Guest User

reHASHplus

Sober IT truths from the island-state

by Michael Tan, Singapore

Subscribe to this blog

The Singapore Triple Play Duopoly causes Singaporeans to play monkey

Oct 6, 2009 11:58

For background, with little bullshit, check out Ian Tan's blogpost here. Ian used to work for the Straits Times in Singapore.

History Channel
The history, in short: (Wiki history here) Singapore used to have one TV station, SBC, then renamed TCS, renamed Mediacorp, then "don't know what they're called now". It was not bad. Malaysians visiting Singapore in the 1980s marveled that they could watch Shanghai Beach on TV, whereas back in Malaysia they had to rent VHS videotapes.

Then somebody dug up the whole country and laid cables, and voila, we had cable television, via this company we call Singapore Cable Vision. It offered cool stuff on TV like HBO, Discovery Channel, the English Premiere League. It even offered cable Internet, at a very fast speed. StarHub took over SCV. Living pretty, no competition, rates were "quite reasonable", not many complaints (haha, nobody to compare against, it was a monopoly over cable!).

In between then and now, we had SPH Mediaworks which did damn well and pwned Mediacorp for viewer numbers, but it was... ahem... surprisingly merged into Mediacorp and became ho-hum time again.

Then SingTel for years tried to muscle into the TV screen via its ADSL broadband Internet. I contributed a little, supplying video decoder cards made by an American company called Sigma Designs. This effort failed, the ADSL network was at its infancy, it was expensive and difficult to set up, the computer needed to be next to the TV, and SingTel did not buy content aggressively enough. Servers were expensive. Bandwidth was expensive. So--no go.

Sigma Designs after a decade or so put a computer, video playback circuitry, everything that a traditional settop box had, and networking circuitry into a single chip called the Sigma Designs SMP8635, and that chip cost S$40 or so.

That rocketed Sigma's stock price from below US$10 to US$70 or something, shipping millions out to the world. That miracle chip could be used in Blu-ray players, DVD players, settop boxes, digital media play appliances, high-quality pocket video players, everything. The main customer segment, however, was IPTV operators.

Man, these IPTV guys loved it--trouble-free, ultra-reliable, cheap settop boxes without gang-rape prices and antique technology offered then by Scientific Atlanta and General Instruments. Total futureproofing as the Sigma SMP8635 had headroom for browsers and was in every sense a full-fledged computer, with more power than a computer five years ago.

For Singapore, SingTel chose the Motorola-Microsoft MSTV IPTV box and called it MIOtv. This was also based on the Sigma SMP8635 with software by Microsoft, manufactured in China and Taiwan, and distributed by Motorola to all its customers who bought the Motorola cable modem which populates 99 percent of all StarHub Internet customers' homes.

SingTel wakes up
SingTel started to become aggressive and to fight StarHub for Internet subscriber market share. And it succeeded. Today, a casual check on stats of users browsing sites controlled by me gives SingTel almost half the market share, compared with about 10 percent a couple of years back.

And it fought hard for content, paying more than two times the price that StarHub paid for EPL and ESPN StarSports, if Ian is to be believed (see blogpost). Herein lies the controversy: Should these two premium channels--EPL for the gamblers and maniacal fans of English football and ESPN Star Sports for the followers of the F1 circus/soap opera--be monopolized by ONE broadcaster? Nobody seems to care that History Channel, AXN, HBO and Cinemax are exclusive to StarHub still. But for EPL and F1, channels which people passionately care for, controversy has started and it is a good thing. Now it's a good time for the country to talk about our broadcasting legislation and make sense of this whole morass of confused policies.

Why the controversy?
Get to the ground and see a good cross-section of people pouring their hearts out here. There seems to be four powerful arguments:

1) Sentimentality: Nothing much to be said here, it's a human emotion. I, too, feel for StarHub, my familarity with the stupid remote control, my love for the recording capability of the HD Hubstation.

2) Money issue: Well, if one takes MIOtv back home, it'll require signing more contracts and paying more for sure. Even if SingTel seems not to want to raise the fees, I suspect that's technicality bullshit as StarHub Hubbers enjoy substantial discounts already, and new signups to MIOtv would still need to pay the base price of the service, then pay "the same fees as per list price that StarHub gave in the past" for the sports channels. Bottom line: I bet consumers pay more if they take the MIOtv in.

3) Technical issue: The wiring of my PS3, Wii, DVD recorder, StarHub HD Hubstation, analog free-to-air TV, home theater PC, and the occassional digital media appliance, all to my poor little 37-inch Amoi HDTV, has rendered advanced playback all but impossible for everybody in my family to use the TV. This is save for my rocket scientist father who occasionally visits, myself, and my four-year-old son who seems to be well on his way to understanding how to switch inputs on the HDTV and combine the TV's input switcher with the external HDMI switcher just to play a certain device.

In a nutshell, it's like playing with a two-tiered combination lock. Adding yet another HDMI settop box to the fray would NOT make matters worse for me, but it would necessitate spending a lot more money on an Onkyo HDTV A/V receiver, priced from S$600 to S$1,200, depending on the bells and whistles one would like.

4) Principle: The most thorny argument of all. They say the Government is forcing the consumer to spend because of the widely held view that the Singapore Government in a way owns a stake in each of the players, and this whole situation sucks because few see any viable alternatives to all this and feel trapped in a cycle of escalating costs just to see a few cars going round a track and 22 people kicking a ball around a field in England.

Tech advance overturns old philosophies
In the past, the Singapore Government took a page out of the US FCC's playbook. It gave a monopoly to the cable channels for the locality they were in, and at that time, it seemed to avert the controversy that we see now since there'd be only ONE guy extorting money from rabid fans.

But even in the US, with the advent of direct satellite TV, fiber optic to the home, IPTV, etc., they're seeing the same problems as we see in Singapore now--the problem of having to pay another pay broadcaster, integrating another box into the home TV system, with the money and principle issues involved.

Tech advance offers some new solutions
A la carte channel selection

StarHub is almost wholly digital cable now. This opens the way toward "a la carte" channel selection, instead of "group selection". Let me explain.

In the past, with analog cable technology, selection of channels could not be too liberal. The cable TV operator would have to segment its 60 channels or so into groups simply because of technical reasons--it could use only frequency filters to filter OUT the groups one did not subscribe to, and pass through groups that one did subscribe to. Not too many filters could be employed at one time.

Digital cable allows the cable operator to offer individual channel selection no matter how disparate. No groups are essentially needed. In the US, a la carte channel selection has been introduced into legislation, but it is not yet law. In Singapore, nothing is heard of it (well and good, I believe that this decision is commercial, not legislative).

The ability to select individual channels would mean that if the current pricing models were sustained, the cable providers that have been fleecing the public in the past by forcing them to buy channels they don't need, would face a big reduction in revenue. But if somebody gets off their lazy fat arse and starts to use their brains a little more, one could execute the vision where a very inexpensive settop box can be put into every home, installed and ready, and the user merely has to request a movie, event, or inexpensive monthly single channel subscription for it to be possible. This could bring to the table tens of thousands of new subscribers by virtue of a lower entry price to the world of cable TV.

The infinitely possible world of PC TV
If all else fails, let's do the most simple thing--view them on your PC. Justin.TV offers F1 in various languages, and TVUnetworks offers all the cable channels, pay channels or not, for free via your PC. There are various preconceptions--that viewing video on the computer is like a black art, the quality sucks, etc. But the reality is that the viewing of settop box TV has the difficulty level of a two-tiered combination lock, and viewing TV on TVU and Justin.TV is as easy as YouTube. You gotta get your link, though, so just search Google for it.

Panacea
It is all not satisfactory. Consumers paying more in an era of "free"? Being forced to view a (maybe) pirated channel on the computer? Having to deal with such complications when technology is supposed to make things easier? What's the cure-all?

Force the government to lay off. Liberalization. Let it go. Let satellite TV come in. Let people bounce laser beams off windows to broadcast stuff. Get rid of all the complicated licensing to be a broadcast house, and allow small budding TV companies to broadcast legally using IPTV, which can be received via 3G, fixed networks or Wi-Fi. Let THEM handle the complications of licensing, let them push the content distributors. Point is, the consumer always wins when he or she has CHOICES. Create the situation where entrepreneurs are allowed to create new choices.

So what if SingTel is the exclusive reseller of EPL in Singapore? Isn't there somebody who's a worldwide distributor? Well, if there is, let NewSG.TV negotiate with that guy, set up the servers somewhere, and offer it for sale to Singaporeans who can then view each match from the server via SingTel's and StarHub's channels.

And if the cable or ADSL network is way too expensive to operate, let it die. The next-gen broadband seems to concretize the restrictions, as would any government-supported business structure.

But here I am, speaking like a consumer. Ask me to put on my corporate hat, especially if a corporation stands to profit from a government initiative, and I would say something else.

For me, I could not take another modem and router in my house. I would stay with my current StarHub infrastructure unless SingTel gives me FTTH, and watch F1 through Justin.TV or something else. That's what I think I'd do anyway. Plus once Android has Flash Lite, I'll just view F1 using SingTel's 3G network without the MIOtv crap.

« Prev

Report offensive

Talkback

There are currently no comments for this post.

About Michael Tan

Michael Tan is lucky enough not to have to choose between his job and his passion. He is the responsible for all aspects of developing new businesses and sourcing new productlines for a regional IT distribution company. He also oversees the company's legal affairs as General Counsel. In real life, he is a technology enthusiast, from both the fun and business viewpoint. The only choices he has to make are whether to play with his astro telescopes, his PC games, his Wii console, hit the track, tweak his car, or refine his biofilters, post his blogs, research for a new digicam, scour every forum to feed his habit further, play with his son… You can reach Michael at michaeltanyk@gmail.com ALL BLOGPOSTS ONLY REFLECT MICHAEL'S OPINIONS AND NOBODY ELSES'.