No Limits by Joanne Black

Author:Joanne Black
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2018-06-08T16:00:00+00:00

TVNZ had to make a strategic decision about whether to ignore Sky, join it or go head-to-head with it by starting its own pay TV network.

In Mounter, Heatley found another tough negotiator. However, Mounter understood pay TV and believed in its future when many others did not understand the concept and thought it would not last. TVNZ had to make a strategic decision about whether to ignore Sky, join it or go head-to-head with it by starting its own pay TV network. The first seemed impossible; the last unlikely. After all, the government’s ethos was to try to get out of using taxpayer money to pay for services where there was an option for private investors, using their own money, to instead carry the risk and provide the capital. By now Sky was close to going to air, subject to the frequencies becoming available. It had signed up most of the key content providers. TVNZ was already behind the game if it wanted to get into pay TV itself. It seems that from Mounter’s perspective it was better to join Sky than to fight it.

Over several weeks Mounter and Heatley negotiated a deal which included TVNZ, Sky’s biggest competitor, buying 25 per cent of Sky. Part of the deal was that Sky could now advertise on TVNZ, which the state-owned company had until then refused to allow. Mounter would join Sky’s board and a schedule of fees was agreed so that if Sky wanted to cover certain live events itself, it could use the outside broadcast vans owned by TVNZ. Mounter pushed hard for Heatley to agree that on some occasions the two companies would jointly buy rights to live events that they both wanted to show. Heatley refused. He reminded Mounter that the whole basis of pay TV was that subscribers got a better product earlier. They could not agree on how to deal with likely conflicts when both companies wanted the same content, so they signed a joint programme acquisition agreement that outlined general protocols but did not specify what was included or excluded. Rights, it seemed, would be won, lost or shared on a case-by-case basis. After Sky launched, the issue would quickly cause disharmony and recriminatory accusations between the two companies.

Mounter cautioned Heatley that pay TV was going to be more difficult than Heatley was already discovering it to be. It was also likely to require a lot more capital than Heatley was budgeting for, Mounter warned.

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