yipee yahoo
10-02-2004, 03:06 PM
It's gonna be very slow goin' with it, unfortunately....
The penetration of pay tv in Aus TV households is only about 23 per
cent.....
There needs to be incentives to get more people in this country
interested, such as an introductory package of about $20 per month to
get the lower end of the pay scale into it.....
Free to air tv in Australia is absolutely abysmal at the moment with
only three commercial tv channels to choose from -- we have a lot of
catching up to do with more advanced civilized countries such as New
Zealand, Camada and the United States of America.....
Australia is unfortuanely stuck in a boring, staid 1950's TV time
warp..........
The Free Trade Agreement with the US will be good if it passes through
the Senate....
More American content on the existing TV networks and pressure will be
immense for the introduction of new commercial tv players which could
be placed onto the digital spectrum and hence encourage the take up of
digital tv in this country which is currently at a dead end......
The pressure is mounting on this country to get out of it's current
pathetic abysmal stone age predicament and enter the 21st century as a
civilized country like New Zealand, Canada and the USA.....
================================================== ===========================
MrXX® <no@no.com> wrote in message news:<9kp820htkifkjco3a1e70thf5cbtke46pm@4ax.com>...
> 'Sam's World'
> The Australian Financial Review : 07.02.04
>
> Here we go again. All the big boys are in there, kicking and shoving
> as hard as ever. Lachlan Murdoch and James Packer, Ziggy Switkowski,
> Sam Chisholm, Kerry Stokes. The battleground is pay TV versus the
> rest. The new weapon is digital. The prize is cash - with plenty of
> credit and ego to go round.
>
> Sam Chisholm has already played an earlier very successful bout in
> Britain when he pushed Murdoch's BSkyB service into the digital world
> more than five years ago. He's been relentlessly pushing the Packers
> and Murdochs and Telstra at Foxtel in the same direction for the past
> few years. Finally, they've all decided to pay up and play. At a cost
> of $550million, Foxtel is due to start offering its digital service
> early next month.
>
> Chisholm - now Foxtel's chairman and a Telstra director - has never
> been a man prone to understatement.
>
> "We're going through a technological revolution at the turn of the
> century," he insists. "It's the equivalent of the industrial
> revolution at the end of the last century."
>
> So will it really be a revolution - or a more sophisticated version of
> the same old stuff? Will a lot more Australians be willing to pay for
> the difference? Will digital pay TV, with 130 channels and more to
> come, finally challenge the dominance of the free-to-air networks? And
> will the confused consumer be able at last to use just one remote
> control to easily record and watch whatever they want?
>
> That leads directly to a more fundamental issue for the future. Foxtel
> will also be trying to use this new service to try to transform itself
> into the gatekeeper of the digital era for everyone else. Given the
> shareholders involved - with Telstra at 50 per cent and News Ltd and
> PBL at 25 per cent each - this tactic hardly comes as a shock. But it
> would certainly mean that for all the talk about new media, it still
> features the same old players in firm control. It's the seemingly
> immutable law of media in Australia.
>
> "Foxtel will be the gatekeeper," says Chisholm confidently. "It has
> all these channels, it has all this technological capability and it's
> in digital, and the networks can't match it."
>
> Perhaps not. Yet for all the hoopla about the brave new world of
> interactive TV, many of the ideas that have caught the imagination are
> likely to remain marginal. Yes, viewers may soon be able to order
> their pizzas or their cars while they watch the screen or play video
> games and quizzes or vote on issues or performances. But based on the
> British experience, most won't spend too much time or money doing
> that, certainly for the first few years at least. Nor, unlike the
> British, are Australians allowed to gamble via their television sets.
>
> Chisholm, however, is convinced that "sports active" will be a
> significant draw - allowing viewers to switch camera angles and games
> and call up sports statistics at the press of a button. Imagine, for
> example, having the eight games of the Australian open on the screen
> at once and switching to the most exciting at will. News junkies will
> be able to flick between screens and order up the big news stories on
> screen or in print.
>
> Others are far more sceptical about how much that capability will be
> used by most viewers after the expiry of the "wow factor" - the
> initial excitement at what's possible.
>
> But what is clear is that most of the audience will also be very
> interested in the greater range of passive entertainment - just
> watching a whole lot more sport and movies which will be available at
> constantly changing times or on a pay-per-view basis. Or pursuing
> their individual interests whether they're historical biographies or
> kids' science shows.
>
> From Foxtel's point of view, the particular division of viewers
> doesn't really matter in the end - as long as there are enough people
> spread over all those channels to add up to a profitable mass.
>
> Chisholm, who spent the 1970s and '80s helping cement Nine's network
> dominance, says the real difference with digital comes down to
> consumers being able to make their own choices.
>
> "With TV networks, your life is spent trying to work out what the
> viewer wants and that denotes your success or failure,"he says. "Your
> reputation rides and falls on your ratings. In subscription TV, the
> measurement is your subscribers and you attract those by offering more
> and more choice."
>
> Which means that no one thing needs to get particularly high ratings.
> It is the antithesis of mass marketing fuelled by advertising dollars.
>
> "What people want is the ability to choose themselves," Chisholm says.
> "This is the big difference between network TV and Foxtel. We allow
> you, the customer, to decide what you like to look at. That means
> recalibrating the whole approach.
>
> "If you like movies, you'll have a choice of over 30 movie channels to
> look at - more importantly, all commercial free. On Sunday night, on
> network TV, you have the choice of three."
>
> That all sounds good in theory. But, of course, the catch is that
> customers will have to pay for that choice. And the more choice they
> want, the more they will have to pay. Certainly, a lot of Foxtel
> customers who signed up to the more limited analogue service were not
> persuaded to keep shelling out every month for what they got on the 44
> channels. Complaints that there is too little worth watching are
> common.
>
> The churn rate - those who sign up and quit - is back under 20 per
> cent but that is still a very expensive hole to have to keep filling.
> It means one big underlying aim of the digital launch is to
> drastically reduce the churn rate - just as BSkyB did - by making
> customers more reluctant to give up all the extras digital provides.
>
> Exactly how much they will have to pay for those extras is still
> unclear. The Foxtel commitment is that the basic digital package won't
> be any more than the basic satellite package - $48.95 - with a greatly
> expanded range of channels. What are tactfully known as premium
> services, however, will easily push the monthly bill way over that.
> The other device expected to be popular - a personal video recorder
> designed for the digital system - will be introduced later and also
> cost extra.
>
> Chisholm's firm view is that "price is not a consideration", citing
> the success of BSkyB in a country that doesn't have the same degree of
> affluence as Australia. Sure, he says, people might have initially
> said the washing machine was expensive - but there aren't too many
> coppers still in use. Going to the movies is hardly a cheap excursion
> by comparison either.
>
> But right now, pay TV is stalled at the level of about 23 per cent of
> Australian homes. Foxtel's ambition is to use the appeal of digital to
> get that percentage up to 35 to 40 by 2008. That certainly doesn't
> sound an unreasonable ambition, given the British experience. Since
> going digital in 1998, BSkyB's subscriber numbers have roughly doubled
> from about 3.5 million to 7 million. It's also on track to take close
> to £400 in revenue per subscriber per year by the end of 2005.
> Multiply those two figures and that's an awful lot of money.
>
> "When it's launched and people have an understanding of the choice
> that's available," Chisholm says, "the proposition is irresistible."
>
> Certainly, Chisholm has more experience with the various forces at
> work than just about anyone. From top to bottom. As part of assuring
> Nine's free-to-air dominance in the 1970s and 1980s and then
> masterminding BSkyB's transition to digital in the 1990s, he has
> worked closely with Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch over the decades.
> He knows Telstra intimately. His former deputies include Nick Falloon,
> now chief executive of Ten and David Leckie at Seven. He was key to
> engineering the Foxtel Optus programming merger with Chris Anderson.
> His fellow board members at Foxtel include James Packer, Lachlan
> Murdoch and Ziggy Switkowski.
>
> From the other side, he's chairman of Two Way TV which is providing
> the Mind Games channel for the digital launch.
>
> In addition, as chairman of Macquarie Network, he's been involved with
> John Singleton's recent attempt to create a new channel with broader
> appeal for thoroughbred racing.
>
> A lot of other players argue Foxtel will remain extremely resistible
> at those prices - no matter how persuasive Sam Chisholm is and no
> matter how inevitable the world's steady march to digital. So far,
> Foxtel has lost close to $1 billion - though PBL and News have made a
> lot of that back due to their joint ownership of Foxsports which sells
> its highly profitable programs to Foxtel in a neat game of round
> robin. With the strengthening in the value of the Australian dollar,
> Foxtel's incredibly expensive movie deals with Hollywood studios are
> also far less onerous than a year ago.
>
> But unlike BSkyB with its ownership of Premier League Soccer, Foxtel
> doesn't have exclusive rights to a major sport. In fact, it's just the
> opposite. This is due to strict anti-siphoning laws to ensure
> Australian voters can't complain about being deprived unless they pay.
> The government is examining these laws at the moment and is expected
> to relax them at the edges so that Foxtel no longer has to wait for
> the free-to-air networks to decline even the most minor sports before
> it can bid for them. It is also targeting "hoarding" - where the
> free-to-air stations often play only a small proportion of the sports
> they own.
>
> Everyone's in there lobbying hard. Particularly in an election year,
> however, no one expects a radical reversal from the Howard government.
> Chisholm still sounds sanguine about the direction if not the time
> frame.
>
> "It's impossible for them to get any stricter," he says "so therefore
> it follows that if there is going to be any change, it can only get
> better ... there'll be more sport available on Foxtel rather than
> less."
>
> That still leaves Foxtel fighting its other major battle of the
> moment. It's whether Seven, Ten and the ABC will sign up to the Foxtel
> digital platform in time for the launch. Time - and tempers - are
> running out.
>
> Nine, of course, has the advantage of being in both camps, with the
> Packers managing to split their loyalties and their risks between
> their free-to-air station and their investment in Foxtel. At Foxtel,
> Kerry Packer was always reluctant to spend the money to go digital,
> especially because of the impact it could have had on Nine's audience.
> But he's been persuaded.
>
> That means Nine has already signed up to be on the Foxtel digital
> platform, including meeting Foxtel's prerequisite of paying over $2
> million a year for the cost of the satellite. The benefit is that
> consumers will just use the one Foxtel remote control to click onto it
> as well. Seeing the digital future, SBS has also signed up.
>
> At this stage, though, Seven, Ten won't be there at all- at least at
> the beginning. The ABC will only be on the cable service, not on
> satellite.
>
> To rising mutual irritation, they are still arguing with Foxtel over
> terms. Yet the actual differences between the parties are relatively
> minor despite the game of bluff and the level of mistrust on all
> sides. It's more a case of egos at 40 paces. Foxtel has belatedly
> agreed to give Seven and Ten the same financial deal as it provided to
> Nine. It will just never agree to cut them in on a stake in Foxtel
> itself.
>
> The impact for consumers is that they would have to use a separate
> remote - a clear disadvantage for all sides, with both sides claiming
> the other needs them more.
>
> For now, though, the momentum is with Foxtel. The others already offer
> some limited digital programming themselves - but customers have to
> buy the box themselves. These won't connect with Foxtel and have so
> far proven spectacularly unsuccessful given the cost involved and
> their extremely restricted offering.
>
> In the meantime, Kerry Stokes is, as usual, using Seven's lawyers to
> appeal the rules of access to Foxtel's platform.
>
> "It really is time for Seven to wake up to the fact you can't sue your
> way to success," Chisholm snaps. He maintains the result is that the
> reluctant partners will just be left further behind Nine and the
> digital revolution. "Technology is what dictates change. All this
> entertainment - a range of services - will be delivered to your home.
> Foxtel will give it to you. This is what digital is doing."
>
> MrXX®
The penetration of pay tv in Aus TV households is only about 23 per
cent.....
There needs to be incentives to get more people in this country
interested, such as an introductory package of about $20 per month to
get the lower end of the pay scale into it.....
Free to air tv in Australia is absolutely abysmal at the moment with
only three commercial tv channels to choose from -- we have a lot of
catching up to do with more advanced civilized countries such as New
Zealand, Camada and the United States of America.....
Australia is unfortuanely stuck in a boring, staid 1950's TV time
warp..........
The Free Trade Agreement with the US will be good if it passes through
the Senate....
More American content on the existing TV networks and pressure will be
immense for the introduction of new commercial tv players which could
be placed onto the digital spectrum and hence encourage the take up of
digital tv in this country which is currently at a dead end......
The pressure is mounting on this country to get out of it's current
pathetic abysmal stone age predicament and enter the 21st century as a
civilized country like New Zealand, Canada and the USA.....
================================================== ===========================
MrXX® <no@no.com> wrote in message news:<9kp820htkifkjco3a1e70thf5cbtke46pm@4ax.com>...
> 'Sam's World'
> The Australian Financial Review : 07.02.04
>
> Here we go again. All the big boys are in there, kicking and shoving
> as hard as ever. Lachlan Murdoch and James Packer, Ziggy Switkowski,
> Sam Chisholm, Kerry Stokes. The battleground is pay TV versus the
> rest. The new weapon is digital. The prize is cash - with plenty of
> credit and ego to go round.
>
> Sam Chisholm has already played an earlier very successful bout in
> Britain when he pushed Murdoch's BSkyB service into the digital world
> more than five years ago. He's been relentlessly pushing the Packers
> and Murdochs and Telstra at Foxtel in the same direction for the past
> few years. Finally, they've all decided to pay up and play. At a cost
> of $550million, Foxtel is due to start offering its digital service
> early next month.
>
> Chisholm - now Foxtel's chairman and a Telstra director - has never
> been a man prone to understatement.
>
> "We're going through a technological revolution at the turn of the
> century," he insists. "It's the equivalent of the industrial
> revolution at the end of the last century."
>
> So will it really be a revolution - or a more sophisticated version of
> the same old stuff? Will a lot more Australians be willing to pay for
> the difference? Will digital pay TV, with 130 channels and more to
> come, finally challenge the dominance of the free-to-air networks? And
> will the confused consumer be able at last to use just one remote
> control to easily record and watch whatever they want?
>
> That leads directly to a more fundamental issue for the future. Foxtel
> will also be trying to use this new service to try to transform itself
> into the gatekeeper of the digital era for everyone else. Given the
> shareholders involved - with Telstra at 50 per cent and News Ltd and
> PBL at 25 per cent each - this tactic hardly comes as a shock. But it
> would certainly mean that for all the talk about new media, it still
> features the same old players in firm control. It's the seemingly
> immutable law of media in Australia.
>
> "Foxtel will be the gatekeeper," says Chisholm confidently. "It has
> all these channels, it has all this technological capability and it's
> in digital, and the networks can't match it."
>
> Perhaps not. Yet for all the hoopla about the brave new world of
> interactive TV, many of the ideas that have caught the imagination are
> likely to remain marginal. Yes, viewers may soon be able to order
> their pizzas or their cars while they watch the screen or play video
> games and quizzes or vote on issues or performances. But based on the
> British experience, most won't spend too much time or money doing
> that, certainly for the first few years at least. Nor, unlike the
> British, are Australians allowed to gamble via their television sets.
>
> Chisholm, however, is convinced that "sports active" will be a
> significant draw - allowing viewers to switch camera angles and games
> and call up sports statistics at the press of a button. Imagine, for
> example, having the eight games of the Australian open on the screen
> at once and switching to the most exciting at will. News junkies will
> be able to flick between screens and order up the big news stories on
> screen or in print.
>
> Others are far more sceptical about how much that capability will be
> used by most viewers after the expiry of the "wow factor" - the
> initial excitement at what's possible.
>
> But what is clear is that most of the audience will also be very
> interested in the greater range of passive entertainment - just
> watching a whole lot more sport and movies which will be available at
> constantly changing times or on a pay-per-view basis. Or pursuing
> their individual interests whether they're historical biographies or
> kids' science shows.
>
> From Foxtel's point of view, the particular division of viewers
> doesn't really matter in the end - as long as there are enough people
> spread over all those channels to add up to a profitable mass.
>
> Chisholm, who spent the 1970s and '80s helping cement Nine's network
> dominance, says the real difference with digital comes down to
> consumers being able to make their own choices.
>
> "With TV networks, your life is spent trying to work out what the
> viewer wants and that denotes your success or failure,"he says. "Your
> reputation rides and falls on your ratings. In subscription TV, the
> measurement is your subscribers and you attract those by offering more
> and more choice."
>
> Which means that no one thing needs to get particularly high ratings.
> It is the antithesis of mass marketing fuelled by advertising dollars.
>
> "What people want is the ability to choose themselves," Chisholm says.
> "This is the big difference between network TV and Foxtel. We allow
> you, the customer, to decide what you like to look at. That means
> recalibrating the whole approach.
>
> "If you like movies, you'll have a choice of over 30 movie channels to
> look at - more importantly, all commercial free. On Sunday night, on
> network TV, you have the choice of three."
>
> That all sounds good in theory. But, of course, the catch is that
> customers will have to pay for that choice. And the more choice they
> want, the more they will have to pay. Certainly, a lot of Foxtel
> customers who signed up to the more limited analogue service were not
> persuaded to keep shelling out every month for what they got on the 44
> channels. Complaints that there is too little worth watching are
> common.
>
> The churn rate - those who sign up and quit - is back under 20 per
> cent but that is still a very expensive hole to have to keep filling.
> It means one big underlying aim of the digital launch is to
> drastically reduce the churn rate - just as BSkyB did - by making
> customers more reluctant to give up all the extras digital provides.
>
> Exactly how much they will have to pay for those extras is still
> unclear. The Foxtel commitment is that the basic digital package won't
> be any more than the basic satellite package - $48.95 - with a greatly
> expanded range of channels. What are tactfully known as premium
> services, however, will easily push the monthly bill way over that.
> The other device expected to be popular - a personal video recorder
> designed for the digital system - will be introduced later and also
> cost extra.
>
> Chisholm's firm view is that "price is not a consideration", citing
> the success of BSkyB in a country that doesn't have the same degree of
> affluence as Australia. Sure, he says, people might have initially
> said the washing machine was expensive - but there aren't too many
> coppers still in use. Going to the movies is hardly a cheap excursion
> by comparison either.
>
> But right now, pay TV is stalled at the level of about 23 per cent of
> Australian homes. Foxtel's ambition is to use the appeal of digital to
> get that percentage up to 35 to 40 by 2008. That certainly doesn't
> sound an unreasonable ambition, given the British experience. Since
> going digital in 1998, BSkyB's subscriber numbers have roughly doubled
> from about 3.5 million to 7 million. It's also on track to take close
> to £400 in revenue per subscriber per year by the end of 2005.
> Multiply those two figures and that's an awful lot of money.
>
> "When it's launched and people have an understanding of the choice
> that's available," Chisholm says, "the proposition is irresistible."
>
> Certainly, Chisholm has more experience with the various forces at
> work than just about anyone. From top to bottom. As part of assuring
> Nine's free-to-air dominance in the 1970s and 1980s and then
> masterminding BSkyB's transition to digital in the 1990s, he has
> worked closely with Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch over the decades.
> He knows Telstra intimately. His former deputies include Nick Falloon,
> now chief executive of Ten and David Leckie at Seven. He was key to
> engineering the Foxtel Optus programming merger with Chris Anderson.
> His fellow board members at Foxtel include James Packer, Lachlan
> Murdoch and Ziggy Switkowski.
>
> From the other side, he's chairman of Two Way TV which is providing
> the Mind Games channel for the digital launch.
>
> In addition, as chairman of Macquarie Network, he's been involved with
> John Singleton's recent attempt to create a new channel with broader
> appeal for thoroughbred racing.
>
> A lot of other players argue Foxtel will remain extremely resistible
> at those prices - no matter how persuasive Sam Chisholm is and no
> matter how inevitable the world's steady march to digital. So far,
> Foxtel has lost close to $1 billion - though PBL and News have made a
> lot of that back due to their joint ownership of Foxsports which sells
> its highly profitable programs to Foxtel in a neat game of round
> robin. With the strengthening in the value of the Australian dollar,
> Foxtel's incredibly expensive movie deals with Hollywood studios are
> also far less onerous than a year ago.
>
> But unlike BSkyB with its ownership of Premier League Soccer, Foxtel
> doesn't have exclusive rights to a major sport. In fact, it's just the
> opposite. This is due to strict anti-siphoning laws to ensure
> Australian voters can't complain about being deprived unless they pay.
> The government is examining these laws at the moment and is expected
> to relax them at the edges so that Foxtel no longer has to wait for
> the free-to-air networks to decline even the most minor sports before
> it can bid for them. It is also targeting "hoarding" - where the
> free-to-air stations often play only a small proportion of the sports
> they own.
>
> Everyone's in there lobbying hard. Particularly in an election year,
> however, no one expects a radical reversal from the Howard government.
> Chisholm still sounds sanguine about the direction if not the time
> frame.
>
> "It's impossible for them to get any stricter," he says "so therefore
> it follows that if there is going to be any change, it can only get
> better ... there'll be more sport available on Foxtel rather than
> less."
>
> That still leaves Foxtel fighting its other major battle of the
> moment. It's whether Seven, Ten and the ABC will sign up to the Foxtel
> digital platform in time for the launch. Time - and tempers - are
> running out.
>
> Nine, of course, has the advantage of being in both camps, with the
> Packers managing to split their loyalties and their risks between
> their free-to-air station and their investment in Foxtel. At Foxtel,
> Kerry Packer was always reluctant to spend the money to go digital,
> especially because of the impact it could have had on Nine's audience.
> But he's been persuaded.
>
> That means Nine has already signed up to be on the Foxtel digital
> platform, including meeting Foxtel's prerequisite of paying over $2
> million a year for the cost of the satellite. The benefit is that
> consumers will just use the one Foxtel remote control to click onto it
> as well. Seeing the digital future, SBS has also signed up.
>
> At this stage, though, Seven, Ten won't be there at all- at least at
> the beginning. The ABC will only be on the cable service, not on
> satellite.
>
> To rising mutual irritation, they are still arguing with Foxtel over
> terms. Yet the actual differences between the parties are relatively
> minor despite the game of bluff and the level of mistrust on all
> sides. It's more a case of egos at 40 paces. Foxtel has belatedly
> agreed to give Seven and Ten the same financial deal as it provided to
> Nine. It will just never agree to cut them in on a stake in Foxtel
> itself.
>
> The impact for consumers is that they would have to use a separate
> remote - a clear disadvantage for all sides, with both sides claiming
> the other needs them more.
>
> For now, though, the momentum is with Foxtel. The others already offer
> some limited digital programming themselves - but customers have to
> buy the box themselves. These won't connect with Foxtel and have so
> far proven spectacularly unsuccessful given the cost involved and
> their extremely restricted offering.
>
> In the meantime, Kerry Stokes is, as usual, using Seven's lawyers to
> appeal the rules of access to Foxtel's platform.
>
> "It really is time for Seven to wake up to the fact you can't sue your
> way to success," Chisholm snaps. He maintains the result is that the
> reluctant partners will just be left further behind Nine and the
> digital revolution. "Technology is what dictates change. All this
> entertainment - a range of services - will be delivered to your home.
> Foxtel will give it to you. This is what digital is doing."
>
> MrXX®