Steve: You've conflated the two seperate parts of the ruling. In particular (2) only applies to showing in a pub, it does NOT apply to domestic consumers.

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The BBC wants to stop paying Sky ten million pounds a year for
Wednesday 12 October 2011 7:28PM

Andrew W: It is probably worth pointing out that the £10m is ONLY for to operate their EPG, the BBC hires transponders directly from SES , which should be the expensive part of this deal.

It is also worth noting that the entire set up and running costs of EPG system was less than £2m with the ongoing costs almost unmeasurable.

Sky is basically rinsing money from BBC and ITV plc as a punishment for having lots of regional television.

A "normal" computer programmer would implement in an efficient way, and not treat the BBC One and ITV One as if they were over 50 .

Sky have created a system that basically is faulty in a way that costs the BBC £10m a year, more for ITV1 and about £5m for Channels 4 and 5.

Sky having to say that their costs are "legitimate" draws close attention to how they are nothing of the kind (as we will see).

I found the comment about the "national grid" quite comical. That company is highly regulated and very specifically does not provide electricity to anyone other than the domestic and commercial sales companies.

If the National Grid got 60% of its electricity from the PSBs I am sure it would not expect the PSBs to pay for it.

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The BBC wants to stop paying Sky ten million pounds a year for
Wednesday 12 October 2011 9:56PM

David Pinfold: The BBC broadcasts the television and radio as unencrypted on several transponders:

Astra 2D at 28.2°E - LyngSat

These as leased to the BBC directly from SES .

and Sky Subscriber Services Ltd provide a service to the viewer to provide automatic allocations of satellite transponders to what are called "logical channel numbers" so that the viewer can choose 101 for the BBC One variant for wherever they happen to live.

Sky do this by having a viewing in the box. It has a serial number and Sky link the postcode to where the card was sent to one of the 70-odd regions shown in the map in the article (it's the genuine map from a Sky internal document).

Freesat do the same, but by asking the viewer to enter their postcode when they set up the Freesat box.

If, for the sake of argument, the BBC, ITV, and Channel 5 refused to pay Sky to provide their channels - as ITV did for a time, there would be gaps in the EPG, but the viewer could follow an "add channels" procedure to view the channels.

However, Sky would be in a bit of a bind because they would be unable to handle 10 million homes calling their call centre for instructions, and the Broadcasting Act lists specifically that the channels removed (for the sake of argument) as "must provide".

To be honest, I suspect that Sky should probably back down on this one, because I suspect that if parliament takes proper notice they will see a company that makes billions of pounds in profit from two not-for profit broadcasters (BBC, Channel 4) and might start using the word "monopoly" in an unfavourable way.

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The BBC wants to stop paying Sky ten million pounds a year for
Wednesday 12 October 2011 9:56PM

More here - Sky could soften cuts to BBC 'by waiving transmission fees' | Media | guardian.co.uk .

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The BBC wants to stop paying Sky ten million pounds a year for
Wednesday 12 October 2011 10:02PM

And here - BBC - About the BBC: Retransmission fees - to pay or not to pay? .

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The BBC wants to stop paying Sky ten million pounds a year for
Wednesday 12 October 2011 10:03PM

ian from notts: Here is a diagram showing how much viewing share the "pay " get -