Re: If you wanted Discovery to be advert free?
^^ this. Sky's best move ever (and the unfortunate British viewing public's worst one) was to invent the EPG.
Before Sky Digital and the EPG, advertising funded channels managed to survive FTA. Once Sky figured out a way to extract money out of these channels by charging them solely for enabling a viewer's satellite box to be able to tune into them - something we managed perfectly well without before the EPG - the game was over.
Add in some discounted services like uplinking, managing their advertising, and now you have all that Mr Broadcaster, how about some cheap encryption? - all money to Sky rather than someone else and the broadcaster might as well as it's a cheaper service for them - then you can see why they are laughing all the way to the bank. They're having their cake, and yours, and the broadcasters', and smearing it all over their dirty greedy fat faces.
These days Sky do next to nothing except charge broadcasters money to sell the same old stuff to customers for ever increasing prices because they've manoeuvred themselves right in the middle. And there's a whole bunch of us cribbing about the TV licence?
It's a massive crying shame our regulators are so shit. TBH Sky the broadcaster needs splitting from Sky the digital platform far more urgently than BT retail needs splitting from BT openreach. Cos at least BT are making a fist of looking like everyone can do business with openreach on the same terms.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
