Telecom New Zealand and Sky sign agreement

compost:
tdgeek: ---In the township of live/delayed professional sports coverage, there are only a handful of properties that aren't owned exclusively by Sky, so they effectively control pricing of this content. This kind of situation is one that many countries have sought to address.---

Ok, then the Freeview/TVNZ company needs to outbid Sky to obtain more properties. They can do that, and have done so in the past. Sky does not have content locked down. It bought the rights, as TVNZ can do...

Competition laws wouldn't exist if competitors could always buy their way into markets.

The whole point of cornering a market as Sky have done is to present a prohibitively high barrier to entry for other players. It would take a lot of money and time to build up sufficient content to be able to sell a package that is attractive to customers, during which time Sky would be using its cash reserves to raise bidding sky-high (N.P.I.) for key content, temporarily lowering its prices to increase the length of time it took for competitors to become profitable, and jacking prices up again when competitors have failed or pulled out of the market.

And here's another voice in support of regulation.

OMG

Its clear you do not want competition, you want artificial manipulation so that you can get Sky content for free, based upon the mistaken statement that Sky controls the market. Are you proposing to allow a business, any business to build itself up, then strip it? I really do not know where to start. Lets not stop at Sky, lets regulate everything??? Or in other words remove competition. An interesting theory is to remove Sky from the market, kick them out, which I assume is within your scope of this topic. Will we then have free access to the current Sky content? No, as someone has to pay for it. So, how much will we pay some other entity for the TV subscription? You will no doubt say "much less then we pay now"? To get good content you need to pay for it, if you run a socialistic business model, you still have to buy the content, its not el gratis.

It just seems to me that some seem to feel if its too dear, lets regulate so I get it cheaper as some nasty corporate is ripping us off. Power, fuel, food, housing, why cant we regulate all of this so its all cheap? And I am being serious, not flippant as that is the way that some seem to feel is the way to operate an economy. Imagine if regulation is an intergral part of the NZ economy, you can forget innovation, you can forget risk. You will end up with a complement of base services.

Back to Sky, if Sky has done so well, clearly there is room for two in the market, as despite what you say, Sky does not control the content it has, it bought it. Get another network to buy better content, and compete with Sky.