by wilswong on Wed Mar 26, 2008 1:33 pm
Just to share something that our dear scholar friends at MICA and IDA has failed to realise and comprehend what is happening now.
The market is now not served properly. It is fragmented and instead of savings, it has introduced more redundancy.
Australia has a similar problem couple of years back when their two main cable tv providers got exclusive rights to certain programs, forcing australian consumers to subscribe to 2 services just to catch their favourite programs. Unlike our dear CASE, the Consumer Rights watchdog in Australia made a lot of noise and lobby for the changes to be made.
So what happened now is that there's a mechanism now that all cable TV providers are to provide all programs to all the customers and exclusive rights are a thing of the past. The only thing that can differentiate them is their service quality.
So, Singapore touted as a market that is high tech is now laden with market manipulations that actually create unnecessary wastage and hinder mass adoption of HD broadcast.
Now in my living room are 2 set top box...one from mediacorp and the other from Starhub...if I subscribe to MIO, I would have THREE set top boxes.
That's stupid and really wasting my electricity so much so I permanently switch off my mediacorp box since their HD content is not really 'true' HD because of the lack of signal bandwidth.
Because there is a lack of HD set top box adoption that does not convince service providers to pump money into HD programs. MIO TV got lotsa program but none of which interest me a lot same goes for Starhub. it is a vicious cycle that IDA and MICA are just standing there are do nothing...don't rock the boat...they say. Sooner or later when people are better than us like those in HK and Korea, we would not have a boat to compete with.
By the way, Singapore HD is not True 1080 HD signals...so don't waste money buying Full HD screens.
