TV Tree
19th August 2002, 14:07
This is from ireland.com
RTE's digital terrestrial television move is pie in the sky
I'M going to blow the dust off the crystal ball and make a bold prediction. If proved wrong, I'll eat humble pie. Promise!
Here goes. RTE's plans digital terrestrial television will be dropped. Why? Because there is no demand for it, and it would cost a fortune.
The proposal is to upgrade the network of masts around the country, so they can transmit a plethora of extra channels over the airwaves to antennae on household TVs.
Some of the new stations would be made up of RTE content, providing educational, news and children's channels.
RTE would sell its network of masts around the country which would then be upgraded by the purchaser to handle digital signals.
London-based stockbrokers Rothschild is advising on the sale of the network of masts. The latest information is that the bids have slipped from €70m to €30m in value.
There is another problem. When the project was originally conceived, the only companies offering digital television were the two cable groups NTL and Chorus.
Both firms have been rolling out the extra services. But due to the economic climate and the work involved in revamping the cables, progress has been slow. Last week, NTL said it had 22,000 customers using the services.
But unexpectedly Rupert Murdoch's Sky has entered the market. It now has about 250,000 digital subscribers who have installed satellite dishes on their roofs. There are 2.1m households in the country, and it is calculated about 300,000 have digital services.
One well informed source said this week that the market was simply too small to offer any investor an opportunity to make a return on an investment in RTE's digital terrestrial project.
But there are others who believe there is still substantial scope for the project to proceed.
Another factor is that the media market is suffering. Liberty Media, which owns 50pc of Chorus, wrote off $5.1bn of its investments in the first half of 2002.
When the big players are doing so badly, there would be little attraction in making a major investment in an Irish project which customers will not need.
RTE said it had a deficit of €29m in its 2001 annual report. How then will it be able to afford to make substantial new programming for digital terrestrial television?
The longer the project is delayed, the less likely it is to proceed, as more and more people sign up to Sky and the cable companies for digital services.
But perhaps I'll be proved wrong about digital terrestrial television and the crystal ball will go back in the attic.
The chemists' complaint that a report showing they have been ripping us off is "superficial" is more difficult to swallow than the overpriced pills they sell.
The pharmacy market in Ireland is still only partly deregulated. The report produced last week by Indecon consultants is a clear indication the sector should be fully opened up.
Health Minister Michael Martin partly deregulated it when he lifted a restriction on where new pharmacies could be located last year.
But there is still a repulsive limitation that only Irish educated pharmacists can open outlets in this country.
As well as excluding all EU nationals from opening outlets, it is also blocks people born in this country but trained abroad from obtaining a licence. This protectionist piece of legislation deserves to be shredded.
Indecon's report on the pharmacy sector said that 73.9pc of pharmacists who replied to the survey believed their profits would fall in the absence of restrictions. Three hundred chemists took part in the survey.
Although the Irish Pharmaceutical Union disputed part of the report, it did not reject the document's assertion that further deregulation would hit pharmacists' profits. The value of sales in chemists has been growing twice as fast as those in other retailers.
What we can draw from this is the fact that because chemists are operating in a protected market, they have been able to inflate profits by overcharging customers. More competition would lower prices.
With our inflation two and a half times higher than the EU average and difficult economic times ahead, the Government can't delay full competition.
David Murphy, Monday Morning
RTE's digital terrestrial television move is pie in the sky
I'M going to blow the dust off the crystal ball and make a bold prediction. If proved wrong, I'll eat humble pie. Promise!
Here goes. RTE's plans digital terrestrial television will be dropped. Why? Because there is no demand for it, and it would cost a fortune.
The proposal is to upgrade the network of masts around the country, so they can transmit a plethora of extra channels over the airwaves to antennae on household TVs.
Some of the new stations would be made up of RTE content, providing educational, news and children's channels.
RTE would sell its network of masts around the country which would then be upgraded by the purchaser to handle digital signals.
London-based stockbrokers Rothschild is advising on the sale of the network of masts. The latest information is that the bids have slipped from €70m to €30m in value.
There is another problem. When the project was originally conceived, the only companies offering digital television were the two cable groups NTL and Chorus.
Both firms have been rolling out the extra services. But due to the economic climate and the work involved in revamping the cables, progress has been slow. Last week, NTL said it had 22,000 customers using the services.
But unexpectedly Rupert Murdoch's Sky has entered the market. It now has about 250,000 digital subscribers who have installed satellite dishes on their roofs. There are 2.1m households in the country, and it is calculated about 300,000 have digital services.
One well informed source said this week that the market was simply too small to offer any investor an opportunity to make a return on an investment in RTE's digital terrestrial project.
But there are others who believe there is still substantial scope for the project to proceed.
Another factor is that the media market is suffering. Liberty Media, which owns 50pc of Chorus, wrote off $5.1bn of its investments in the first half of 2002.
When the big players are doing so badly, there would be little attraction in making a major investment in an Irish project which customers will not need.
RTE said it had a deficit of €29m in its 2001 annual report. How then will it be able to afford to make substantial new programming for digital terrestrial television?
The longer the project is delayed, the less likely it is to proceed, as more and more people sign up to Sky and the cable companies for digital services.
But perhaps I'll be proved wrong about digital terrestrial television and the crystal ball will go back in the attic.
The chemists' complaint that a report showing they have been ripping us off is "superficial" is more difficult to swallow than the overpriced pills they sell.
The pharmacy market in Ireland is still only partly deregulated. The report produced last week by Indecon consultants is a clear indication the sector should be fully opened up.
Health Minister Michael Martin partly deregulated it when he lifted a restriction on where new pharmacies could be located last year.
But there is still a repulsive limitation that only Irish educated pharmacists can open outlets in this country.
As well as excluding all EU nationals from opening outlets, it is also blocks people born in this country but trained abroad from obtaining a licence. This protectionist piece of legislation deserves to be shredded.
Indecon's report on the pharmacy sector said that 73.9pc of pharmacists who replied to the survey believed their profits would fall in the absence of restrictions. Three hundred chemists took part in the survey.
Although the Irish Pharmaceutical Union disputed part of the report, it did not reject the document's assertion that further deregulation would hit pharmacists' profits. The value of sales in chemists has been growing twice as fast as those in other retailers.
What we can draw from this is the fact that because chemists are operating in a protected market, they have been able to inflate profits by overcharging customers. More competition would lower prices.
With our inflation two and a half times higher than the EU average and difficult economic times ahead, the Government can't delay full competition.
David Murphy, Monday Morning