Greg Dixon: Sky's high is Ground Zero for viewers

COMMENT

Well, I'm terribly happy for Sky TV. After years of spending, spending, spending to buy up the rights to all the sports that matter in this country and then making sports fans pay, pay, pay through the snout to watch it live, the pay-TV company is reportedly in rude health and worth about $2 billion.

Yes, that's right, your or your family's addiction to rugby and cricket has helped this far-flung outpost of Rupert Murdoch's media hegemony grow into a very handy little earner.

If you've got money in Sky - rather than spending money on Sky - you'll be rubbing your hands in the knowledge that the network's clout in the market has grown considerably since its birth in 1990.

So much so that around 38 per cent of New Zealand homes now have one of its ugly black boxes - in total it has nearly 600,000 subscribers.

It's gained some 33,000 new subscribers in the 2003-04 financial year and the revenue during that period zipped up 12.6 per cent to $440 million.

And its customers - you and me - are watching more of it. While news and sports viewing numbers have been static, overall viewing figures have apparently reached an all-time high on the back of new channels like Disney, UKTV and the History Channel. Its 84 channels have just under 20 per cent of the share of the viewing market these days.

Nice fat sums for those with a buck invested in the thing, but what about those of us forming the cash cow that's being milked?

I was interested to read a comment from Sky TV boss John Fellet in this paper last weekend. Said Fellet: "What you learn in this job is that there's no such thing as bad programming."

Translation: "We can play any old crap we want to and you saps will watch it."

In mitigation, Fellet was reacting to a sniffy comment made by a bloke from the Television Broadcasters Council, which represent the free-to-air lot, who sneered in the same story that trying to find something [to watch] on those 84 channels can be a pretty thankless task. Well, yes. But as I said in this column a month or so ago, more choice is better than less even if you still can't find something to watch during any given hour.

But really there is no defence for such blatant condescension from Fellet. While pay-TV, particularly digital pay-TV, is about having a plethora of channels to cater to a plethora of audiences, it should also be about quality.

To believe that anything - presumably outside All Black and Super 12 games - will do to fill those 84 channels is to treat your paying customers with contempt. To openly say it: beyond understanding.

Of course Fellet is not a programmer. But if he had his way?

"I can't stand the reality TV revolution," he told the Herald last week. "If it was up to me, we'd just show John Wayne movies and baseball games." Swell.

The sky may seem to be the limit for making money from Sky. However, with Fellet's attitude, things are looking rather limited for its ever-growing number of paying viewers.