Netherlands' SBS seeking nominal yearly fees to pay for HD broadcasts
by Darren Murph 
posted Jan 15th 2009 at 8:19AM
No one ever said the spoils of high-definition came free, and no one knows that better than Dutch commercial broadcaster SBS. The outfit is reportedly holding its hand out and covering its face while asking for payments between €2 to €3 per year, per subscriber, from cable operators in order to pay for HD broadcasts. That's according to Eric Eljon, MD of SBS Productions, who hopes to begin high-def simulcasts within a few months should a deal be reached. In The Netherlands today, there is no license fee at all, with the public broadcasting system paid for out of the general budget; additionally, there's currently no way to recoup the massive increase in cost when switching to HD via advertising alone. C'mon, cable carriers / consumers -- just think of the HD starved children.[Thanks, Wouter]
Filed under: Industry, Regulatory, OTA, New content
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
DirtyDutch @ Jan 15th 2009 10:33AM
I am from the Netherlands, but i do pay a subscription fee to watch analog cable. Its 15 euros. To watch digital cable i have to pay for a seperate package. To watch digital cable HDTV theres is an additional package. So if SBS decides that they also need money than i think i pay about 40euros total to watch their programming in HD.
MaT @ Jan 15th 2009 1:58PM
Belgium here :) My carrier (telenet) charges €12.73 ($16.64) for analog tv. If you want HD you need to pay €6 ($7.84)/month extra for a standard HD settop-box and €8 ($10.54)/month for a settopbox with harddisk for recording. Then you can recieve 6 HD channels wich in my case aren't even interresting (1 is in another language, 2 are just boring local stuff, 1 kidz channel, 1 boring culture channel and national geographic wich is ok but that exciting). There are 2 extra HD channels that are good (sports and movie channel) but they come for another €5 ($6.54) extra. About the settopboxes: they are pure proprietary crap (slow and not stable firmware) full of vendor locks and you have no other choise of hardware.
So in short: the reason why we are behind in the HD race is probably that it's to expensive for to few channels.