jonathan.rawle.org

Many people have blamed both sides in the dispute between BSkyB and Virgin Media, but over the last week or two it appears that Sky have launched a vendetta against their competitor.

First, to fill in the background: the two companies couldn’t agree on the price that Virgin pays Sky to show Sky’s “basic channels” (Sky One, Sky Three, Sky Sports News and Sky Travel). This resulted in the channels being withdrawn from Virgin’s cable TV service when the previous agreement expired at the end of February.

Now, Virgin Media customers who had signed up so that they could watch Sky One will understandably be angry. But to the outside observer, it’s surely Sky who are to blame for the situation. I know Virgin are not offering a reduction in price as a result, but they have said that customers wishing to leave won’t be held to any minimum contractual period, which seems fair enough.

It’s hard to know exactly what happened during the price negotiations. However, Virgin claim that Sky was asking for double the amount they had received previously. One other point that isn’t highlighted so much in reports is that, as part of the deal, Sky were insisting that customers on Virgin’s cheapest “Medium” TV package should no longer be able to receive their channels anyway. So any Virgin customers on that package would have lost out whether Virgin had agreed to the deal or not, simply because Sky didn’t want them to receive the channels.

Having forced Virgin to give up the Sky channels, BSkyB have launched a campaign of negative advertising and publicity. For example:

• Adverts on Classic FM telling Virgin Media customers they can no longer watch Sky One, and telling them that if they switch to Sky satellite TV, they will be able to catch up on Twenty Four, Lost and The Simpsons in a special “catch up” weekend.
• Newspaper adverts comparing TV, phone and internet prices from the two companies. While the price given for Sky is a special bundled package, they quote the total prices for individual services from Virgin, making it seem more expensive

This week, Virgin Media announced their new 20Mb/s broadband service, a product that has been in the pipeline for some time, and which had nothing to do with the Sky dispute. They described the new product in a press release. While they do say they their competitors can’t match the service, there is no mention of Sky (or any other competitor), and anyone who understands broadband will realise that Virgin’s technology is superior as they have a purpose-built fibre-optic network, rather than squeezing broadband down copper phonelines using ADSL. But Sky responded straight away, issuing a statement accusing Virgin of pushing up prices in the broadband market, and making dubious claims about their own service. Anyone who doubted which side is most “behaving like children” should take note that one company’s press release promoted its own product, while the other criticised the rival’s.

As if all that wasn’t bad enough, it seems Sky News even launched a subtle smear campaign against the Virgin name. I’ll add the caveat that I don’t see Sky News myself, but a poster on the BBC website claimed that in the aftermath of the Cumbria train crash, Sky’s report was heavily biased towards blaming Virgin Trains for the accident, at a time when the rest of the media were concentrating on a faulty track as the likely cause.

It was time someone stood up to Rupert Murdoch. He controls both one of the main broadcast platforms (satellite TV), the channels, and even many of the programs such as Twenty Four and The Simpsons (which are distributed by 20th Century Fox). His competitors are also his customers, and as has been seen, he can use his position to name his own price for his channels (which have the programs and movies people want to watch because he owns those too) safe in the knowledge that if they refuse to pay up, he can remove channels then poach the customers by urging them to switch to his platform. If Virgin hadn’t stood up to Sky, next time around, the price could double again. I’m not even going to touch on Murdoch’s control over other parts of the media such as the newspapers.

Fortunately, not everything is quite going Sky’s way. As a result of pulling channels from Virgin, they have lost 10% of the audience for their basic channels, so advertisers have indicated they will ask for refunds. In a separate development, Sky had announced it plans to withdraw its channels from Freeview, the UK’s free-to-air digital terrestrial platform, and to broadcast pay-TV channels instead. This has angered the other Freeview shareholders such as the BBC and ITV, who have asked the regulator Ofcom to strip Sky of its share in Freeview. Sky is also under investigation by the Office of Fair Trading after it bought a 17.9% stake in ITV, in a move widely seen as intended to block Virgin from buying ITV. Let’s hope the tide will start to turn against Sky, but it’s going take a long time and many more battles before healthier competition can be introduced into the British TV market.

The eclipse of the moon was visible from many parts of the world, but luckily occurred at a relatively sociable hour of the evening in western Europe.

I didn’t have my tripod, so the sequence of photos above were taken with the camera hand-held, making it impossible to take a long exposure during totality. But at least the final frame gives an idea of the colour of the eclipsed moon.

Key times (in UTC) during the eclipse were as follows:

• Moon enters umbra: 2130
• Totality begins: 2244
• Totality ends: 2358
• Moon leave umbra: 0111

Source: BBC News.

Despite having heard the news of a fatal rail crash in Cumbria, I didn’t think twice about boarding a train this morning. In fact, it never occurred to me that I should think about it at all.

But now I see the sensationalist media have articles such as Crash is major blow for railways, with the front page of BBC News also carrying the lede “Trains on trial: How rail travel can recover from its first fatal crash in years”. So paradoxically, they are saying it’s a disaster for the railways as people will be too scared to take the train, while at the same time pointing out the truth: rail travel is extremely safe, to the extent that no-one has died on the railways for a long time.

If that wasn’t bad enough, I was incensed by a ridiculous comment on the BBC’s Have Your Say page:

It may be statistically less likely to be involved in train crash than a car crash but the fact of the matter is most train crashes are the result of a maintenance person not doing their job properly or a train driver being too tired. I don’t mind dying for my own negligence, but I’ll be damned if I’m to die for someone else’s. Call me old fashioned, but I avoid trains because I don’t like putting my life into the hands of train company’s employees. —Matt Marshall

Putting aside the fact that only one person has been killed in a rail accident in more than two years, compared to thousands of people who are killed in road accidents each year, let’s consider who is most likely to cause a road accident. If a car driver crashes into a ditch or a wall, it’s probably his own fault, although it could be a mechanical fault, faulty brakes, steering, etc. which could be down to negligence on the part of the manufacturer or mechanic. Other accidents will usually involve two vehicles, so statistically, it’s equally likely that a crash is going to be caused by another driver. In fact, if Mr Marshall is a reasonably competent driver, it’s far more likely any road accident he’s involved in will be down to someone else’s negligence – after all, there are a lot of bad drivers out there.

The last deaths in a rail accident in the UK were in November 2004, and on that occasion the crash was caused by a car that had been stopped on the track, apparently for the driver to commit suicide. The worst rail crash in recent years, the crash at Selby in 2001, was caused by a tired driver sure enough, but unlike the driver Mr Marshall imagines, the tired driver at Selby was a car driver, who lost control of his vehicle and stopped on the track, resulting in 10 deaths. (The guilty motorist, Gary Hart, was later jailed for five years.)

Returning to this week’s accident, while my consolations go to the victims and their families, I have to agree with what many of the emergency services and other commentators have said on seeing images of the crash scene: following a crash at 95 miles per hour, with carriages on their side, up in the air, or turned through 180 degrees, I’d feared the number of fatalities would have been far greater. But it appears that the design of the Pendolino train, with all its in-built safety features, meant the carriages remained intact, reducing the injuries sustained. In the past, I’ve heard criticisms of the Italian-designed Pendolino – that it is far too heavy and therefore inefficient – but following this crash, I shall certainly look on it in a new light. While we should of course be concerned that poor maintenance of the track could have caused such an accident, and insist that maintenance procedures are improved so that the likelihood of a crash are reduced, why must we consider this another “failure” of the railways? In fact, the performance of the Pendolino in a high-speed crash should be seen as a success, meaning some good decisions were taken in choosing replacement rolling stock. Nothing can ever reduce the risk of an accident to zero, as rail expert Christian Wolmar puts it:

[The Pendolinos] have a very high standard of resistance to accidents but one has to recognise that they go very fast and that nothing can prevent some damage happening when accidents happen at that speed.

It remains far safer to travel by train than by road. It is only the public’s lack of understanding of risk, and the coverage of rail accidents in the media, that cause people to think otherwise.

The news that BT is introducing a “penalty” for people who pay by cash rather than direct debit almost passed me by last week. Apparently, evil BT are going to punish pensioners and the needy, are pushing up charges by £4.50 with a new surcharge, or hiking charges by £4.50 per quarter for customers who pay by cash or cheque in a move that amounts to introducing stealth charges.

At present, BT gives customers who pay by direct debit a £1 discount per month. From May, they are reducing the cost of line rental for everyone by £1 per month, scrapping the direct debit discount and introducing a surcharge of £1.50 for people who do not pay by direct debit. The net increase for those who prefer to pay by cash is therefore 50 pence. The idea of having a different price for paying by cash is nothing new.

This just goes to show how the spin the media puts on an story can change people’s perception and make the matter seem much worse than it is. “BT increase prices by 50p” doesn’t have quite the impact as, “BT punish pensioners with £4.50 penalty.” The media’s reporting of the increase has no doubt done more to worry pensioners than the small print in BT’s pricing leaflet would have done.

As I understand it, people on BT’s Light User Scheme won’t have to pay the new charges for cash payment anyway. Anyone who spends enough on calls each month not to qualify as a light user clearly isn’t the sort of vulnerable person who is going to worry about a 50p per month increase.

While I do think the media is to blame for the way they have reported this story, it does have to be said that it’s a spectacular public relations blunder on the part of BT. Moving from a reward for paying by direct debit to a penalty for paying by cash is bound to result in negative press coverage. It makes me wonder if they have been warned about their current practice of advertising headline prices that already include a “discount” for paying by direct debit…

The fact that over a million people have now signed an online petition against the introduction of a road pricing scheme just goes to show how much the public hates this idea. Even if there has been a lot of encouragement in the press and the blogosphere for people to add their names, and even if some people have signed up more than once, there is nevertheless a lot of opposition to it out there.

With such a complex issue, it’s difficult to say exactly why people might object to a new policy. In the case of “pay as you drive” road tolls, I have seen postings urging people to sign the petition against “tracking”. In fact, the exact wording of the petition is, “We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Scrap the planned vehicle tracking and road pricing policy.” This is a reference to the fact that Global Positioning System (GPS) technology is likely to be used to pinpoint the location of a vehicle, so that the correct tariff for driving in the area at a particular time can be levied. Now of course, GPS itself does not track anyone. The satellites broadcast signals that can be used by a GPS receiver to pinpoint its location. No information is sent back to the satellites. It is not yet clear how the road pricing system would operate, but it is possible to think of arrangements where journey data would not need to be sent back to a central location. Anyone truly concerned about tracking should try to distance themselves from those who simply don’t want to pay to drive, as the latter group could overshadow an important civil liberties issue.

The stated aim of road pricing is to reduce congestion. At first, a sensible alternative to installing expensive GPS equipment in every vehicle would seem to be simply to increase fuel duty, while at the same time eliminating the tax disc, and providing annual “MOT” roadworthiness checks for free. That would encourage people to drive less, even if they already owned a car, as the cost of keeping a car unused would be reduced. However, while fuel duty means that both high usage and inefficient vehicles are taxed more heavily, it does not allow prices to be varied according to the time of day. If congestion is the issue, drivers need to be deterred at particular times of day: during the morning and evening “rush hours”.

So, would road pricing have much of an effect on congestion during the rush hour? I don’t believe it would. There is already a big incentive not to travel during the rush hour: namely, congestion! Who in their right mind would choose to sit in queues of traffic for nearly an hour, when they have the choice of cruising along in 15 minutes? On the trains, peak-rate fares already exist, yet the rush hour commuter trains are as packed as ever. People travel at certain times because they have to. If congestion at particular times of day is to be eliminated, we all need to rethink our daily routines. People drive to work; they take their children to school. Both work and school start at around 9am. Reducing congestion during peak times will require more flexible working arrangements – something that could be encouraged by the government.

The other reason that people won’t abandon their cars even if new taxes are introduced is that the alternative – public transport – is extremely poor. Londoners complain about their transport system, yet visitors to the city from other parts of the UK marvel at the regular, integrated bus and underground system. Anywhere else, you are likely to discover that the route is served by three buses a day, and that those are operated by three different companies who print separate timetables, and whose tickets are not valid on each other’s services.

There’s no doubt that something needs to be done to stop our roads becoming even more congested, and we haven’t even begun to consider the effect of cars on the environment. Road pricing may well have a role to play in the end. However, there are many steps that need to be taken before the public will ever begin to accept the idea. First, reassurances must be given that the system will not mean a record of everyone’s journeys are collected and stored by a central agency. Then, people must be given the opportunity to make their journeys in a way that avoids the high peak-time charges: by providing a world-class public transport system, and by initiating a change in society where the “9 to 5” culture disappears wherever possible. Without these measures, road charging will inevitably be seen by the petition-wielding public as nothing more than an attempt to impose yet another tax – and to keep tabs on what they are doing.