Quote:
Originally Posted by Horizon
Alan, you may or may not know that Cable & Wireless owned a UK cable tv company in the 90s.
Cable & Wireless were the "original" competitor to BT as envisaged by Thatcher's government. C&W set up a rival phone company to BT called Mercury and this was pretty successful. There were even C&W phone boxes in the streets!
As all the North American companies who had funded the UK cable tv industry pulled out in the 90's, three of them: Bell Cablemedia, Nynex and Videotron were merged with C&W's Mercury to form a new telecom's/tv powerhouse to rival BT and Sky under C&W's control. That was in 1997, it lasted three years...
C&W were quite frankly useless, they knew it and so did everyone else. They sold their cable tv/Mercury (as was) telephone business to ntl in 2000. That's why we have still, in part, have three legacy cable tv networks today, ntl's, telewest's and c&w's.
In short, I do not think Cable & Wireless' reentry into the cable tv market would be a good idea, although I like their name, it's kind of relevant!
As for competition to Sky and BT, I tend to look at what's happened in the past, particularly in the States to give a possible indication as to what will happen here.
Being a small country, we cannot sustain the same quantity of media giants that the US has, but there will probably be (once the blood letting has finished) be 3 or 4 big providers. BT, Sky, VM (or whatever it may be called in the future) and another provider. All four companies will provide tv, telco, broadband and mobile services on their own networks.
Again looking at the States and what almost happened here, I expect all four providers to own a "network" tv channel. Sky already has its, VM wants ITV, but I think BT will get that and CH4 (if privatised) and CH5 will be gobbled up by the others.
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Channel 4 to be privatised? It already is and they own quite a few channels anyway and they also own 50% of the popular music channels.
Virgin Media and ITV lost that opportunity ages ago and previously NTL had some kind of hold over the ITN News channel, it was a disaster! Virgin Media has made it quite clear they don't want to be in the content providing that's why they sold off Virgin Media Television and there stake in UKTV.
BT hasn't got a clue when it comes to Cable TV let alone Digital TV and TV channels, first they had some crap cable franchises that you can't do anything with them, then they had a share in BskyB they fell out and now they come up with BT Vision