Singapore's Sling: exclusive vs cross-carriage

The announcement of Singapore’s new mandatory pay-TV cross-carriage regulations was a lesson in how to create chaos in 1,425 text characters.

The scurrying about trying to wrest sense and advantage from every comma will last at least until the 22 April deadline for industry consultation.

The goal seems clear: to create an environment where one box will deliver all pay-TV content. Consumers won’t have to cross the road and back chasing a football (or any other) content.

This is a good technical solution that may create a back-end/service headache for operators, but it’s great for consumers.

There may also be an advantage for channels who have network access to everyone without anyone meddling with their commercial agreements. Maybe.

The country’s two pay-TV platforms – StarHub and SingTel – were given ample opportunity to get it together by themselves. But they couldn’t. So they’re being made to.

It’s fabulously, wonderfully Singaporean: if you can’t sort things out by yourselves and play nicely together, the gov-
ernment will step in whether it wants to (or you want it to) or not.

The line between technical logic and involvement in pricing blurred with the minister’s anti-exclusive/cost remarks in Parliament.

Acting minister for information, communications and the arts, Lui Tuck Yew, said the country’s exclusive carriage-centric competition had “negatively impacted” the industry and consumers, and that the practise had driven content costs beyond in- ternational benchmarks. For instance, StarHub’s content costs-to-revenue ratio was up from 40% prior to rival SingTel’s launch in 2007 to 70% today.

Only seven of 179 channels offered are common to both platforms. 131 of the carriage agreements are exclusive.

Here’s what chilled programmers, who didn't necessarily know that the system (or at least not this bit of it) was broken and weren't in the market for a fix: “MDA’s review has concluded that this situation is unlikely to self-correct in the near future, and steps need to be taken to address this market failure,” the minister said.

What do the new rules mean? Numerous phone calls on different days to the MDA to clarify all came up with the same answer: the regulatory body is not meddling with commercial issues. Content owners are free and clear to sign whatever they like as long as the same service (branding, packaging, promotion) is available across the road. Presumably across- the-road subscribers have to pay for the new subscription, but those details are yet to be worked out.

Then what’s the issue? As long as they get their money, why should platforms or programmers care about the delivery system?

The big HOWEVER in all this is that if the MDA thinks there are too many exclusive deals, which it clearly does, then whatever it says means less that the “in-effect” effect. There is also, clearly, a drive to drive prices down, although the MDA is standing solidly behind its support for market forces. Where do programmers stand? As this issue went to print, they’re unhappily all over the map and not saying what they really think.

0 characters on that one.