FTA TV is spreading the FREEVIEW gospel at the moment. Hang on, five new channels? I have had them for ages, except for ONE HD which broadcasts sports 24 hours a day, and means 10 no longer has a high def channel for anything other than sport. And the programming on the other “new” channels is 95 percent the same as the SD channel. Funnily enough, the ads are pretty much the same too.

The problem we have is a small market, high costs to provide the service over such a wide brown land to relatively few people, and a monopoly on service providers. If only Foxtel would listen to me and do it my way, they would make a motza.

Give foxtel to everyone for free, charge them for the box and install, and give everyone for free the channels NOBODY watches, come on who watches the weather channel? I can think of at least 15 channels nobody watches. Use those channels to advertise their other channels, the ones you have to pay for, keep drumming it in to the masses, and eventually they will weaken, adding a channel here and a channel there, the old customers who now pay for foxtel will still pay to get all the channels, and foxtel will have a much larger userbase to flog not only their pay to view channels, but also everything else known to man that advertisers want to sell.

Has anyone else thought that this could be construed as “Third Line Forcing”? [For those not in Australia it is a major offense under our Trade Practices Act]

But Foxtel/Telstra would never do that would they? *ha*

A major point in Tom’s post was that advertising was NOT part of the original contract for the service he was talking about. Therefore, by inserting ads, the amount of paid programming time was reduced to about 3/4, though the payments remained the same.

And, since the channel’s promotional spots don’t bring in revenue, you can be sure most of that remaining 1/4 is 90% sponsored advertising, so I don’t see your point in distinguishing between the two.

So, in effect, Tom is saying they’re “stealing” programming time from the paying customer AND getting ad revenue on top of the customers’ payments, which were supposed to be for ad-free services.

1. If you have an IQ, it means you can skip the ads. So why don’t you?

2. You don’t make the distinction between ads and promos (that being spots which get you to watch other shows on Foxtel). Generally speaking, people don’t mind these as much.

3. The studios make shows which go for approx 23 mins and 42 mins. That’s to allow for advertising. If you really wanted no ads at all, you’re either asking Foxtel to show wall to wall promos (not practical), to start at weird-ass hours (also not practical) or to include more 5-10 min buffer programs at the end (which they often do).

But I think the most important thing is the first. Ads are just a necesary evil – deal with it and skip them using the IQ like everyone else.