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Price Dispute Means 800k Customers Lose TV Channels In Sweden (telecompaper.com)
Z00L00K writes: Due to a conflict between the cable operators and the channel providers, 800,000 to 900,000 customers will lose some of the most-viewed TV channels in Sweden, among them Eurosport, Discovery Channel and Animal Planet. Additional customers in Norway will also lose channels. This is caused by a considerable hike in price for the channels from the provider Discovery Networks. However the amount of money involved is still kept secret for negotiation and business reasons. "Telenor Broadcast arm Canal Digital said Discovery Networks has told it that it will withdraw its channels from Canal Digital Sweden and sister company Bredbandsbolaget from 01 February. This follows Discovery's attempts to raise prices and pay for a number of channels that viewers had not chosen. This will affect their approximately 800,000 customers while a new contract is negotiated. Telenor Sweden customers will not able to watch Kanal 5 or the other Discovery channels until a deal is reached." Considering that Sweden has a population of almost 10 million the impact is noticeable.
I live in Iceland and I'm wondering if I'm going to be affected; I think our channels are based on yours (at the very least, the commercials on them are in Norwegian).
I like to use some of those channels as "background noise" while I'm working on a project. Nothing so interesting as to draw too much of my attention, nothing so annoying as to make me angry at it (describes most of the stuff on History these days), but also nothing so tediously mundane as to not give me the benefit of "background". Discovery Science commonly suits the bill, sometimes NatGeo, sometimes BBC, etc.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
Given the land rush for decent, original content by Netflix and Amazon and a few cable channels that haven't given in to "reality" shows featuring has-been B-listers screaming at each other, I'm surprised that this would be a business priority for Discovery.
I would think they would rather invest in decent content while they can still compete for it so they will have something to show. Jacking up the price on junk content sounds to me like the way to become irrelevant faster than they already were.
Based on the limited information given, sounds like they want to subsidize less popular channels by raising prices on more popular channels.
At least PBS has quality content still, honestly. Nova has gone down hill a bit in presentation, but that's a generational culture thing. As a Gen-Xer, personally despise anything with hype, melodrama, and electric guitar riffs in a DOCUMENTARY! Frontline OTOH, still golden; probably the best non-biased documentary series out there.
Life is not for the lazy.
Bundling reduces prices. Your cable/TV company sell you to advertisers. It's as simple as that. It's the same all over the world. If you don't like it, stop kidding yourself the ISP is only what you pay. Cancel everything to do with TV, the STD/DVR etc, and pay the price for online only. It sucks, I know. But we've been doing it for over four years now, and it's just the way things are, and it'll probably never change because there's too much money involved.
That lack of competition doesn't really help us. Countries where ISPs aren't limited to cable TV infrastructure fare better.
I find it surprising people still watch TV.
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