Sky ices Picnic, blames Ofcom

Marvellous

"An Ofcom spokeswoman today said the appropriate people to comment on Sky's cage-rattling were in a meeting all morning. Prior to the publication of this story a second Ofcom press officer rang El Reg demanding to know why we hadn't called to ask the regulator's response."

And that tells you all you need to know about the wankers who "work" for Ofcom.

Procrastination

... certainly is the name of the game at Riverside house. Although baulking Sky puts them up a notch in my estimations. Sky may as well replace their free to air garbage with a blank screen, it might make it more exciting.

18 months for a yes or no?

Sorry, can't stand Sky, don't like Murdoch agenda, but 18 months to make a simple decision as to whether they can swap channels or not?

Ofcom is just a fat bloated quango, liposuction it, return the money to the tax payer.

MPEG4

[If Ofcom were to approve the broadcaster's desired switch to MPEG4 encoding, a fourth channel could be squeezed into the spectrum, granting a reprieve for Sky News.]

Who do we lobby to have the switch to MPEG4 blocked?

Offcom are weak

There's already pay TV on Freeview (Top Up TV and Setanta) and it should be kicked off. Shirley they can't call it "FREEview" and then charge for it.

However I suspect that Offcom's political masters would rather there was pay TV on there, then they can charge the broadcasters more. Everything is seen as a revenue channel by our current government, which wouldn't be a problem if they had any idea how to spend all that money for the public good. Unfortunately they just throw money at things like the NHS and hope it improves. </Political Rant>

Anyway Offcom are too weak to simply say no, and instead allow themselves to be dictated to by UK.gov.

All this talk of a change to MPEG4 has got nothing to do with giving people extra channels, but everything to do with selling new hardware.

Eeeeexcellent.

Glad OFCOM had the sense to stall this into the ground. If they'd given a flat no, Murdoch would have wheeled out his million dollar lawyers and dragged them through the courts.

Freeview does suck, but squeezing a couple more channels wouldn't help when the signal is so weak you need a patch to the feckin' Arecibo dish to pick up half the channels! Crank up the watts, for the love of God!

Murdoch`s mint

This sounds like yet another way to line Murdoch`s pockets. Sky always were a mercenary bunch, having had experience of them in the trade way back in the early analogue satellite days. I`m not a great fan of Ofcom either, but it seems that they weren`t the feet-draggers in this case, looking at their rather snotty comment in this article:

http://www.ukfree.tv/fullstory.php?storyid=1107051451

Surely

Sky's days are numbered. When (if) they get round to installing FTTC/FTTH, everyone will surely ditch the dish. If you know what you're doing, it's easy to get Sky for pretty much free, but who'd want to?

PayTV is not a public service

Seriously PayTV is nothing more like broadcasting noise. On satellite that is no problem at all as there is enought bandwidth, but no other channel has that kind of bandwidth.

About Fiber to the Home, that probably won't kill satellite television for several reasons:

1. You'd need multicasting and that won't happen any time soon.

2. Even if you get local multicasting, the ISP won't allow foreign multicasting. That's why you will never get foreign channels. For example, no german IPTV provider carries the BBC or ITV and not even Channel 4. Even though you can get all of those easily via satellite in many parts of germany. (recommended dish size 100-200 cm)

3. IPTV probably will keep detailed logs of everything you watch. You will not have an option to record, and the archives provided by the provider can be changed or deletec at any time.

Satellite simply allows you to get the channels you want without any domestic instance controlling what you get. So in case your country starts a war with another one, you will still get those channels. It's almoust like the internet.

Sidetrack - IPTV recording

"3. IPTV probably will keep detailed logs of everything you watch. You will not have an option to record, and the archives provided by the provider can be changed or deletec at any time."

Hello, my name is FRAPS, and I'm your new friend!

Steven R

BskyB hack competitor bankruptcy

It’s a good job for BskyB that OFCOM are just toothless bureaucrats because instead of having to listen to their whining over this they would just take their license away due to their involvement in hacking their competitors, Dish Network and DirectTV in the US and if I remember correctly Ondigital and Virgin/NTL in the UK and a couple of EU TV providers.

DirecTV == News Corp == BSkyB

DirecTV and BSkyB are both owned by News Corp (As is SkyItalia and Foxtel as well as a few others round the world), BSkyB does NOT participate in the North American market.

DirecTV was accused of leaking information on DishNetworks security keys to PayTV hackers (Dish would prob have done the same if Videoguard was crackable...it isn't, which is why DishNetwork gets hacked the most...they use Nagravision (heading to V3 which I've heard is either cracked or close to being cracked)

Videoguard has lasted as long as it has due to good security based on military style algorithms for cipher strength (NDS who wrote it and maintain it have done work for the Israeli Defence Forces and are based in Israel, also they are rumoured to be good friends with mossad (and to be honest would you make it know you had cracked Videoguard if you thought Mossad would come after you?....I wouldnt :-| )

Also Videoguard is customised for each provider (ie BskyB, Foxtel etc) meaning if one provider falls the others are secure still, plus I get the sense NDS have several versions already prepared in case of a major break in the coding (remember the big BSkyB card swap to the Dark blue viewing cards a few years back? rumours are that someone was very close to breaking that implementation of Videoguard so BSkyB swapped out all the cards and did an over the air box update to change the encryption and strengthen it.

(I keep an eye on what is going on as I find cryptographic cracking interesting....and plus watching the virtual games of cat and mouse is quite amusing as well as reading about someone getting too cocky and getting nicked - i.e. selling sat boxes pre-programmed with encrytion cracks (Heck a lot of local newspapers carry ads for Free To Air Satellite Boxes (especially in Canada) a euphemism for a box that is either re-programmed before sale or can be, by either the store or the customer themselves, cops aint stupid but selling Free To Air boxes is legal, reprogramming them isnt)

Anon....as I really dont want a visit from Mossad, and I really like being able to walk / breathe