Excellent piece about Sky & what it costs us (& what it would have cost us)

[Ponders]

\link{http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/26/murdoch-cameron-shameful-tale\90% of Sky subscription income goes to News Corp in the US & isn't taxed in the UK}

'Sky is parasitic, as its own subscribers watch many more hours of BBC than Sky, so Sky would collapse if the BBC denied it its channels. Yet the BBC still pays £5m a year for appearing on its platform, a deal struck by Thatcher to help Murdoch.
The sum was cut, but in all other countries commercial broadcasters pay national broadcasters for the right to use their content - not the other way round. The BBC should be paid a hefty fee from BSkyB to compensate for the 16% cut it suffered, partly as a result of Murdoch lobbying.
The cut was pure spite, since the licence fee has no connection with Treasury deficits. Pressure persists to deprive viewers of listed national events saved to watch free on BBC: Wimbledon and the rest would go the way of Premier League football.'

Time the BBC's funding was increased again?

How are other national broadcasters funded in other countries?

I'd always assumed the licence fee system was unique (making it hard to draw comparisons in how contracts between broadcasters are arranged).

There is no national broadcaster in the US. There is PBS, which is funded by local pledge drives (& very tedious they are too)

'Public broadcasters may receive their funding from an obligatory television licence fee, individual contributions, government funding or commercial sources' from \link{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_broadcasting\wiki}

Germany & Ireland have a licence fee - I didn't read the entire thing

for every £1 in Sky subscriptions, 90p flees the country, straight to News Corp and Hollywood in the US.

I think this sentence is cunningly worded to perhaps hide a simpler explanation for the sake of the author's attack on Murdoch.

It's worth bearing in mind that most of the crap on Sky is US made. So films are typically from Hollywood. Many of the TV series like House, Simpsons etc are all US based. So it's only natural a lot of the money paid by Sky for the programs will go abroad.

It would be more interesting to see how much of the money actually goes to News Corp rather than an entire country.

Don't get me wrong, I don't like Murdoch at all and what he's done but part of this whole debacle has been because the press have been allowed to bend the rules and so I don't think misleading comments from the Guardian help at all.

I've always seen the press as the watchers of our government but as the old adage goes, who watches the watchers? Noone it would seem. No effectively anyway.

No one is forced to have Sky TV. The BBC does sell its programmes all round the world. Sky operates in the UK where the licence payers have already paid for the BBC.

People have sky to pay for sports, movies and a greater choice. It is up to the subscriber to decide whether it is value for money.

I didn't consider that aspect of it, niceguy. They buy a lot of British stuff too though, don't they, & all that sport. And making the BBC pay them for broadcasting BBC programmes is completely wrong, surely?

It would be interesting to see a simplified balance sheet (I don't understand the complicated ones!)

Does ITV pay them for broadcasting ITV programmes?

\link{http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jun/30/bskyb-ruling-italy-labour?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487\oooh, how fascinating to read this with hindsight!}

and all the pieces linked at the side - eg Kelvin McKenzie saying "Thank God for Rupert Murdoch, we need more like him"

Yep Ponders, they do buy British stuff too but I bet in comparison the UK stuff is cheap. I also completely agree it's wrong that the BBC pay Sky.

The main issue here is do we want Murdoch and his dodgy memory and poor grip of his subsidiaries to own more of the news/media in the UK. I think the answer to that by the overwhelming majority of the UK public is no.

Actually, considering the overall budget of the BBC, then 5m is small change compared with the total spend for different TV networks.

Also, I have little doubt that the overall spend on distributing the signals also dwarfs the cost of having the BBC channels available on Sky (and let's face it, with no payment, channels 101 and 102 would probably be Sky1 and SkyLiving/Sky2).

I think there are perhaps 15% to 20% of households using Sky and that satellite service complements the other methods of getting digital channels, and there are some remote areas which can be told "your only option is to use satellite" where, if Sky didn't carry BBC (and imagine FreeSat didn't exist for a moment) the total cost to set up power and equipment to reach some little island might well cost more (in total for a few installations) than that 5m paid to Sky.

Don't get me wrong - I'm a customer but not a fan (it was a relatively cheap way to spread the cost of a PVR over the year and I will cancel at end of 12 months).

Channels on the first page of any EPG are bound to get a lot of viewers hence their desirability among TV stations.

NG, like you I have Sky but not a fan. Just in case you don't know, the PVR features stop when you cancel the subscription. That said, I held out until they called me back and offered me the basic package for £10 a month for another year.

WHY can't we have cable here

Snoffair

Hate murdoch
Love sci-fi

Is paying £5 million a year really very much to allow the BBC to broadcast using SKY? I would of thought that was quite a good deal for the BBC as it means that they get on the dominant TV subscriptions companys platform. I also doubt that SKY would collapse if the BBC was not on it as it seems to me that SKYs main selling asset is its Sports channels not the BBC as you can get the BBC through freeview and not pay a subscription at all.

I don't think £5m is a huge amount for the BBC, but it is money straight out of licence payers' pockets into the pockets of News International. It may have been a reasonable thing to do to encourage satelite broadcasting 30 years ago, but now it would be pretty easy to make provision of terrestrial channels a requirement of the right to be a cable or satellite provider if the government wished (unless there are EU laws regarding this). That would be a reasonable requirement in a market place with the barriers to entry (and consequent lack of competition) that satellite and cable have. Also Sky would probably see fewer customers if those customers had to set up a separate receiver and video input for basic channels, so they would probably want to do it anyway. Do the other terrestrial channels pay Sky to broadcast them?

EdithWeston "I'd always assumed the licence fee system was unique"

I can't speak for other countries, but in Greece at least ERT (the national broadcaster) is funded via the electricity bill. When you get your bill every quarter a sum is included (and itemised) to go to ERT. I think it's terribly unfair - you have no control over what they put on, you can choose not to have a TV, but if you have electricity, you have to pay for ERT.

Thanks Ponders, it's a chilling reminder of how close the government came to giving the Murdoch empire such a stranglehold on our news and broadcasting.

The thing that keeps coming back to my mind is James Murdoch giving that lecture in Edinburgh, IIRC, where he attacked the Beeb. Something about 'the chilling effect of state-sponsored journalism'. The hypocrisy of it was breath-taking.

And those muppet Tories on the Culture select committee STILL think they can get away with sucking up to Murdoch...

It's all parties. The article says that payments from Beeb to SKY were set up under Thatcher. This means that neither Blair nor Brown were minded to change this arrangement. Blair, godfather to Murdoch's DC.

Labour is only getting the "lighter" ride in this because their actions were a couple of years earlier.

Here is something that explains why the BBC payment to Sky exists

www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/oct/19/sky-bbc-free-ride

Thanks niceguy2 and claig

So it is 10M but still tiny portion of 181M spend on distribution (though maybe 60% is international feeds to cover sport and news and entertainment for subsequent UK broadcast).