Normal Basic Cable Tv At A Normal European Price

NORMAL CABLE

Tell me why the basic cable service in this European (?) capital has (1) all channels in the one language except TG4, (2) has four channels exclusively in the basic for children (3) is so expensive for so few channels.

Most people in mainland Europe understand the word multi-channel to mean multi-lingual.
So why not Dublin?

In Bruxelles cable subscribers pay 123 euros for 39 multi-lingual channels, in Rotterdam they pay 130 euros for 37 multi-lingual channels whereas in Dublin customers pay 216 euros for 14 channels.......all in the cheapest basic and in one language plus the Irish language channel.

I am told that in the last century free to cable services French language TV5 was provided for all in Dublin, Galway and Waterford and also news bulletins in German, Spanish and Italian. The Dublin cable company wanted to cooperate with the government in celebrating the Irish presidency of the Union and so they removed the European mainland language news bulletins permanently in the same week as the Communications ministers from the 15 +10 were meeting to discuss television without frontiers.

Then someone told me to pay more to get one language channel and for this extra payment I would get more than a hundred more English language channels. This doesn't make sense as I only want one or two language channels and I don't watch all the fourteen channels in the basic so why would I be happy with a hundrd more. I only want what is normal in Latvia or Slovakia or Slovenia or Bruxelles.
Is it that all Irish people have told the cable company that they hate channels in 'funny' languages?

Yet friends tell me that TV5 and German tv are available in the basic service in Swords, Malahide and Maynooth and other towns in Ireland.

I am so confused and I thought when I moved here that I was no longer in the U.K. but I don't see any red telephone boxes or post boxes and most people seem to use the euro.............

PK - the king

Normal Cable - European cities carry so many different service languages because of the fact that there are only a few language exclusive channels for each country. Most of the channels are cheaply dubbed versions of american and english stuff - look at Antenne 2 or even TF1!!! The French basic package by some local Paris cable company had - TF1, Antenne 2, 3, TV5, EuroNews, EuroSport, some music channel in French, which turned into a late night porno channel and a few german channels. Because England has so many channels which are free to air due to massive advertising numbers, cable companies only give people english channels. Why would someone want to have space wasted carrying channels they don't watch due to language barriers? If you want foreign language channels, get 'em free on a satellite system.

icdg

Okay, there's 15 channels on NTL Dublin.

4 - The Irish terrestrial channels. There is a licence requirement to carry these.
4 - The UK terrestrials - the whole reason for the existance of cable in Ireland. Leave these out and you might as well go home...
2 - Sky One and Sky News. Extremely popular and basically must-haves for any cable company. If you don't believe me, cast back your mind to 1992 when both these channels were dropped from Cablelink because of a carrige fee dispute. Mass uproar and Cablelink promising to do anything to get the channels back. Eventually they were restored.

That's already more than half the channel space gone without any foriegn channels. And to carry a foreign channel, that only a handful of viewers might watch, you have to drop a English language channel that has thousands of viewers.

Drop Nickelodeon, and all the kids will be up in arms.
Drop MTV, and the teenagers get angry.

You see what a mindfield this is...

PK - the king

Ntl should remove MTV!!! Why would teenagers go mad? Nothing but crap on it anyway!!! Considering it's name is MUSIC television, it only seems to show any music in the early hours of the morning. :rolleyes:

as icdg said, there is no point removing channels which have thousands of viewers to replace channels which will have possibly a hundred viewers (if even 100).

Mossy Monk

dont they do that european channel in Dublin. in Waterford it is TVE, RAI Uno and Sat1 which change over every 8 hours or so

Originally posted by PK - the king
Ntl should remove MTV!!!

agreed!!!!! before work today i looked frantically for something to watch and that channel is nothing but repeats of programmes shown a million times before

Go Figure!

Originally posted by PK - the king
Ntl should remove MTV!!! Why would teenagers go mad? Nothing but crap on it anyway!!! Considering it's name is MUSIC television, it only seems to show any music in the early hours of the morning. :rolleyes:

Yeah they should get rid of MTV and make TMF 24 hours, and bring back the foreign news for those who want it. Having said that I have the digital package anyway so I am not that bothered because I already have TMF and TV5 24 hours a day.:)

PK - the king

Well, tbh, mtv doesn't really affect people much anymore - especially me. I got the €10 installation for sky and they're installing it in 5 weeks :mad: :eek: :dunno: I still can't understand the big delay. So I'm gonna go over to the satellite forum and discuss it...

Mossy Monk

Originally posted by cableguy
They dropped it for TMF.:dunno: :dunno:

strange, in waterford TMF comes on after Nick leaving the foreign channel a frequency for itself