BBC vs Sky - The Story so Far

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Originally Posted by henners88

I wonder if Sky will ever consider offering the F1 channel at a reasonable price as a bolt on for freeview viewers in the future?

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Highly unlikely. There's a very finite amount of bandwidth on Freeview and it would be wasteful to have a channel which most people would only be interested in for 4 hours per fortnight. A more likely scenario is making races available online on a PPV basis, but AFAIK they don't currently have the rights for this.

PS have you seen the latest updates to the Sky EPG? They've added a far better catch-up section including iPlayer, which doesn't even need a subscription, and pretty much duplicates everything YouView does. The software is still painfully slow, I'll grant you, because the boxes have less memory than a goldfish, but the functionality is excellent now.

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Originally Posted by henners88

The bandwidth is there to do it.

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Doesn't YouView have a permanent internet connection? In which case the bandwidth becomes irrelevant, it could support millions of channels. Freeview as delivered over the air only has a very limited capacity (hence the dire picture quality on most channels), and couldn't justify the F1 channel.

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Originally Posted by Dave B

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Originally Posted by AndyL

Probably a bigger factor was blowing the thick end of a billion quid on relocating to Manchester, which was instigated by the previous regime.

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Most of which will pay for itself: if they'd stayed in London they'd have practically had to rebuild TV Centre. The place is falling apart and riddled with asbestos and 70's wiring. Indeed they've already said that their Olympic coverage would have been technically impossible from the old facilities.

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Exactly.

Whereas, over the course of the "frozen" licence fee settlement, they'll lose fully a QUARTER of their income to inflation and the extra stuff it needs to pay for now (S4C, BBC World Service, BBC Monitoring, etc). That's more like a billion PER YEAR in lost income and extra expenditure by 2017.

True. However the freeze was necessary. The likes of the BBC cannot keep asking for more and more money and expect us just to pay up. I haven't had a wage rise for a long time either.

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Originally Posted by Mark

True. However the freeze was necessary. The likes of the BBC cannot keep asking for more and more money and expect us just to pay up. I haven't had a wage rise for a long time either.

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I agree that a freeze was a good thing, after all the BBC has become bloated and has its fingers in far too many pies. Indeed - and I say this as a massive F1 fan - it shouldn't be paying huge money for the rights to successful mainstream sports like F1 and football when commercial broadcasters are willing and able to screen then. But as somebody says, once you combine this freeze with the extra demands placed upon them by the coalition the BBC's position becomes very difficult indeed.

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Originally Posted by henners88

Its only its playback channels/programs that rely on an internet connection. It doesn't stream all its content from the internet and functions like a freeview box for live content. You can record live and it has HD channels too. The picture quality is not HD when watching programs from the last 7 days but the image quality isn't dire at all.

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That's my point: as a catchup device it functions much as a PC would, grabbing the streams from iPlayer, 4OD and so on. Therefore the number of channels is practically unlimited (and their picture quality only limited by the broadcaster's source material and your internet speed - can it really not access HD VOD?). Sky could easily launch an online channel which the YouView boxes and any other device could access, the only barrier being the rights to do so.

But for live broadcast it relies on the Freeview terrestrial transmitters, which can only support a finite number of channels (hence my comment about the dire PQ on many, but not all, of the channels as they're compressed like crazy to fit the limited spectrum) - and which is why I don't believe they'll ever devote such scare resource to a channel which would struggle for viewers outside of race weekends.

Sky commentary is rubbish, should have waited and watched the race on the BBC later. Probably will anyway....I'm so glad I am not paying for SKY as it is terrible...

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Originally Posted by Dave B

I agree that a freeze was a good thing, after all the BBC has become bloated and has its fingers in far too many pies. Indeed - and I say this as a massive F1 fan - it shouldn't be paying huge money for the rights to successful mainstream sports like F1 and football when commercial broadcasters are willing and able to screen then. But as somebody says, once you combine this freeze with the extra demands placed upon them by the coalition the BBC's position becomes very difficult indeed.

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I tend to agree with the view that it shouldn't be paying huge amounts for sports rights at such a time, but, equally, the reaction to the BBC losing what remains of its sports coverage would be such as to cause a different backlash. As with almost everything the BBC does, it seems, it's damned if it does and damned if it doesn't. And, in any case, there are so many other savings the BBC could make.

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Originally Posted by henners88

Loved Vettel shunning Sky in favour of the BBC with David Coulthard. 'Yeah but we are live' Brundle said desperately. The thing is they are both filming live and the Beeb reach more people.

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Dear oh dear, that is truly desperate.

The latter point is well made. Many sports need the BBC perhaps more than the BBC needs them. Snooker is one example. If Eurosport was available on UK Freeview just as it is in most mainland European countries, this would be different.

I watched the Sky build up for the first time today round at the parents' house. It was terminally dull, and hour and a half of adverts and boring interviews and tedious "analysis". The whole channel seems to be repeat after repeat as if they don't really know how to fill a full schedule.

I'm now back home listening to Radio Five Live and enjoying it much more. No thanks, Sky, you've not sold it to me.