or Amazon and buy it for the price of that one book. If I then want a Jamie Oliver cookbook (in my humdrum life of conformism!) I can go to the same shop, or a different one and buy it for the best price.

But imagine if Dan Brown’s new book was exclusive to Tesco and you had to be a member of Tesco at £50 a month to get it. But to get Jamie’s you had to be a member of Sainsbury’s at another £50 a month. It would suck? No.

It’ll come in at less than a Sky Sports subscription

presume most footballerists want to watch atleast 1 match a week, 2hours, whats that? 4pints ish? so £10-12 a week and that’s just for your saturday game. You’ll be better off going riding your bike and leave that pseudo sport for rooney and drogba 😉

There’s rather a lot of areas where competition is bad for customers, utilities, public transport etc etc

COMPETITION IS NOT BAD FOR CONSUMERS!

Flounces off…..

Is that really that much different to publishers, though? If you want to read Dan Brown’s latest you have to pay Doubleday money, nobody moans that they’d rather give their cash to Random House… take a long hard look at your life, and wonder how it is it came to this?

FTFY 😉

You do realise that businesses exist to provide profits to shareholders right?

So you remove all product differentiation from the market, profits fall massively and you end up with a monopoly provider, and limited consumer choice.

You are missing the point. We could have close to a perfect market for media. There are an almost unlimited number of producers and an almost unlimited number of consumers. But we have these “delivery platforms” getting in the way with their exclusive content. They have reduced the market from one with almost perfect competition to one with at best an oligopoly and even a monopoly in certain circumstances.

Take away these pointless companies, make them surpless to requirements by banning exclusive content and sure these few big companies go bust and their shareholders are a bit pissed but overall we are all better off and so are the content producers.

If you want to improve things I suggest you work on reducing barriers to entry, perhaps you could set up your own company to provide the sport you want to see.

But the barrier to entry is currently the huge prices that are paid for exclusive content. And it is in the interest of the everyone but us to maintain this. It should be banned. People would still pay but the money would only go to the people adding value, to an ammount equal to the value they add.

Take away these pointless companies, make them surpless to requirements by banning exclusive content and sure these few big companies go bust and their shareholders are a bit pissed but overall we are all better off and so are the content producers.

So when you ban exclusive content who’s going to pay for the cameras, the commentators, etc.? Whether or not you like Sky you have to recognise that sports broadcasting has massively improved since we were kids – thanks to competition.

Whether or not you like Sky you have to recognise that sports broadcasting has massively improved since we were kids – thanks to competition.

PFFT!

So when you ban exclusive content who’s going to pay for the cameras, the commentators, etc.? Whether or not you like Sky you have to recognise that sports broadcasting has massively improved since we were kids – thanks to competition.

We are – As a group of consumers we are still going to have to pay what it’s worth, but exclusive content is akin to profiteering. We are paying more than its worth due to a monopoly situation.

And Sky can still exist as a content provider, they can still film the footy and make a program about footy. But since that content can’t be exclusive to Sky as a delivery mechanism we can just pay to watch the footy for the market value of just football.

And maybe football as an industry will make less money since excluisvity is such a money spinner for it. But people will still play it, and people will still be willing to pay for it so it will still be a viable business, but maybe with fewer vulgar cars and houses and £200k per week contracts.

IIRC there was an attempt by terrestrial broadcasters to produce a single platform for telly IP distribution called ‘Project Kangaroo’ but the Powers That Be blocked it.

Kangaroo

But as for sport, I watch the cycling on ITV4 and while I support Froome/Wiggo et al. I refuse to give Murdoch any of my hard-earned. Other sports are in my ‘meh’ camp.

I’d be interested in Syfy but I think it looks like pants now.

but exclusive content is akin to profiteering

I’m sure Sky, as a business, are happy with that.

Anyway, I reckon football clubs should be nationalised. Pay all players a decent but normal wage, better for the top clubs of course, and put the lot on the BBC.

I’m sure Sky, as a business, are happy with that.

I’m sure they are. But why should we be?

Well, how much of a socialist do you want to be?

I’m sure Sky, as a business, are happy with that.
I’m sure they are. But why should we be?

You don’t have to pay Sky , though
You do have to pay the BBC

wrightyson – Member
Oh and whilst we’re at it I wish another electrical retailer would come to the high street as currys have hot the market sown up at the moment!

There’s Comet!
Oh, wait…
FWIW, I’m with BigButSlimmerBloke here; I record lots of stuff, but if there’s an inadvertent programme clash, or I miss something because I forgot to set it to record, then tough titties, my life isn’t going to end, it’s an FWP (First World Problem), and I’ll just carry on watching something else, listen to some music or read a book. Life’s too bloody short to bother about missing some blokes poncing around kicking a ball about, feeding their already grossly overblown egos and bank accounts by making them think they might, in some way, actually be important.

I’m sure Sky, as a business, are happy with that.

I’d argue this is the opposite of socialism. I’m saying we should regulate the market for media/content to make it a more competitive market and prevent the creation of monopolies. We still have to pay, we just only pay what it is worth.

Err, how about you go out and ride a bike instead. 😀
Also, have you forgotten, rupert murdoch is a lying, cheating, **** **** **** of the highest order.
Don’t give a **** your money.

How do we cut out the middle man who isn’t adding any value but is bleeding us dry?

they add a small amount of value – they film. mix, edit and broadcast, you know, do the actual stuff that you can see. You can make any sport really, really boring if you don’t do that really well. Look at how grindingly boring cycling coverage is when it isn’t filmed and delivered as well as the TDF is.

You can’t cut out this middle man, without a fleet of OB trucks theres nothing for you to actually see.

they add a small amount of value – they film. mix, edit and broadcast, you know, do the actual stuff that you can see. You can make any sport really, really boring if you don’t do that really well. Look at how grindingly boring cycling coverage is when it isn’t filmed and delivered as well as the TDF is.

Yeah, but we don’t have to pay for this bit though exclusive content deals though. Take the premier league, some of the cost is making the TV program, but most of the cost is paying the premier league a fee to have exclusive rights to show the games. Sky want this exclusivity so they can charge huge prices for subscriptions. The exclusivity has no function, no value other than it creates a monopoly that allows Sky to charge more.

Get rid of this and people will still pay for the content, for the production and the players wages etc but the price won’t be inflated because we allowed a monopoly.