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Sky televsion in France


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Does anyone know how this affects the new FreeSat boxes which are now available in the UK? Is there some requirement for them to be installed at a UK address, for example. I read somewhere that some resellers were only making them available with the installation, but that this was a just a try-on. These boxes are available in HD versions as well as standard models.

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Well, the obvious thing, of course,  is that freeview has no subscription so the need to sort out payment from a UK address obviously goes. From what I've read, the issue about the obligation to have a dish installed, whether you want one or not, seems to have faded a little. The only possible problem that may arise is having to provide a UK address when you buy the box. I think that's for the TV licence guys, although the post code also defines which TV region you get - i.e. London postcode gives you BBC1 London.

So, to sum up Bilbo - no I can't think of any issue that may affect the sale of a freesat box. Unless anyone else knows different.

 

Tim

By the way - I'm being picky here - it's freesat - not Freesat or FreeSat.[8-|]

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Just to confirm that our Sky HD box was originally registered to us at our UK address.  Once we knew we were moving to France, we disconnected the phone connection in the UK, and continued to use the service there without problem for some months before we moved here, and obviously it is still disconnected and is working fine.

As a matter of interest, the people who subsequently moved into our UK house also have Sky HD which they have registered at the same address that Sky think we are still resident at, and we haven't heard a dickybird from Sky, so I don't really think they go to any extraordinary lengths to check up on users.

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The obvious difference is that for a freesat box - with its one-off payment - there is no (or little) paper trail for the licencing people to follow. Paying in Comet with cash and giving W12 8QT (Television Centre) as the postcode, then putting it in the boot of the car and bringing it to France, would be a jolly wheeze in my opinion!

paul
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The problem surely has more to do with the advertisers than anything else.  Sky's money comes from not only subscriptions but, much more importantly, from advertisers.  It is they who do not want non-UK based telly watchers as the ads are clearly not (as yet anyway) European and are very much aimed at a UK audience - what do most of us care what the offer of the week is at Sainsbury's?  Of course Sky would take our money if it were simply a matter of subs but it is not.  To keep the ad' revenue healthy they must at least be seen by their main financial supporters, to be doing what they can to prevent us from watching whenever they can.

But we're a resourceful lot and where there's a will....

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[quote user="cooperlola"]

The problem surely has more to do with the advertisers than anything else.  Sky's money comes from not only subscriptions but, much more importantly, from advertisers.  It is they who do not want non-UK based telly watchers as the ads are clearly not (as yet anyway) European and are very much aimed at a UK audience - what do most of us care what the offer of the week is at Sainsbury's?  Of course Sky would take our money if it were simply a matter of subs but it is not.  To keep the ad' revenue healthy they must at least be seen by their main financial supporters, to be doing what they can to prevent us from watching whenever they can.

But we're a resourceful lot and where there's a will....

[/quote]

Surely the same can be said for the advertisers on ITV 1/2/3/4 and Channel 4 E4/More4. All of whom are - apparently - quite happy with the broadcaster's (and Astra's) assurance that the footprint of the satellite they are using is sufficiently tight as to make continental spill-over an insignificant problem.

Perhaps it me, Coop, (a racing certainty, some would say) but I don't quite follow the logic of your point. Why would a UK company (say Direct Line, for example) care if their ad is seen by people for whom it is irrelevant? We 'guest' viewers form no part of any audience measuring survey, so cannot affect their cost-per-thousand, or reach calculation.  In fact for some multi-nationals it might even be seen as a bonus (c/f Cilit Bang).

paul

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Excuse me if I'm missing something obvious here but I'm not sure I quite get why advertisers should give a rat's wotsit where their ads are seen.

So what if you see an ad for something which you can't buy because it isn't available where you live.

Surely the fact that you're seeing the ads, wherever you may be, could conceivably generate a minute number of sales which wouldn't have come about at all if you were denied seeing them so thay cannot possibly say that they are losing anything, quite the opposite, they can only gain.

With PVR's and FF/skip etc. who has to watch ads these days anyway, not me thats for sure[;-)]

 

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I've got a sky box providing all the free to air channels and fancied HD for the Euro football. Spoke to the guy in a supermarket and explained that i don't have a landline, I've been mobile only for years. He said it was no longer from Sky. Costed up the subscription charges to get sky HD and it just didn't add up. So I bought a Grundig HD Freesat box. Absolute joy to use I and I don't need to page through all the unavailable sky channels any more.

Guy in comet said freesat sales are superb. Lots of ex Sky customers realising that freesat meets their viewing needs at a fraction of the cost. I suspect Sky will feel the impact over the next year or so and adjust their prices accordingly.

 

strangely, when buying the freesat box, I wasn't asked for address details so that the TV licencing people could send me yet another draconian demand to buy a licence - I've already got one

 

 

 

 

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Media spends are worked out on the basis of the number of views vs the budget spent across the various media available.  Advertisers  rely on viewing/readership figures etc to decide where the budgets are best spent.  Thus they rely on figures from Sky and other providers to decide whether to put their millions into TV, cinema, magazines, poster campaigns, direct marketing etc etc.  If Sky's figures (or any other provider for that matter) are skewed because they don't reflect the target audience required (ie a person who is apparently subscibing from the North East of England is in fact in France/Spain or anywhere else for that matter) then the advertisers object.  Whereas few UK editions of national newspapers are actually sold and read outside the UK, the less that becomes true as regards television, the more the adverstisers get p*ss*d off about it.

Of course Sky don't care who pays the subs and where they are but, believe me, the advertisers certainly do and media buyers put huge pressures on TV companies to provide the correct figures, and to return the target audience they're paying for.  And he who pays the piper...

And of course, you're not paying a TV license fee to pay the costs of Auntie Beeb's channels either.

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[quote user="cooperlola"]

Media spends are worked out on the basis of the number of views vs the budget spent across the various media available.  Advertisers  rely on viewing/readership figures etc to decide where the budgets are best spent.  Thus they rely on figures from Sky and other providers to decide whether to put their millions into TV, cinema, magazines, poster campaigns, direct marketing etc etc.  If Sky's figures (or any other provider for that matter) are skewed because they don't reflect the target audience required (ie a person who is apparently subscibing from the North East of England is in fact in France/Spain or anywhere else for that matter) then the advertisers object.  Whereas few UK editions of national newspapers are actually sold and read outside the UK, the less that becomes true as regards television, the more the adverstisers get p*ss*d off about it.

Of course Sky don't care who pays the subs and where they are but, believe me, the advertisers certainly do and media buyers put huge pressures on TV companies to provide the correct figures, and to return the target audience they're paying for.  And he who pays the piper...

And of course, you're not paying a TV license fee to pay the costs of Auntie Beeb's channels either.

[/quote]

The flaw in your argument, Coop, is your use of the term 'sky's figure..'

What figures, do you imagine, Sky could possibly give to an advertiser which would materially affect their advertising spend? 

Sky knows :

1/    how many subscribers they have.

2/   where those subscribers live, thus what ITV region they are in.

3/   The average socio-economic group of that household from postcode averaging data.

4/   which package they subscribe to.

5/   ( in very broad terms)  the ratio of minutes watched across the constituent parts of each package (extrapolated from the previous quarter's audience research).

Sky doesn't know :

1/   if anybody is actually watching anything

2/    if anybody IS watching, what channel, out of the subscribed package, is being viewed at any given time.

3/    by who (age)

4/    by who (income group)

5/    how many.

That data is - at best - of limited use to an advertiser, so they turn to BARB/JICTAR who extrapolate total audiences for any given channel (in units of 15 minutes) from a selected audience sample with data recording set-top boxes which record the channel selected, and the duration. I believe there is now some means of noting the number of people in the room. This gives a raw, over-night rating of the share and the reach for any given programme. This is supplimented by weekly diaries, and street interviews which provide an AI  (audience appreciation index).

All the above, you will note, takes place in UK households, and on UK streets. Those of us viewing iincidentally 'across the water' therefore have absolutely no impact on the audience research figures: there are no 'figures' for us to skew !

The only area where Sky does have firm data is for services like Box

Office movies which require positive input from the subscriber via the

phone line, and we are - obviously - self-selected out of that group

anyway.

Yes - we are all erroniously totalled in with the postcode figures, however, here is some data from OFCOM reports :

BSkyB

For the year to 30 June 2007, BSkyB reported £3,406m in retail

subscription revenue, up 8% from the previous year, and £352m in

advertising revenue, up 3%.

from this you can see that actual advertising revenue respresents less than 10% of their income,

and

 Q4 2007 review :

DIGITAL SATELLITE TELEVISION – Sky subscribers and free-to-view satellite services

BSkyB increased its subscriber base by 145,000 during the quarter to reach 8.3 million with over 321,000 additions year-on year. When combined with free-to-view satellite households, total satellite households reached almost 9.4 million.

The number of Sky subscribers taking the ‘Multiroom’ service reached over 1.5 million, an increase of 305,000 during 2007, this means that 17% of Sky customers now have at least one extra set connected to satellite television.

Sky’s high definition service, Sky HD, added 64,000 subscribers taking the total number to over 420,000.

The number of customers using Sky+ service increased by 434,000 to reach over 3 million for the first time

I don't know (cannot know) how many of us there actually are viewing outside the UK, but logic tells me that as a percentage of the total households noted above, it must put us  w-a-y  down in the noise.

paul

EDIT sorry. when I cut-and-pasted this to the 'quote' page, I later noticed it had only copied half of the original reply !

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[quote user="cooperlola"]And of course, you're not paying a TV license fee to pay the costs of Auntie Beeb's channels either.[/quote]The UK TV licence is nothing more than a tax levied on possesion of a device capable of receiving TV programmes whether you use it or not and irrespective of what you watch.

Why would that mean anything at all in France or make you liable to pay it [8-)]

 

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[quote user="ErnieY"]

[quote user="cooperlola"]And of course, you're not paying a TV license fee to pay the costs of Auntie Beeb's channels either.[/quote]The UK TV licence is nothing more than a tax levied on possesion of a device capable of receiving TV programmes whether you use it or not and irrespective of what you watch.

Why would that mean anything at all in France or make you liable to pay it [8-)]

 

[/quote]

That very well may be the case, ErnieY, but you can't argue that that's not exactly what the money is used for !

paul

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You have put that over at length and very well Gyn_Paul.

Back in the 80's I had dealings with a company called AGB (Audits of Great Britain) who in turn supplied data to BARB (British Audience Broadcasting). Modems were installed into 'panel members' homes which monitored not only what and when they watched... but even who was watching. It all depended of course on the member entering the correct data which was then collected overnight when the modem was polled. It was never very exact - as the old saying goes, Garbage in, Garbage out - but it was data and it was presented as valid. How a toddler or even a teenager 'member' could be relied upon to log on baffled me then and baffles me now.

One got the impression that they (the program providers) needed to tell their advertisers something even though they knew it was skewed and we knew it was nonsense.  As the other saying goes, lies, dammed lies...and statistics!

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Absolutely, Bannon,

This was, of course, the critisism ranged at the A.C. Nielson company in the early days: that their polling sample was comparatively tiny, statistically un-representative, and (in America's case) racially skewed, but the general feeling in both Madison Ave and in corporate HQ's seemed to be that - yes - we know it's probably statistically dodgy garbage, but at least we're all using the same dodgy garbage !

p
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