Originally Posted by tellstar Sorry but sky are changing the cards so sky should pay for the fta card..
Like many people in the uk satellite is the only way to recive channel 5 and get a fair picture of the other 4 channels.....
These channels are free to air ie payed for though adds etc. so why do we have to pay sky to watch them ????????
There are the ones who are taking them away from us NOT the bbc or itv THEY ARE...... |
Unfortunatley Tellstar, you cannot blame a commercial TV company for trying to protect their encrypted viewing, in
Sky's case, this was almost certainly one of the reasons for issuing new cards.
If the BBC had not stopped using encryption, everyone would have received new cards and everyone would have been happy. Well, everyone except the BBC directors and possibly the general licence payer who would have had to foot the bill.
Perhaps you should be targetting your ire at the three commercial channels involved, the ones who have hitched a free ride for the past few years.
Channel five for instance, have always been encrypted (soft encrypted on analogue) and it was only when the BBC joined the Digital platform with their FTV card scheme that they became more widely viewable. It was also always known, that "5" wasn't going to be available to the whole of the UK due to a lack of gaps in the spectrum, in fact I find it strange how the channel has suddenly become everybody's "must have" instead of a "not worth watching", perhaps maybe to add weight to an argument?
ITV was forced onto the digital platform by market research which suggested that digital satellite viewers were unprepared to press the extra button to switch across to terrestrial to view it. I would guess that they have done their research and established that their loss in UK viewers is minimal, so do not need to look at paying for a scheme.
Channel 4 sems quite happy with the situation and of course has its Film 4 business which is subscription only anyway.
I have not heard one hopeful comment from any of the commercial channels reference a resolution of this situation, so why would
Sky pay for it, when the main commercial beneficiaries of a new card scheme, appear disinterested?
The other point that to me is important, is that the number of digital viewers
actually in the UK, who have no other way of receiving the main four channels, is quite small compared to the number of FTV cards which would have had to be replaced. The BBC, rightly so, probably looked at the forthcoming cost of replacing a million cards for expatriate viewers and I'm sure that this was a huge contributory factor for their move to FTA.