Seeing only the dark side of the free economy

The worst fears of football fans who subscribe to the country’s biggest cable-TV operator edged closer to reality yesterday. But the stand-off between TrueVisions and GMM Grammy over the Euro 2012 broadcast raises a major question for everyone. 

A free market, people are always told, benefits the consumers. That doesn’t seem to be the case where this controversy is concerned.

TrueVisions customers have lost out. For several days now they seen only a blank screen instead of football matches, and yesterday’s announcements by both TrueVisions and GMM Grammy confirmed that the deadlock continues. The chances are getting higher and higher that the blank screen will remain until the end of the popular soccer tournament. Cable TV customers have been wondering why they can’t watch the live broadcasts, especially since they’d been made to believe – when they subscribed to TrueVisions – that they would get normal, uninterrupted access to the free TV stations as well.

GMM Grammy customers aren’t in a much better position. Buyers of the firm’s set-top router box will be embarrassed if it turns out everyone is able to watch the broadcasts, box or no box. They’d been led to believe that buying the box would give them the exclusive right.

Customers of the two media giants already feel betrayed – or they might soon. They’ve been put into this situation because of fierce competition in the pay-to-view TV business. The market is getting freer, with newcomers like GMM Grammy able to challenge even well-established TrueVisions. Big investments have been made to hook existing and new customers. On the surface, viewers should gain from the battle between commercial competitors. A closer look, however, shows that the competitors are operating at the expense of consumers.

Cable-TV customers are given more choices, but the new choices are costly. Subscription fees have steadily increased. The more channels that viewers want, the more they have to pay.

The National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission tried to step in last week. The commissioners admitted that the problem was complicated. They advised TrueVisions to honour its contracts with subscribers, but were obviously unsure about the exclusivity of the Euro 2012 broadcasts. Talks were held between the business rivals but no conclusion was reached.

This kind of showdown is not the first of its kind and will not be the last. The Olympics are coming in a month or so, and the World Cup will return in 2014. European football leagues are becoming more popular in Asia and the fight for “exclusivity” is getting fiercer with each passing day. The business mentality that led to the TrueVisions-GMM Grammy stand-off in the first place was the simple idea that “my customers” must benefit and “your customers” will lose out. In the business world there’s nothing wrong with such a concept. However, the general thinking about the free market needs adjusting. It’s time to admit that competition doesn’t necessarily benefit the consumers.

We are now able to watch far more content on TV than in the past. But access or non-access to content has also created social classes as well. Thai political ideologists have been making quite a lot of noise over the privileges that some are enjoying while others are not. This is despite the fact that real social parity is happening elsewhere on a massive scale. The commercialisation of access to special TV content has been so great that many people are thankful for hackers who manage to steal that content and sell it on cheaply.

To be politically correct, the hackers should be condemned. The problem with media commercialisation, however, is that what is politically correct is getting increasingly harder to define.