planetf1.com

This sums up my opinion perfectly.

My commitment is to F1, not to crusading against hyper-wealthy media bastards. Whilst I too hate Murdock, I've got plenty of other more important things to get angry about without having to sacrifice the only sport I watch in order to protest against Murdock.

And to the user who mentioned £500 a year... My first year's Sky+HD package with the F1 channel came to £162, which worked out as £13.50 p/month (I got it for that price as at the time Sky were offering £100 M&S vouchers if bought in December last year and I got £100 back through a cashback site). I felt this was totally worth it to trial the new F1 channel, and this offer was open to anyone.

And I love it. It'll be worth the £30 p/month for the second year. The coverage is the best, most thorough and comprehensive we've ever had in the UK. And with the greatest respect, I think F1 fans are going to have to get used to Sky, because I don't see this split deal with the BBC lasting forever. I've also got a feeling in me guts that DC will be making the move to Sky pretty soon.

Well you see that is where you are wrong. I pay to watch a whole load of programmes I wouldn't be able to if I didn't pay. You on the other hand take some weird stance of moral outrage, but only related to this one situation, and miss out on all the excellent programmes I get to watch. Sucks to be you.

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This forum is about F1, right? Whatever channel is showing full and live F1 is the one I'm watching.

I had Sky for a few GPs in the summer but I found that I only watched the race and the rest of the coverage carried too much advertising. So I cancelled and went back to the BBC. I won't get Sky again unless they sell just the F1 channel for a much lower price... (And to respond to the last post - no I don't buy any motorsport magazines.)

I think he was referring to the fact that one can't get F1 on SKY without having to pay for a normal SKY subscription, when he would prefer to just pay a tenner for the F1 channel on it's own, without any other channels

You can get it on Virgin Media as well - it's also a fair bit cheaper with them if you get a bundle.

We moved our Broadband, Phone and TV over to them and it worked out at just under £100 for everything - that may sound like a lot, but it included 2 tivo boxes and 1 standard box, 120mbps internet, unlimited calls (inc mobiles), etc. Before that, individually we were paying about £120 for Sky (non-hd, not even Sky+) in 1 room, 10mbps Virgin broadband and BT phone.

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Goodness! Where did that come from? are you feeling ok?

I'm really surprised by the vehemence towards me shown by PZR and yourself with regard to this topic. I am not your enemy, I am just a girl who has chosen not to purchase a Sky subscription. The OP asked us to state if we would change our viewing habits and all I have done is reply and state my reason. Demeaning yourselves by throwing personal insults around over such an inconsequential topic would be amusing if you didn't appear to genuinely be angered that I should make a different choice to you.

I'm not sure it's possible to feel morale outrage over a TV subscription but I guess you guys must, for me it's a financial decision because my view is that it is a ripoff to pay to watch adverts so I vote with my purse by choosing not to subscribe. That's all.

And I'm amazed by some of the outright bollocks you have spoken in the is thread. If it was all about you why did you bring others into it in your original comment

You can't or are not prepared to afford it, that's fair enough but don't make up some cock and bull story about adverts. Probably would have been best to leave out the amateur dramatics and fibs of your initial post too

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I didn't bring anyone in, the choice to respond as you did was yours not mine.

Your comments may be 'cock and bull', mine are not, I stand by what I said - I won't pay to watch adverts on sky. What you choose to do is up to you. Your strangely & overly vociferous resentment of my choice in this matter puzzles me and I wonder why you cant accept what I'm saying; trying to twist it into something its not - what reason do you have?

It would be a very sad world indeed if missing a few TV shows would make someone's life suck, does this have something to do with it?

Hmm,



You very much did bring other people into it. Why you felt the need only you can answer. I don't resent your choice, just the cock and bull reasons you have given for making that choice.

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I'm surprised about the figures you're quoting. Are you sure you haven't been mugged?

I pay around £48 per month for my SKY, including the entertainment pack, HD and Multi-room and I think that's a small fortune. It's basically because I live where elephants go to die and struggle to even get Freeview - it's either SKY or play charades every night

Location is the same reason I pay around £25 per month for my BB, which is 8mbps unlimited and includes line rental and unlimited daytime landline calls. If I lived near civilisation and had e.g. cable as a choice then the whole lot would drop to under £50, including all of the above plus faster BB and unlimited mobile calls too. You're paying double that - are you sure you're not paying your neighbour's bills too?

Not sure if this has been stated, discussed or whatever but it comes up from time to time:

THERE ARE NO ADVERTS DURING QUALI/RACE COVERAGE - EVER and the last advert break (there are only about 2 breaks before the race - one of which is the McLaren 'Tooned' one) is always at least 30 minutes before the race, and then they dont have one for at least 30 minutes after the race.

Also, the adbreaks on Sky F1 are MUCH shorter than your normal adbreak as they are mostly F1 related/specialist ads. For example there's the lotus 'sure' advert which is about 25 seconds long - thats the entire ad break.

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But you don't pay to watch adverts. You pay to watch television programmes and some - not all - of them happen to have adverts in. You seem happy to record and watch later so by doing that you wouldn't have to watch any adverts anyway.

Major sporting events such as F1 don't have ads in them anyway, at least not during the race itself. I rarely watch the buildup so I have a pretty much advert free viewing.

I understand not watching SKY due to financial reasons as it's not cheap. You do, however, get an awfully big choice of television programmes to watch and free F1 thrown in, which I appreciate doesn't suit everybody. Adverts are a red herring though as it's not even necessary to watch them depending on your viewing habits.

It does sound dear, but its not.

We moved from 1 sky box with 'everything' except HD, to virgin with everything on 2 tivo boxes and a virgin VHD box, all in HD and with on-demand content.

We were also paying about £48 for Sky, our phone bill was about £45 a month, then broadband was £25 a month. Total was £128 a month (or there abouts).

Now we've got the Virgin 'VIP' bundle with a few extra bits added on for being long time customers (Been on Cable broadband since the days of Cable & Wireless!) and it's a little under £100 and we're getting a huge amount more.

To give you an idea on the Sky costs. If we wanted to move from our Sky SD (non-recording) box to 2x Sky+ HD and then have the standard Sky HD box in another room, we'd have been looking at:

- £55.50 base monthly cost
+ £10.25 for HD
+ £20.50 for 2x Multiroom subscriptions
MONTHLY TOTAL: £86.25 (no telephone or broadband included here!)
+ £199 one-off for the extra 2x Sky+ HD boxes

Then to top that off, you cant get access to the on-demand content without Sky Broadband!

Another thing as well, the Sky on-demand content selection is pretty small when compared to Virgin's - they have all the Sky anytime content (free) plus their own stuff, and stuff added by other TV channels. This is all in addition to iPlayer/ITV Player/4OD/5/etc as well.

Each Virgin box also has its own dedicated 10mbps internet connection, and doesnt piggy back off your own internet, so wont slow down streaming, even in HD. We've had all three boxes streaming HD content, and it's worked perfectly fine as the cable connection into your house is theoretically capable of upto 10GBPS in connectivity.

The package we're on also includes 120mbps internet (not-capped either), unlimited calls, free calls to virgin mobiles, access to stream virgin on demand content online (a bit like Sky go).

So VM was really a no brainer for us. Obviously it wont make sense (financially) for those with smaller TV and broadband packages or in non-VM cabled areas.

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The truth is no-one held a gun to your head and forced you to respond. The choice to do so was yours alone.

Just because you don't agree with my reasons does not make them 'cock and bull'. 'Cock and bull' is when you tell someone their life sucks because they wont get to watch some TV programmes.

It means I have no intention of getting Sky anything no matter what happens to F1 on the BBC.

What would you do if/when F1 is no longer on the BBC or any free-to-air TV channels in the UK? Just curious

Suffice to say I would still be able to watch F1.

Even if the Sky broadcast was the only available broadcast in the UK?

I'm fine without Sky, 10 races live on the BBC and for the others if they do 2 hours for highlights then I watch it, as it feels like you are basically watching the whole race delayed, but with the hour and a half shows I just watch it through RTL.

Might get Sky in the future but for the moment I would quite like to spend my money on other things seeing as I can still see the races basically in full without Sky.

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Support: Kimi Raikkonen, Lewis Hamilton, Jenson Button, Heikki Kovalainen
Respect: Alonso, Schumacher, Newey
Not so keen on: Vettel, Di Resta, whoever decides to red flag when it rains in F1

Off course they are cock and bull. You can't understand why a sports mad fan would pay to watch at least extended highlights of pretty much every premier league football game, every champions league game, every PGA Tour and European PGA Tour golf event, every ATP tennis championship, every F1 weekend live and uninterrupted, several rugby league and union games per week from the major leagues around the world, every England cricket match, several NFL games per week, etc, etc? If you can't understand that then your either incredibly stupid or your lying. As I said cock and bull to try and prove your point. What you should have said was, 'I can't afford' or 'I'm not prepared to pay for Sky'. That is perfectly acceptable, however to try and tag some other crap on about not understanding why other people do is a load of bollocks and what I took issue with.

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Well if I lived in UK again: Dish aimed to RTL sat + Radio5 commentary. Done.

Here in the US, I have to pay for the "digital preferred" package just to get SPEED channel. Overall not bad, $80/mo for internet/digital cable+DVR, but I bring up the Sky stream on PC and mute the TV when it goes to adverts on Speed Channel.

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As soon as you touch this limit, something happens and you suddenly can go a little bit further. With your mind power, your determination, your instinct, and the experience as well, you can fly very high.

On a related note, how much is it to get the F1 channel in HD with Virgin?

Nah, not now. Sky changed it so you can now use any broadband provider to connect to the Sky+ box to access their on-demand, maybe realising that their broadband is complete shite

I have pretty much the same package as you with the exception my 3rd box is a V+HD and 50mbps BB although that will soon be doubled . As for will me paying change after Sunday? No it won't as I was already paying for the sports package so the F1 channel was no additional cost to me when it was added.

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PF1 Pick 10 Competition
Best Round Result: =2nd (Europe 2012)
Podiums: 2 (Europe 2012, Singapore 2012)
Top 10 finishes: 5
2012 Championship Standing: =9th

Virgin don't carry the F1 channel in HD.




Yet

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PF1 Pick 10 Competition
Best Round Result: =2nd (Europe 2012)
Podiums: 2 (Europe 2012, Singapore 2012)
Top 10 finishes: 5
2012 Championship Standing: =9th

Ahh fair enough on the internet side of things. Guess they probably did one of their little 'exclusive for a year' things.

Wouldnt be at all surprised if we get the HD channel on VM next year. Not that it bothers me if we dont - the F1 FOM HD feed is certainly not full HD.

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You remind me of a dog I know named Ted. Ted had an imaginary itch and he started chewing at it, eventually he chewed off all his fur, then through the skin and started chewing away the flesh of his leg. So Ted had to wear one of those large plastic collars, you know the kind, it's the kind of collar that stops a dog from chewing his own leg off. You're probably wondering what happened to poor old Ted's leg? His leg got better once the collar went on and he couldn't chew his leg anymore, but you know what - as soon as the collar was removed he started all over again.

You're like Ted, and I'm your imaginary itch. It doesn't matter to you anymore that the very point we started discussing has been lost you just keep on chewing away no matter how dumb it is. You spend your time thowing childish insults around, calling me stupid, trying to make up some fairy story about how i'm talking 'bollocks' or telling me my life sucks over missing some meaningless TV show and all the time you don't see how badly all this reflects on you because you seem unwilling or incapable or having an intelligent discussion.

I'm sure there is a reason you need to insult someone for nothing more than having the audacity to disagree with you, the sad thing is that this topic could have been anything and you would have resorted to insults just the same - but you can't win an argument with insults all it does is make you look weak.

You need to get your perspective back and ask yourself what you are doing and why, don't be like Ted chewing away forever without any reason. The only person you will damage is yourself.

You also need to understand that you cannot tell someone what their reasons for doing something are. All you can do is disagree with those reasons or have reasons of your own.

Or maybe you're Ted and I'm a little flea that keeps on biting. And you just can't stop scratching. Takes two to have a conversation, and you're free to stop any time you want

You know what would be great? If you actually addressed some of the points I made. Rather than this smoke screen you keep putting up so you don't have to deal with them

As for intelligent debate...what intelligence did this add to the debate?



You took all of Sky TV and boiled it down to adverts, rubbish channels and channels available on freeview. A distinct lack of intelligence in that comment don't you think?

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for all the ppl ranting on about cost you could have it for the full year for £100 or less

get a 60cm dish and point it to a free to air satellite channel like rtl and watch it with the sound from bbc r5l

if you all ready have sky you may only need a dish as you can ad extra channels via the sky box BUT ONLY IF THE FEC AND SYMBOL RATE ARE THE SAME (MOST ARE)

IF YOU DONT WANT TWO DISH'S UP YOU CAN BUY A Dish and a MULTI ARM LNB kit for les than a £ 10

its not rocket science to set up long as you do your home work

keep an eye on lidl aldi they do satellite kits fo6 £60 wich is all you need

there are some fta that dont do breaks in the race you just have to find then via google

this legal as there all fta thee are other ways with boxes but thats illegal skybox s11

If we do get the HD then its a bonus but the way Tivo upscales it, watching on my Samsung is perfectly satisfactory for me

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PF1 Pick 10 Competition
Best Round Result: =2nd (Europe 2012)
Podiums: 2 (Europe 2012, Singapore 2012)
Top 10 finishes: 5
2012 Championship Standing: =9th

You're still chewing away I see. Just like Ted you think the imaginary itch is real - but you haven't been discussing the original topic for some time, you have been doing your best to ignore the topic by making this personal and throwing around insults and yet you don't see the hypocrisy of your comments.

I would like to believe you want to have a reasonable debate but until you can stop putting insults in your posts you're not ready. You need to let go of your 'imaginary itch' or I will always appear to you as the enemy, but I'm really not and it's not necessary to insult someone over something so utterly in-consequencial.

Still not answering any questions I pose? This was your first input into this 'debate'.



I took issue at the time with the second paragraph. And it's still what I take issue with. I have asked you a few questions in regard to this. Questions you have ignored. Let me repeat, just in case you're having trouble understanding, I have no issue with your decision to not pay for Sky, you are free to make that choice and it's a perfectly reasonable stance to take. However, your second paragraph does not paint the reality of the situation. I have given a perfect example of why someone would want to pay for Sky TV. It wouldn't have been a giant leap for anyone to understand that hence why I made the comment I did. You are free to take any stance you want, however, you should expect to be challenged when you make statements that fly in the face of reality. So it might be best to just admit that your understanding was flawed and you can then stop scratching that flea

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Sky have been very effective with their financial model with some very good profitability results, if we look at a simple example of Sky's financial model we can understand the balance between subscriptions and advertising. Please note this is just a simple example:-

In July last year Sky announced profits of £1073m and had 10.3m customers. So if we make an assumption that the average Sky customer is paying £50 per month for their subscription we could say that £515m of their profit came from subscriptions (48%) and £558m from advertising (52%).

I don't know what you guys think, and to me it really doesn't matter because I'm not a Sky customer but personally £558m profit per year seems enough. If I was a customer I would be asking why I'm paying a subscription because if Sky was a free to air service paid for solely by existing advertising they're profits would have still have been £558m. Alternatively if Sky were to provide their service without advertising and maintain the same (assumed) average fee per customer of £50, their profits would have been £515m.

Of course as a business Sky will do everything they can to maximise profits, and if you're a shareholder you're probably rubbing your hands together with glee at the prospect of a large dividend. But as a customer, you should always try to get the best possible value for a product and considering the information above, perhaps you should consider if you're really getting good value when most of what you pay goes not to cover operational costs but into profit.

Do you really think I would still be paying for something if I didn't think it was good value for money? Sky's profits or how they are made up are inconsequential to me. They provide me with a product that I feel I get very good value for. The creation of the dedicated F1 channel meant I got even better value for money because I got a whole new channel dedicated to a sport I love for no extra cost. So as I have repeatedly said you are free to make your choice and it is a perfectly legitimate one. However, the second paragraph of your initial post is not a true reflection of reality and that it what I had and still have a problem with. So you can keep introducing new elements to your argument but none of them will change what you wrote in that second paragraph.

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@Lucifer, thats a very simplistic view.

For example, the £50 sub isn't just paying for the programming it's paying for the hardware. So the £50 is not profit as per your calcs.

Second does that 10.3 million customers included businesses? I believe Pubs pay a little bit more than £50 a month. I read a bit there on a quick google that suggests that some places are paying Thousands per month. Screwing up the average some what.

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Disclaimer: The above post maybe tongue in cheek.

"I thought I'd get your theories, mock them, then embrace my own. The usual."

You're right,- it's an overly simplistic model I just presented it as an example. I'm sure Sky's business customers are paying considerably more for the service, I imagine hotels in particular pay a substantial amount for the privilege of passing on the Sky service to their customers. But simplistic or not it highlights that Sky's profit margin is very high. As long as their customers are prepared to pay the going rate they will milk it for as long as they can, a funny statistic is that if we assume that 2% of all viewing is people watching adverts Sky made £21.46m profit from this alone, I'd like a slice of that cake!

Their profits are high but then so is their expenditure.

Are their Profits high relative to their costs? It's not as if they are putting a pound in and getting a million back.

Nevermind that some of those profits will be re-invested to make the product better. Less money means less money reinvested and possibly an inferior Grand Prix weekend.

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Disclaimer: The above post maybe tongue in cheek.

"I thought I'd get your theories, mock them, then embrace my own. The usual."

there are couple of points on here I find a little bit odd. If you don't mind me asking I'm curious as to the following:

1. Why should you care or worry about how much profit a company is making? Do you always choose your goods or services on the basis of how much profit a company makes or on whether you actually need (or want) the goods or services themselves?
2. On the subject of value for money, the value is surely in the service the customer receives, not in how much it has cost the company to provide it. If the value of a TV service is £x, then why should it matter whether the company supplements that income with additional advertising? The customer still gets the subscription they have paid for. Now I understand if you feel that a television service is not worth £31.50 per month (the cheapest offering with HD, and therefore F1, I believe); it's a lot of money to pay. But whatever the amount you do feel is reasonable I don't understand why what the company does in the background should influence your opinion of that service in any way.
3. Profit doesn't go straight into the chairman's pocket. A substantial amount is usually re-invested to either improve or add to service offerings (I'm not talking about operating costs). For a company the size of SKY (or Virgin, BT etc) that re-investment would have to be in the hundreds of millions to have any impact upon their existing services. If they didn't do this then we'd all still be stuck with old SKY boxes (not even SKY+) and HD wouldn't be where it is today either. Do you recognise this or do you feel that companies shouldn't bother somehow?
3. There are other companies that offer subscription cable or satellite TV services, both in the UK and all around the world. In my experience both here and abroad the only one I have found which offers a completely advertising-free service is the BBC, which has a substantially different operating model to the others anyway. Do you regard all these other companies with the same distaste or is this reserved for SKY alone? If so, why?

Sky's revenue (which includes investment projects) was £6597m in 2011 so their profit margin is 16% (£1073m profit after tax). As a comparison retail companies typically have a profit margin of 2-5%.

well in 2011 Virgin Media's operating margin was 14%, which is a much better comparison than retail companies. All one can read from that is that they are healthy and appear to be well run...