Dr Detroit reminds us that there is another market for the BB product which is severely disadvantaged by Channel 5 and their absolute control tendencies.
I have many friends who do not live in the UK and no longer have access to any Big Brother, certainly Spain, Ireland and America have had little access in the past, and if Desmond and his cohorts have their way, will have none in the future.
What have they to gain from this?
The programme will certainly have no resale value in the future, so they cannot be holding it back for Big Brother xx - The Director's Cut dvd. And they don't want anyone offshore from our Small Island to watch it now.
I feel the fell hand of the Multi-Nationals behind this. There has certainly been a desperate scramble on the Internet to regionalise the delivery of material. It isn't driven by governments because they are like the giant supertankers - it takes them forever to slow down and change direction. Multi-National corporations however do have the resources to force through this process and have the money and skills at their disposal to make it happen. It certainly happened with the dvd market. But that was to ensure that differential pricing would not lead to grey market imports. There is no profit to be had from blocking BB alone outside of the UK. It must be a side effect of something else.
The something else.
This seems to be driven by the need to separate markets so that particular products (TV shows for example) can be made available on subscription streams at some time in the future. Their default setting seems to be that it will only be available in one country and they are perhaps just testing the system. (This is regardless of the fact that if it can be streamed it will be re-streamed by third parties because the people who are good at diverting the system largely work outside the system).
It does not seem to be wholly a Ch5 issue, BBC iPlayer is the same and I dare say the other TV channels also are closing it down.
Can we sway them with a well chosen argument?
I doubt it. The Big players seem to be impervious to common sense arguments, But that does not mean we cannot follow the well trodden pathways of aggravation and avoidance. We aggravate them and we also circumvent their controls. They are irritating but we are resourceful.
It's a travesty that I have to go through almost ILLEGAL means to get BBUK clips and shows to post on my blog.
ReplyDeleteI would imagine that Ch5 must answer to someone about the way they handle outside sources from viewing/posting their content.
Sponsors being one of those they might have to answer to.
Why can't Ch5 include outside viewing as a demographic to be presented to sponsors in order to keep said a from pulling revenue?
I know for a fact that if it weren't for Freederm advertising on Big Brother, I would have never heard of them. I have no viable way to purchase Freederm, nor do I believe that I am in need of it's products. But I DO know about them thousands of miles away, and their ad campaigns.
So what is wrong with Ch5 being able to increase revenue by allowing outsiders to view/upload/purchase Big Brother content? They would then be able to present this to the sponsors as a point of sale not used previously.
Channel 4 did not let us purchase feeds in the U.S., but we were never blocked from viewing or posting their content.
While I understand the implications of posting copyrighted material owned by another party, it does bring me some kind of internal satisfaction that there are those INSIDE the UK who feel that bloggers like me deserve the right to post content outside of the legal jurisdiction of Channel 5 and their legal team.
I do feel safe being able to bring Big Brother to my U.S. visitors. And I fully expect to be contacted by Channel 5 and its entities to comply with a 'cease and desist' in the future, judging by the frequency in which they are shutting down Youtube content of their product.
My question to them, as it has been in the past, would be WHY?
If I can lead a charge of U.S. Big Brother fans to open their pocket book and shell out money for a Live Feed, then WHY would it make sense for them to reject this? Is money NOT the motivating factor in Channel 5 bringing Big Brother to its network?
These are questions that I have asked.
Channel 5 isn't capable of an answer.
They are hiding behind the terms of their license. There is no other common sense reason that they are not pushing the programme out far and wide unless there are Multinational reasons at play.
ReplyDeleteAnd Desmond is a Multinational:
Richard Desmond's Daily Express to Channel 5 media group tripled pre-tax profits after a tough 2009 to just over £30m, helped by a rapid recovery at the broadcaster, which airs CSI and from this summer will also show Big Brother.
Northern & Shell will this week file accounts at Companies House showing pre-tax profit of £30.3m during the whole of 2010, compared to £8.9m last year.
Desmond bought Channel 5 in the summer for £99.1m, according to the accounts, and immediately instituted a wide-ranging restructuring that saw almost all the senior personnel leave at a cost of £11m.
The cutbacks, coupled with an unexpectedly buoyant Christmas advertising market, meant that the broadcaster of Neighbours traded with underlying operating profits from September.
Channel 5, it is understood, has accounted for half the profit growth seen at Desmond's businesses. Its proprietor believes the channel was poorly managed under previous boss Dawn Airey, who worked for RTL [See footnote]. It also accounted for the growth in his company's turnover. Revenues at Northern & Shell were up by £103m to £525m.
This summer Channel 5 will air Celebrity Big Brother, followed almost immediately by the traditional variant for unknown wannabes as Desmond tries to steal audience share from an under-pressure Channel 4.
The proprietor is not taking a dividend from the company, which he owns outright and which dates back to his early days as a publisher of pornographic and other magazines. Nor, a spokesman said, is he taking a large personal pension contribution. In the middle of the last decade he paid himself roughly £50m in some years when profits were high.