Singapore will be running a S$5 million, year-long trial of 3D TV from today, just months after the first 3D TVs started going on sale here at retail stores.

The trial will be run by broadcasters SingTel, StarHub and Mediacorp, said Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts, Lui Tuck Yew, at the opening of the CommunicAsia show this morning.

No, it is not SingTel and StarHub you should be angry with. Nor should you fret that the S$66 package – at about S$1-a-match – to watch the World Cup on the telly is four times more than what you had paid in 2006.

Rather, the best reason to switch off from next month’s football extravaganza is because you, the Singapore football fan, have been taken for a ride.

And unless you vote with your remote, prices for sports programming and other pay-TV offerings in future will go further north, after these World Cup deals announced last Friday.

Singapore football fans are finally getting all the live matches for World Cup 2010, after the country almost ended up as one of a handful that could not reach a deal with FIFA to broadcast the world’s biggest football show.

In the end, StarHub and StarHub are said to have ironed out a deal that will cost them about US$15 million (S$21 million), which is half the S$40 million asking price that had been reported earlier.

From April 30, all you couch potatoes will be punching in different numbers on your StarHub remote to access the channels you have grown so accustomed to over the more than 10 years that cable TV has been on the telly in Singapore.

Following other pay-TV operators like Astro in Malaysia, StarHub is changing all its channel numbers into three-digit numbers, themed along the genres they belong to.

So, your favourite Football Channel would be changed from Ch 27 to Ch 222 (Ch 200+ is for sports), while HBO would change from Ch60 to Ch601 (Ch 600+ for movies), for example.

After all these years, and facing the wrath of football fans deprived of live World Cup matches, Singapore’s media regulators finally decided a fortnight ago to rule out exclusive pay-TV content henceforth and bring an end to one of their most costly mistakes of late.

As Acting Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts (MICA), Lui Tuck Yew, told Parliament two weeks ago, the authorities will now force pay-TV operators – mainly StarHub and SingTel now – to share their content.

This brings an end to costly bidding exercises that have made it expensive for football fans to watch exclusive programmes like live Barclays Premier League (BPL) matches.

While a positive move, the question remains if this has come too late, and if the authorities, mainly the Media Development Authority (MDA), an agency within MICA, had allowed such a distorted market to develop over the years.

Talk about mobile TV brings me back many years – maybe as many as five years – when the first 3G phones came to town in all their bulky and overheated glory. Who can forget how pixelated and jerky the mobile TV or videos were when they were demo’d on these early 3G wonders?

Thus, seeing StarHub launch its new mobile TV offering today reminds me of how far we have come in mobile phone technology.

It’s no wonder StarHub’s new CEO Neil Montefiore, facing the media for the first time in his new role, kicked off the launch today by stressing how much things have changed since those lousy mobile TV programmes of old.

Phones today, he notes, are faster and smarter. Networks too, are keeping up with bandwidth over the air. And finally, the content is appreciated now  – young audiences are no longer averse to watching news or sports on the small screen.

What do StarHub have on offer then? Essentially 24 channels – including CNN, Disney and TVBJ – will be viewable on the small screen for just $1 a day. If you like what you see and want to view it everyday, there’s a $25-a-month subscription that you can sign up for.

Tired of pesky relatives asking when you are getting married or having kids during Chinese New Year? Turn on the karaoke at home, with a new on-demand service that StarHub is delivering soon over its cable set-top box.

For just S$4.50 a day, you can sing to your heart’s content – or get your relatives to stop discussing your personal life – while they are gathered at your place over CNY. If you like it so much, you can also sign up for a S$10-a-month subscription and sing all you want at home.

The new service, called KaraOK!, is not StarHub’s first foray into home karaoke. But this version coming online on January 18 will offer on-demand access to an eventual 30,000 music videos in various languages.

Not sure if this is another ploy by StarHub to keep viewers, as it readies to lose its Barclays Premier League (BPL) progammes next season, but you can now watch all StarHub cable TV channels on your set-top box.

Apparently, this “unlocking” of the channels – which includes premium ones like HBO – started late last night and is continuing now into Sunday morning.

We are still not sure why there are free programmes. Whether this is an unwitting Christmas present from StarHub or a smart ploy to get users to see its other channels, we still don’t know.

But if you have always wanted to see what you are missing on the channels you never paid for, power up your StarHub set-top box and fire away on the remote. Enjoy it while it lasts!

Often a tolerant lot, Singaporeans can accept a lot of things – slow broadband speeds, lack of full number portability (until last year) and even not being able to choose their government (in some wards).

But one thing they can’t stand, joked a journalist pal of mine, is to have their weekend football fix taken away. Should that happen, he declared, there’d be a “RIOOOOT!”

That perhaps explains why the Singapore media authorities did a stunning U-turn yesterday, saying that they might just  make SingTel share its fresh-in-the-bag Barclays Premier League rights with StarHub come next year.

Acting Minister for Information, Communication and the Arts Lui Tuck Yew, even went so far as to say the government was considering an universal pay-TV set-top box for Singapore homes, so that people don’t have to get two set-top boxes to watch BPL on SingTel and other popular channels that StarHub carries.

Maybe it’s the rumblings on the ground.

Maybe it’s StarHub playing the public card of late – appealing to the public, and more likely, its pay-TV subscibers, in full-page newspaper ads to group together and “share their views” on SingTel’s EPL (English Premier League) win for the next three seasons.

Whatever the reason, the red camp has today come up with prices to tune in to live EPL matches from next year, and it has kept to its promise of not asking for more cash.