[opendtv] Re: Australia DTV

Bert wrote:
"Can you get an idea of how popular multichannel services are down 
under? Do your relatives subscribe to any such service? Do they find it an 
unnecessary expense"?

  Of the four households, only one subscribes to FoxTel while the remainder
use OTA analog.

The following DTV set availability is based upon today's store visits:

  The two large stores visited were Good Guys and Harvey Normans. Each had
a substantial inventory:

  Many DTV receivers were available at each store, twelve models were HDTV
capable. Several were dual tuner large drive DVRs priced from $770 to $600
US. The lowest priced HDTV STB was $160 US.

  The lowest price of the four SD STBs was $60 US. Outputs were
Vid/SVid/RGB while audio was L/R and Optical.

  All sets, except two large 1080P plazma units, were displaying LOCAL OTA
STATIONs (Cricket, Golf and a game show) in wide screen SD, which looked
good and which is a major departure from US store policies. The time of day
was early afternoon and no HD was being broadcast. 
The 1080P sets were fed by a Blue Ray demo disk. The salesman advised me
that, as yet, no other "software" is available for this format. One was a
65 inch Panasonic with a price of $12,307 U.S.!

Dale

Original Message:
-----------------
From: Craig Birkmaier craig@xxxxxxxxx
Date: Sat, 25 Nov 2006 09:06:58 -0500
To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [opendtv] Re: Australia DTV


At 3:15 PM -0500 11/24/06, Albert Manfredi wrote:
>Can you get an idea of how popular multichannel services are down 
>under? Do your relatives subscribe to any such service? Do they find 
>it an unnecessary expense?

According to Astra and other sources:

http://www.astra.org.au/article.asp?section=2&option=1&content=1

As at Quarter 2 2006 1,728,800 homes out of a total of 7,313,000 
homes were subscribing to subscription television. With a typical 
subscription television home having an average of 3.12 residents, the 
industry has a viewing potential of nearly 5 and a half million 
Australians (ie 5,401,200 out of a total of 19,447,000 people). From 
a household perspective this equates to 23.6% penetration and from a 
people perspective this means a 27.8% penetration. Source: OzTAM 
Establishment Survey Q2, 2006.


And From:

http://www.budde.com.au/Reports/Contents/Australia-Digital-TV-Market-Overvie
w-and-Statistics-133.html

Digital Free-to-Air (FTA) TV has been held up in a vicious cycle 
since it was launched in 2001. Available digital content has been 
nowhere near sufficient to help drive sales of digital receivers. By 
mid 2006, penetration of digital TVs (digital receivers or digital 
integrated TVs) stood at only 20% of Australian households, which 
still classifies digital TV as a niche medium. However, sales of 
digital TVs in Australian homes finally started to take hold in 2005 
and the first half of 2006 and this trend will continue into 2007 as 
prices for LCD and plasma TVs continue to drop to more affordable 
prices. This report provides detailed statistics on a wide range of 
areas including adoption rates of digital TV by type of device, 
household penetration of digital media as well as consumer surveys on 
digital TV adoption.


Looks like things have reached the tipping point down under. The 
Digital TV share has incresed from 20% to 30% in one year, and it did 
this with little more than digital versions of what is available via 
the Analog FTA service.

Historically, the multichannel market in Australia has been limited, 
as has been the case in most European nations. When DTV was 
authorized, Foxtel et al lobbied successfully to prohibit 
multicasting.In this respect Australia is not much different than the 
U.S. - i.e. techno-politics has the upper hand over market-based 
competition. One can only imagine what the DTV penetration would be 
in Australia now, had multicasting been permitted.

Here is the beginning of an article on the subject...

AUSTRALIA: Digital TV's key question is one of multiple choice

Multichannelling ban would give monopoly to Foxtel, Seven argued

The Age
Friday, March 24, 2006

By Helen Westerman

Major media players successfully lobbied to keep in place a ban on 
multichannelling of free-to-air television stations with claims that 
lifting the ban would damage local production of news and drama, 
documents newly released have revealed.

But that argument was dismissed by the Seven Network, which strongly 
supported lifting the multichannelling ban by saying that it would 
have no significant impact on existing free-to-air or pay television 
services in Australia.

The Seven Network also argued that failure to permit multichannelling 
would entrench Foxtel, which is jointly owned by PBL, Telstra and 
News Limited, as a monopoly pay tv operator and compromise the 
digital platform.

http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=41370

Hope this is what you were looking for Bert.

Regards
Craig

 
 
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