Media Guardian Setanta set to challenge Sky for slice of the action
Am I the only one to be getting completely fed up of down right misinformation from the press about Freeview? Take this little quote from the Media Guardian.
Setanta, the Irish sports broadcaster that recently emerged as a serious rival to BSkyB for Premiership football rights, announced yesterday that it had secured a berth on the digital terrestrial service Freeview for the first time.
A nice attention grabbing way to start your article. Then the very next paragraph hits you with:
The company has sealed a deal with Top Up TV, the add-on pay-TV element to Freeview founded by the former Sky executives David Chance and Ian West, to use its capacity to show games on a pay-per-view basis.
Right. So in other words, it's not on Freeview.
Let's make this abundantly clear. if it's on Top Up TV, then it's not free. If it's not free then it's not on Freeview. Perhaps we should reiterate this again, just to make sure the old Media Guardian can fully understand. Setanta WILL NOT be on Freeview
So if Setanta is not going to be on Freeview, why on earth is the Guardian telling us that it will be?
It's completely misleading and it's not the first time the Media Guardian has uttered such rubbish.
Just two months ago the website shouted out the headline Freeview to kick off sports package. The story? Eurosport was going to digital terrestrial via, yes you guessed it, subscription based Top Up TV. You know the one. It's the one that's not free.
Such complete rubbish uttered by our national press can only do one thing - cause customer confusion. There's already enough of that in the market place with most of the population believing that to have a satellite dish means you have to pay a subscription (it doesn't) without hoards of mislead consumers wandering off to Dixons and getting annoyed because a certain national newspaper has led them to believe that for a £40 set top box, they can get Eurosport, UKTV Gold and whatever, for no monthly cost.
We're already in a tricky stage with analogue switch off - the Media Guardian seems intent to confuse and mislead, making things worse. All this from one of the nation's leading media publications.
Thankfully someone does get it right. The headline on Broadcast's article about the Setanta story is truthful and accurate. Setanta joins Top-Up TV it says.
