The great TV turn-off?

Faster broadband means that watching TV on your computer screen is becoming a real – and cheaper – option for viewers. Does this spell trouble for Sky and UPC, asks Conor Pope

WHEN SKY Television screened the final episode of Lostat 5am on an early summer morning, it was the clearest indication yet that the world of television has changed forever.

The spectre of illegal downloads was haunting Sky's top executives and they knew that once the final episode was screened in the US, thousands of its potential viewers would be scrabbling around online in search of illegal downloads. Rather than simply surrendering to the world's thousands of digital pirates, it turned the last Lostinto 'event TV' and co-ordinated a simultaneous broadcast with ABC. Broadcasters in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Israel, Turkey and Canada also simultaneously broadcast the finale.

Last Wednesday, the BBC started broadcasting the fourth series of Mad Men– on BBC4, its digital channel – four months ahead of schedule in an effort to reduce the level of illegal downloading of the show.

RTÉ has no plans to bring forward the screening of the series, but with 60 per cent of the State’s 1.6m homes now broadband enabled, the big wigs in Montrose and out in Ballymount know they need to come up with plans to either combat or embrace the internet or else they will be in big trouble.

The stations have, to their credit, not buried their heads in the sand. The RTÉ Player in particular allows viewers access much of the station’s home-grown and imported programmes online for 30 days after they are first screened and it has won plaudits from viewers.

But it is a different story when it comes to the satellite and cable TV providers, Sky and UPC. With a dramatic increase in broadband speeds just around the corner and the growth of online providers, coupled with the increase in the number of legal downloading services for films and TV programmes from giants such as iTunes (not to mention the massive growth in the peer-to-peer illegal downloading) people may soon be asking just what Sky and UPC are for.

Watching the telly can be a costly business in Ireland. If you sign up to a top-notch Sky package with all the sports and movie channels, it will cost €76 a month. Add to this the cost of a TV licence – €160 – and the annual TV bill tops €1,000. Sky’s most basic service, meanwhile, attracts a monthly charge of €23 or €276, close to €500 when the licence fee is factored in.

A reader from Santry has none of these costs. He has no television but watches a lot of television programmes and while he does not subscribe to either UPC or Sky, he has pretty much all his viewing needs catered for – for nothing. “I download specific programmes from the web. It can be fully legal, a grey area or illegal,” he says. “The Channel Four site has a player which is freely and legally available. So too is the RTÉ Player. I watch the BBC which is not normally available to Irish viewers through a site called uknova.com.” He says this site has a strict usage policy and prohibits any programmes which are available to purchase being uploaded or downloaded. He does not watch a lot of television in any event so this system suits him.

Marie from Dublin 7 on the other hand watches a whole lot of TV and while she has an account with UPC, it is the most basic package. She needs nothing more elaborate because much of what she watches is downloaded from the web and most of it is done illegally.

“I download a lot of US TV shows – mostly things that air here three or four months later. I just find it really frustrating having to wait, and as I am quite active online with Twitter and Facebook and so on, you see a lot of teaser trailers and spoilers,” she says.

"At the moment I'm watching Mad Men, True Bloodand Hung– which actually just started on 3e, but is still 10 episodes behind the US. The other two haven't been shown here, at least not the current series, yet. I also downloaded the entire six series of The Sopranos. It took about a week but I didn't want to buy the box set because I knew I'd only watch it once."

But if we download these programmes – particularly ones of the quality of The Sopranos, arguably the best programme of its generation, won't we deprive the production companies of revenue and inevitably the next generation of programmes will not get made?

Marie is not swayed by this argument. “I feel guilty downloading music when I know a lot of artists are struggling to make a living but have you seen the Emmy red carpet lately?”

She says US programme makers don’t make their money from licensing in Ireland. “They make extra money from selling to Ireland but by the time it reaches my computer, they’ve made the money from the 15 minutes of ads US TV channels tack onto each show.”

There are thousands of people like her in Ireland happily downloading TV programmes and loading them onto multimedia players, so it would hardly be a surprise if the traditional providers in Sky and UPC were not watching developments with some degree of anxiety.

A UPC source told Pricewatch that while the company is monitoring how technology is developing – ironically as its broadband arm rolls out faster broadband speeds, the risk of online piracy and live streaming increases – it is not overly concerned that it could become obsolete as a provider in the near future.

Its research shows that the vast majority of the viewing public prefer their TV to be delivered in a linear format – that is to say they watch what is on when the programmers decide to put it on.

A growing number of people are using digital video recorders provided by both UPC and Sky to record programmes and watch them when they choose, while a smaller number are using online players.

“There are enough legal ways to watch television and most honest people are happy to pay 70 cent per day for all the TV programmes. Apart from the fact that the illegal downloaders may be in breach of their broadband terms and conditions, they also have to examine their own consciences,” we were told.

Our two downloaders are unlikely to have too many sleepless nights and neither is overly concerned they will be brought to heel by the authorities. “It’s never occurred to me actually,” Marie says. “I’m more concerned that my friends and colleagues will discover that I watch American TV programmes aimed at pre-teens, to be honest.”