Ofcom responds to threatened luvvies

UK telecoms regulator Ofcom has published a supplement to its Digital Dividend Review, looking specifically at the needs of the entertainment industry, and presenting options which might preserve the wireless microphone in theatres and TV. Entitled Programme-making and special events: future spectrum access, the supplement runs …

[Jonathon Green]

Impoverished West End theatre owners and producers???

"...if that body should pay a fair market price for that chunk, or some form of price protection should be in place to protect an industry which brings so much income to the country"

Surely if the luvvies bring so much income to the country they can *afford* to pay a fair market price for the spectrum they claim to need and don't need subsidies in the form of price control onthe spectrum they claim to need? - I mean it's not as if the likes of Cameron MacIintosh and Lord Lloyd-Webber are short of the price of a pint is it?

[Carl Fletcher]

Re: Impoverished West End theatre owners and producers???

*Sigh*

The theatre business goes way beyond the big name hit shows you know. There is a massive number of smaller productions that can barely make ends meet to feed their cast and crew. I'm not necessarily saying that they require sympathy, people choose their profession and life, but also it's not necessarily a status quo you want to upset. Theatre feeds into the (much bigger and more significant) TV and film industries. For example, The League of Gentlemen started out in fringe theatre, and now they've got multiple exportable tv series and a film to their names.

Just because theatre is not necessarily hugely popular or profitable by itself doesn't mean it's not massively important. Hurt theatre and you cut off the talent supply from television...

[CharleyBoy]

Re: Re: Impoverished

>Hurt theatre and you cut off the talent supply from television...

"talent"?

Put that way. PLEASE hurt the theatres.

[Will Leamon]

Come now...

Just wanted to pipe in for all the struggling video producers in England. Ya'll have those right? The wireless mic is the cheapest way to get anything like decent audio in a cheap TV/Web/Movie production. If this was going on in the US (as I'm sure it will eventually) it would be decimating to the only part of my life I care about.

www.thrillahill.com

[Keith Langmead]

Re: Re: Impoverished West End theatre owners and producers???

Also consider the knock on effect that theaters have on other industries, trains/planes/cars traveling there, restaurants providing food for the visitors, hotels providing accommodation, pubs providing refreshments, other attractions being visited during the peoples visit... all of which bring money into the economy, and in turn generate taxes to feed back into the pubic coffers.

It's no different to the tourist trade in the south west! Everyone comes for the beaches, but they themselves don't generate any money at all. What they do have is a knock on effect with all the other things which people do while visiting them, which help the economy thrive in that area during the summer months.

[Iain Forsyth]

If you think that it's just 'luvvies' that are threatened, read this...

I feel that the implication that 'luvvies' are being precious about a simple change of frequency band shows a great lack of understanding of the implications of this kind of change.

When you watch a documentary, home decorating, gardening, or observational location program on TV, look for the sound recordist's name in the credits. Almost inevitably they will be freelance or self employed, and while most make a comfortable income, they have no guaranteed work in a competitive industry. They usually provide their own kit, including 2-3 radiomicrophones. These are not cheap £50 bargains, but broadcast quality, often costing at least £2000 each! So if you own 3 and overnight the frequency band is sold off and re-used, you have £6000 of redundant equipment. This could be likened to, say, legislation being brought in to outlaw cars over two years old - turning them into scrap value immediately as they couldn't be used.

What about sports events - football, golf etc? How often do presenters drag cabled microphones along? How do you follow a golfer's chat while they walk to the next tee? How do we hear every whisper on 'Big Brother? How do the director and technical staff speak to a presenter, interviewee and staff in live location news reports? All with the use of radiomicrophones or 'talkback' communication using frequencies which were proposed to be sold off, with no alternative realistically available. How could an industry with a relatively small number of individual users hope to outbid a mobile telephone company with millions of customers for an alternative block of frequencies to use?

If the currently available frequency band is auctioned off to the highest bidder, many of the popular TV programmes made in the UK could not be produced. Let it be a warning of what could happen elsewhere. Radio frequency bandwidth is in short supply, so imagine if the government decided to sell off the frequency band widely used for wireless networks - and was not providing an alternative.....

[Anonymous Coward]

WiFi

Surely if wireless networks can cohabit (fairly) happily, microphones can be developed that utilise the technology? (Presumably with WPA2)

No license required. Plus 802.11n would give them perfectly adequate range.

[SImon Hobson]

Hmm

Iain Forsyth fairly well sums it up but misses out one detail. One of the questions being asked by OfCom is if they opted to sell off some spectrum for such uses then who would buy it ? As Iain points out, there is no 'big user' that would be in a position to bid for it - only lots and lots and lots of little users. Even if they managed to get together and raise a successful bid, there would be plenty of individuals who would decide to freeload and not chip in. Any form of 'per use' or 'per user' licencing scheme would be expensive and inefficient to administer (which is why several existing licence types have been made 'free' or 'for life' instead of annual for a modest fee.

Contrast this with uses such as mobile phones and related stuff. There you have a small number of large comapnies buying spectrum which they then rent out to large numbers of consumers. What allows them to control usage and get a return is the way that the consumers equipment doesn't work without the network - ie totally the opposite to the radio mike use.

So there are several problems :

1) The loss to the many small users faced overnight with redundant kit (which has no second hand value).

2) The cost to the same users of buying new (and therefore even more expensive) kit at a time when demand is good which keeps prices up !

3) The problems of running any form of licencing system which is unlikely to raise significant profit whilst being affordable.

If there is a mandatory change, then the only reasonable way to do it is to licence a new band/system and phase out the old over a significant period (not less than a decade). Over time many users will have switched to the new system thus lessening the problem. Such a changover could be accellerated by blocking the sale of new old equipment.

As for suggesting something like WiFi - all I can say is that a suggestion like that can only come from someone who a) doesn't have a clue about the technology, b) had never tried to use it in a 'busy' environment, and c) has no idea about the requirements for real time audio !