Alan Ratcliffe wrote:
I never bought into it - briefly considered it for the doccies, music and Beeb, but then they started introducing adverts... AFAIC, there are two different revenue models - ads or pay TV, and DSTV are trying to get away with both.
As do Sky in the UK. The BBC has neither, but it gets paid for by license fees - and it's having to cut costs right now.
Pay TV has never meant no ads. It means "things you can only get from us". DSTV have a virtual monopoly on rugby in SA, and have the local soccer Premier League signed up. They do allow SABC to show some matches, but they cherry pick the ones they want to show. Cricket has insisted that all local international games must be shown free-to-air, but they have no say over away fixtures.
OH... the "BBC" channels you get here, other than the news, are not pure BBC. They're more "British". They carry quite a lot of content from ITV eg Downton Abbey.
TV stations sell a lot of content on. It's get quite confusing. In Britain you do not get all F1 races live on BBC (you can on Sky). Here in SA we get them all live - with coverage provided by the BBC. Go figure. Some of the biggest hits on the "BBC" channel are shows that they have licensed from the opposition for distribution overseas.
I see they even charge extra for certain events these days?
I'm not aware of that. They used to. It may depend on which package you're on. They do "rent" movies out at so much per movie, but these are newish features that they won't have on their movie channels yet. I can recall years ago M-Net (this was pre-DSTV) would charge extra for, say, a world championship boxing match.
These days you can buy different bundles of programs. 600 per month is the whole magilla. If you want just the sports then there are cheaper packages available.
