Football rules punt Oz IPTV into touch Australia's nacent IPTV industry won't be able to win business with the entertainment industry's time honoured practice of paying outrageous prices for exclusive rights to broadcast live sport, thanks to a new plan outlined yesterday by Minster for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy Senator Stephen Conroy. …
Conroy is to IT as an ocean is to a sack of kittens
So naturally the idiots made him minister for broadband & digital economy.
Hopefully this will go as well as his last brainwave..the great aussie firewall, or at least the other side will find someone to lead the party who isn't obviously overcompensating.
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There would be no problem here if it weren't for the insistence on exclusive rights or nothing. I understand that exclusive rights are significantly more valuable than non-exclusive but the all or nothing attitude of both the broadcasters and the rights holders leaves a load of consumer demand unmet, as evidenced by the widespread illegal streaming of various sports. By offering a diverse range of viewing options I'm sure the rights holders could actually make more money overall due to the increase in the size of the audience.
I'd love to see IPTV take off in Australia but the anti-siphoning laws are an important safeguard and unless IPTV is more readily available than cable TV then it's quite right for it to put in the same class for this purpose. By more readily available I mean either ad supported, reasonably priced pay per view or casual single 'channel' subscriptions as opposed to the massively bundled long term subscriptions offered by Foxtel.
Personally, as a Brit living in Oz, I'd love to be able to watch England play Test cricket and I'm prepared to pay for the privilege. I am not prepared to pay for an enormous bundle of crappy Foxtel channels just to get that though and there are currently no (legal) alternatives. IPTV has the potential flexibility to allow people to buy the content they actually want but only if the rights holders switch to non-exclusive rights contracts.
"Curiously, the Bill proposes to allow the Minister to decide which events appear on the list of events that must be shown on free-to-air television."
Curious, I agree, but that's the way it's been run for the last 20 years & it generally works quite well. Every few years the FTA & PayTV networks fight it out for what goes on the list & what doesn't. Events stay on the list until 3 months before they start, giving PayTV a chance to pick them up if the FTA networks choose not to broadcast them. There's been a few cases between negotiations where the Minister has decided to either put things on the list (ensuring they're available on FTA) or pull them off (allowing PayTV to fight it out with FTA for the broadcast rights) - "in the national interest", of course ;-).
It's basically a very "bread and circuses" - or, rather, "plasma and sport" - practice. Keep the punters happy by letting them watch footy, cricket, and the Duhlympics for free, and they wont vote you out just because soccer ends up on Foxtel...
This is where IPTV should sit. Yes the younger generation can get IPTV set up but older generations can't and most IPTV is exactly the same as pay TV (it's just using another paid service to deliver it). I think new legislation should also be put to the parliament which excludes ISP from getting exclusive rights and restricting it to only their subscribers. This is the first time I agree with Stephen Conroy (the guy is clueless so I think someone else put him up to this). Now if only we can get someone in to fix the rest of this stuff ups he has put in (the NBN and the filter) We can get this country moving again!
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