In message <Pine.LNX.4.33.0405071422270.32122-100000_at_siconic.com>
Vintage Computer Festival <vcf_at_siconic.com> wrote:
> But if they decide to phase out TechTV's
> core programming, which is their computer help shows, it'll be a mistake.
> There will always be geeks, and geeks like technology in general, not just
> video games.
This is strangely reminiscent of what BskyB (the UK "Sky" satellite TV co)
did to "[.tv]". First they started it up as "The Computer Channel" and All
Was Well. A few games shows, but the vast majority of the stuff was actually
of general interest to computer users/geeks (delete as appropriate). The name
got changed to "[.tv]" at some point, but the core programming remained
mostly the same. In August 2000 (or was it 2001?) Sky ditched .tv. Why? "Not
enough viewers" to put it bluntly.
TTBOMK, at least three petitions have been sent to Sky asking them to start
broadcasting the TechTV international feed over the Sky system - Sky's
response? "No". I think one of the petitions had around 250,000 signatures...
Over the past year, Sky have moved onto an "Increase prices, decrease choice
[channels], increase length of advert breaks". Needless to say, the
subscription was cancelled as soon as it came up for payment again.
As an example, when Sky shut down the analogue satellite service (on the
Astra 1 satellites), the cost of a base subscription was around ?8 per month.
Now they've moved over to digital (on Astra 2) it's been upped to ?19 per
month for what is effectively an inferior service. I've no objections to
Sky using MPEG, what really annoys me is that they've pushed far too many
channels onto the satellite. The bitrate is low enoguh to produce noticeable
artifacting.
Nice fact: The Office of Fair Trading investigated Sky's subscription costs
not long ago. Their opinion? "Sky subscription fees are high, but not
excessive". My opinion? Two million subscribers and none of them can be
bothered to look at how much the charges have gone up.
[ Rant mode off ]
> Anyway, it depends on what their marketing wizards determine is their core
> market.
Sky's core market seems to be the "couch potato" market, i.e. "I'll watch
whatever's on just because it's on." Their basic response to every single
criticism seems to be "Ignore it and it'll go away".
Damn marketdroids...
> I'm sure if people wrote in en masse to suggest that G4/TechTV
> keep it's core tech-specific programming then that would make an impact.
This may sound a bit cynical but, well, don't be so sure... My experience of
these companies is that they ignore basically everything that their customers
say, unless it makes significant financial sense to listen. If they were
going to lose, say, 10,000 out of 1million viewers, they'd ignore every one
of the 10,000. If they were going to lose 750,000 out of 1mil, they *might*
listen. Which brings us neatly back to the "couch potato" mentality - "It's
on so I'll watch it, and I won't complain about the extortionate prices".
Later,
--
Phil. | Acorn Risc PC600 Mk3, SA202, 64MB, 6GB,
philpem_at_dsl.pipex.com | ViewFinder, 10BaseT Ethernet, 2-slice,
http://www.philpem.dsl.pipex.com/ | 48xCD, ARCINv6c IDE, SCSI
... Hey! Your Trakball is upside down!
Received on Fri May 07 2004 - 18:06:10 BST