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.

This means some lucky trial users from the industry will be among the first here to don their stereoscopic 3D glasses to view 3D content made in Singapore.

We’re not sure how many couch potatotes will excited by it, but this year’s National Day Parade will be recorded in 3D and expected to be viewable in the more realistic viewing mode. Great news if you’re a fan of the yearly extravaganza.

More seriously, it’s a good thing Singapore is spending dollars to develop content, talent and media services for 3D programmes, since other countries, such as Australia and Britain, have already broadcast 3D programmes like football matches, in the past 12 months.

Details are still sketchy for the Singapore trial now, and it is unclear if this industry-based move will bring 3D content to actual home users, like the nationwide high-definition TV (HDTV) trial of four years ago, which enabled viewers to watch the last World Cup in HD.

For the new 3D TV trial, broadcasters “may choose to extend the trial to include consumers,” said an MDA press release.

What we do know is that TV makers such as Samsung, LG and Sony will be really happy that sales of 3D TV sets have got a nice push here.

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.

When prices go up, there’s usually a good reason. For the World Cup 2010 broadcasts, why Singapore viewers are paying more is because FIFA believes folks here have always paid so much and thus can continue to pay more than what the rest of the world does.

Put simply, we are suckers eager to be ripped off.

Just look across the border to Malaysia, where the free-to-air RTM TV station is broadcasting a good number of the matches on the telly. Why not look at Italy, too, where there’s one match shown on free-to-air TV a day?

Okay, you say these countries are not as rich as Singapore. What about New Zealand, which is getting 22 matches on free-to-air, or Australia, where the matches are shown on free-on-air TV on SBS?

There is no other way to see it. Football fans in Singapore, in their desire for live football, have driven prices up to a point where rights owners can hold out for one of the highest per-capita premiums in the world.

In the end, Singapore broadcasters are said to have paid S$21 million for World Cup 2010 rights – more than four times the estimated S$5 million that StarHub coughed up in 2006.

What ends up now is a no-win situation for all but FIFA and its Asian representative for the World Cup 2010, Football Media Services (FMS).

Don’t hate StarHub and SingTel. Be grateful they did not rush in to pay the S$40 million FIFA had initially asked for. But now, with just weeks away to market their broadcasts to advertisers and viewers, how much of the costs can they recoup? I’d be worried as a shareholder.

And couch potatoes, long angered by the ever increasing prices demanded by sports rights owners, are boycotting the World Cup. To rally football fans here, a Facebook page started just days ago now has more than 3,000 supporters.

This sorry episode has laid bare the problems entrenched in Singapore’s pay-TV market for years. While prices spiralled out of control, the biggest loser has been the football fan.

And that is where change has to start from, for the sake of being able to watch football on the telly at reasonable prices in future. Say no to World Cup prices that have been manipulated by FIFA, and which have come about under the watch of previously hands-off government regulators.

Remind the Media Development Authority (MDA) it has a duty to Singapore viewers, by preventing the pay-TV market from being distorted, at their expense.

In Britain, where the cost of watching football on the telly has long been an issue, the government regulator Ofcom finally made key changes to the market this year to level the playing field.

In recent months, it has forced BSkyB to cut the price that it wholesales its premium content to rivals by more than 20 per cent. This translates directly to discounts for viewers, including football fans following the Barclays Premier League.

Sure enough, powerful broadcasters and their content partners will challenge Ofcom’s rulings. But the move is a sign that people, and finally, government regulators who represent them, have had enough of pay TV prices set by greed, not real cost.

This has to be the model for MDA, as it fulfills its role as a regulator acting in the interest of Singapore viewers. The banning of exclusive pay-TV content in March, which finally put an end to costly bidding exercises, is a start.

Sadly, by that stage, content owners have long got used to Singapore paying high prices, and FIFA was not ready to change in an instant for World Cup 2010.

Ultimately, change has to come from the viewer. And that is why I am saying no to the World Cup on my telly at home. There’s no other way if I want prices to be more reasonable in future.

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.

Should football fans rejoice? Let’s do the sums.

For the 2006 World Cup, StarHub is said to have paid US$5 million for the rights for the month-long event. Its asking price to subscribers then: S$15 for early-bird sign-ons and S$25 subsequently.

This time round, would viewers have to pay more? It looks certain, though StarHub will probably not heap the entire 3x increase in its costs directly on viewers.

By most measures, S$60 to S$100 to watch 64 matches in a World Cup where Singapore is not even part of is a bit rich for most fans, bar of course, the very rich ones.

That’s also considering that the final few matches – the semi-finals, third-place play-off and final – should be shown on Mediacorp’s free-to-air channels, if FIFA lives up to its promise of bringing football to the masses.

Should this be hailed as a triumph for content sharing in Singapore? I’d say a qualified “yes”.

If StarHub and SingTel had gone in with competitive bids, instead of a joint one, then surely, we’d be looking at even higher fees to be paid to Football Media Services (FMS), the Asian representatives of FIFA for World Cup 2010.

Singapore telcos were being asked to pay more – at the highest dollar per capita – simply because the earlier SingTel-StarHub bidding war for Barclays Premier League rights had yielded such fat profits for the rights owners.

The Singapore market suddenly looked like a succulent chunk of meat to content owners – they believed they could ask for crazy prices because of the distorted and unhealthy type of competition going on here.

Now, none of this would have happened had the pay-TV market been regulated with a more enlightened approach. Up until last month, the authorities had simply shrugged shoulders and said the market would correct itself.

Well, it had not. Indeed, it had become worse, until urgent action from the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts to reverse course and start ruling out exclusive pay-TV deals here.

So there is good news for football fans and indeed pay-TV users in Singapore.

This lower World Cup bid, though still high by many measures, has at least shown that the Singapore market, and by extension, its viewers, are not absolute suckers for content owners to rip off.

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.

StarHub says this will let users easily locate their more than 100 channels, to which they added four more at today’s announcement and demo.

But the real reason for doing this, I’d imagine, is to prepare for a market without exclusive pay-TV deals. Remember the long-overdue ruling against exclusive pay-TV content?

It means StarHub and its chief rival SingTel can no longer keep the good stuff – be it Discovery or HBO or Barclays Premier League – to themselves, after the current contracts expire in the next one to three years.

That means something of a free-for-all, especially when it comes to StarHub’s large stable of currently exclusive programmes. I can imagine SingTel would like HBO or Discovery or even CBeeBees, which StarHub wrested from the “red” operator last year, in the mio TV lineup.

With a big number of channels tied up for now, StarHub must be thinking which ones SingTel will attempt to grab a share of when their contracts end. It could also try to grab some from SingTel as well.

How will a change in its channel numbers help StarHub? The new system could very well prepare for new channels that are incoming – possibly ones which StarHub would like from SingTel’s current lineup.

The most attractive would be the video-on-demand programmes straight from the United States, which mio TV customers enjoy, as a perceptive journo pal of mine told me today at the StarHub event.

StarHub’s head of content, Kathleen Syron, says it has readied an entire 900 series of numbers to cater to channels showing “must-carry” programmes from its rival. You can imagine these could easily include channels it wants from SingTel too.

Of course, the StarHub folks were mum when asked which channels they were eyeing, or how many they expect to bring over or share with SingTel. They say they do not expect any change in channels this year (no surprise, given that the contracts usually tie up for three years, and the ruling only applies to contracts signed from this month).

Interestingly, StarHub chief operating officer Tan Tong Hai said there is a lot more to be discussed with the authorities, when it comes to the new ruling to kick out exclusive TV deals.

You get a sense that it is still being tweaked as we go. But I, for one, can’t wait for the day when all the barn doors are open, and exclusive pay-TV deals are consigned to the past.

Think about it – change comes not just to the pay-TV landscape, but also the market for this whole triple-play bundle of services that also includes mobile and broadband.

Without exclusive content to anchor a triple-play offering, operators will have to work harder to package their deals. And that’s a good thing for consumers.

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.

For more than seven years, the MDA had simply washed its hands of the market, choosing in 2006, and later in 2007, to say that there were no problems with the market, even when SingTel and Starhub were paying hundreds of millions of Singapore dollars for exclusive BPL content, making the country one of the costliest markets in terms of dollars per capita.

The final straw came in the past two months, when it was revealed that Fifa, the rights holders for the World Cup 2010 in June, had demanded a ridiculously high fee that StarHub and SingTel simply refused to pay.

To think it had taken the farce of Singapore being one of a handful of countries to miss out on live World Cup matches to get the Government to act.

And for two market rivals – SingTel and StarHub – to put aside differences to table a joint bid for the World Cup, which was rejected by a greedy Fifa keen to exploit Singapore’s willingness to pay for exclusive content, to move this impossibly bad situation for Singapore’s pay-TV viewers.

Might things have been different had the authorities acted all these years, instead of telling people nothing can be done, and that rights holders will just “leave Singapore” if the authorities had forced the sharing of content?

Well, the answer is clear now. That official line, held for years by MDA, is now officially rubbish, after Minister Lui finally admitted two weeks ago that the current situation is a “market failure that is evident”. Yet, as he delivered the changes, he must have also wondered if they have come too late.

Firstly, if he had ruled on this just months before the current BPL bids were accepted, SingTel would not have paid excessive amounts for the upcoming three seasons. Users would not have to worry about getting a second set-top box to watch different programmes on the telly.

Secondly, the ruling, which only applies now, may or may not be enough to bring the World Cup to Singapore. Fifa is well prepared to play hardball and stick to its asking price, which has been said to be above a stratospheric S$40 million.

To this, I say football fans will just have to treat this entire episode as a harsh lesson in pay-TV economics.

That the authorities have so dramatically reacted to a potential loss of World Cup rights will not bring instant results when it comes to the screening of content that is in hot demand.

Sports rights owners, say, the Football Association Premier League (FA PL) in Britain, have always played hardball when it comes to exclusive rights. And they might well say “forget Singapore” if the authorities here insist on sharing content.

To which, I say, you, the football fan, just have to start voting with your wallet. So far, you have said no to the damaging exclusive content deals that have made everything expensive and inconvenient for pay-TV viewers. And finally, the authorities have acted in response.

Should content owners, in the form of Fifa or FA PL or anyone else, try to force the issue in future, couch potatoes would just have to learn to say no, offering a big thumbs-down to bad deals.

I’m prepared not to watch the World Cup. If I have to watch the final, I might just drive to Malaysia to watch it. Football fans here, I imagine, would find this tough at first, but realise that it’s the only way forward in the long term.

From here, let’s see where this new ruling brings us.

If done right, with the next-gen broadband network up in Singapore from this year, the new content-sharing rules could mean that content is piped through one network, over one set-top box, and viewers will be able to choose – at their convenience – what pay-TV programmes they want, at a time they choose.

That will be progress indeed.

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.

The service is available on a wide variety of platforms, from Blackberrys to Androids to eventually the iPhone and Symbian phones. The StarHub TV on Mobile service has been tested on 16 handsets – including upcoming models like the Motorola Milestone. And yes, Nexus One users can tune in, even though it’s not on the list of phones because it is not officially sold by StarHub.

To tune in, you’ll have to use your phone to download an app from the StarHub Gee portal. This gives you an excellent view of not just a TV programme but also the electronic programming guide (EPG), which is pretty nifty.

The best experience for me, from trying out the different phones on show today, is arguably on the HTC HD2. The fact that it has a massive 4.3-inch screen helps, of course. But more importantly, the interface is top-notch. A semi-transparent interface pops up on-screen if you want to change the volume, for example. And the touch-screen lets you slide along the different channels to tune in.

Kudos go to the SPB folks, the developers that StarHub hired to develop the mobile TV app. I’m told a team of them flew down to Singapore to handle the job – and the effort shows.

The only problem I can detect is a few seconds’ lag when changing channels. That’s essentially for buffering the content, since it is streamed over the 3.5G network. It’s something I can live with.

The bigger question is whether this demanding service will take a toll on a cellphone network that is already taking on an increasing amount of searches on the Net and refreshes of Facebook pages. StarHub says it can handle the load – we’d take their word for it for now.

Another question is whether there will be just as big an audience when live Premier League football goes out of the StarHub lineup of programmes. Its executives say that news, not sports, was the biggest draw on its previous mobile TV offering, which attracted 100,000 viewers (both samplers and paid users) in December 2009.

But you wonder if this service – like its KaraOk! service launched just last week – was another pro-active attempt at keeping its Hubbing subscribers as SingTel starts trumping up its Barclays Premier League (BPL) advantage come June.

As a consumer, I am not complaining.

Some folks might think it’s bad news that SingTel won the BPL rights for the next three seasons. That’s half the story. Come August, I’m going to sign up for SingTel mio TV at the same rate I used to pay StarHub for current BPL matches.

I’m going to keep my StarHub TV subscription for the bedroom – at a lower cost without the sports programmes, of course. And finally, I’m going to sign up for $1-a-day access to programmes on TVBJ, for example. This way, my wife will be happy on her small and big screens, while I enjoy my football in the living room.

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.

I say eventual, because only 5,000 videos will be available at launch, with 100 added every week after.

Unveiling the service today, StarHub execs were keen to show off its ease of use – you use the same remote controller for  your StarHub Hubstation or Hubstation HD box to select and play the tracks. And unlike at a karaoke lounge, you can pause the song, go to the toilet and come back to sing again.

The only catch is you will need one of these interactive Hubstation set-top boxes – StarHub will have an offer to swap out your old digital set-top box for a Hubstation.

You’ll also need a mic, of course, to make a nuisance of yourself and kill your neighbour’s  afternoon nap.

But all in, this looks like a smart way to keep the karaoke fans among us glued to a high-end StarHub box, as competition intensifies in the coming months with SingTel offering live Barclays Premier League (BPL) on its rival mio TV service.

So far, there’s nothing here that’s similar to what StarHub offers, certainly not at this price. The Xbox Lips game, for example, lets you download mainly English tracks, not Mandarin or Cantonese songs that home-bound crooners here crave.

I’m not sure StarHub makes much money here, but this karaoke service sure looks like a good ploy to keep people subscribing to its TV channels, which you will use your set-top box for most of the time anyway.

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.

This, of course, comes after intense lobbying by StarHub, which just last month lost the exclusive BPL rights for the upcoming three seasons to SingTel.

Through ads in the newspapers, the “green” telco has been stoking up the fires among its unhappy subscribers, who suddenly realise they have to keep a StarHub set-top box to watch their favourite National Geographic documentaries yet sign up for a separate SingTel mio TV box to get their football fix.

But I don’t blame StarHub, or indeed SingTel, which is unfairly facing the unhappiness of football fans who see it as the party responsible for raising the bidding price for the exclusive content (SingTel has not raised prices for football channels, despite reportedly paying more for the rights).

The people I do want to question are the government media regulators: what on earth are you doing?

Weeks after the exclusive rights are bid for and awarded to SingTel, they are attempting a retro-active ruling on how things should be. This is like telling contestants to re-run a 100-metre race after the winner has been declared – because the umpires have changed their minds on the rules.

Don’t get me wrong. As a consumer, I’m for a single set-top box for watching everything on TV. I’m for content-sharing, like the pay-TV operators in Australia have agreed, to avoid pushing up exclusive content prices in future.

But what is happening now reeks of indecisiveness. For the authorities, which have done nothing against exclusive pay-TV content all these years since SingTel entered the market, to suddenly declare a change of rules is akin to flip-flop decision-making.

The MDA (Media Development Authority), an agency within MICA, has for years known the problem of pay-TV exclusivity.

In surveys it conducted and in plain public feedback, it was told about the unhealthy competition that existed in Singapore’s small market. It did nothing in the previous round of spiralling BPL bids in late 2006. Again, it did nothing in the last round in late September.

This despite knowing that telecom operators – SingTel and StarHub in Singapore – were using their profits in the “fatter” broadband and mobile markets to fund costly bids in the hardly-profitable pay-TV content market, so that they could sell a “triple play” bundle of service.

This,  in itself, already showed how distorted the market was, and was reason enough for the regulators to step in.

But no, the MDA insisted it would leave things to the free market, however distorted it was. It said it would let subscribers choose with their wallets, based on their ability to swallow the increasing costs of getting their football fix.

And so, after all the complaining and unhappiness from the public, SingTel went ahead and won the bid, and tried its best to grab some subscribers with a new, low-cost football deal for next year – the first time prices had not increased after a renewal of rights.

Yet, now, after all that is said and done, the authorities are doing a dramatic U-turn.

I am a StarHub Hubbing customer – my bills go up to $400 a month for broadband, mobile and TV – but I am feeling a deep sense of injustice for SingTel and indeed a worrying sense of uncertainty for any other telco here.

Why should the rules be changed only after StarHub loses its most important channels? Were the authorities listening when SingTel cajoled, complained and finally cursed as it entered the pay-TV market in 2007, having failed to get MDA to rule out exclusive channels in a newly-liberalised market?

Were they listening when market watchers told them how unrealistic it was to regulate an increasingly converged industry – broadband, mobile and pay-TV – with two regulators (MDA for pay-TV and the Infocomm Development Authority for broadband and mobile)?

If the authorities are to change their minds so easily, how should market players plan their investments in future? Would any foreign telco be confident in investing here in such a climate?

If SingTel had known that it would not have exclusive rights to the BPL channels – after StarHub had enjoyed them for years – would it have sunk in all that money to bid in the first place? How do their executives answer to shareholders now?

The truth is, if the regulators had listened to the market and to the customers all along, they would not find themselves in the current dilemma.

Now, what they can – and must – do if they are to go ahead with this content-sharing deal, is to apply the rule evenly. Don’t let StarHub keep all its exclusive programmes, which range from CBeebees to NatGeo. Let SingTel subscribers have the popular channels too.

And this universal set-top box: unless Singapore gets the Next-gen National Broadband Network (NGNBN) up fast enough to connect it to, forget about this fantasy piece of equipment.

StarHub uses a cable plant to send its TV signals to homes; SingTel uses a totally different ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line) broadband network – you might just get two separate set-top boxes more cheaply than to specially make one for the Singapore market.

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.

In fact, it has come up with a pretty sweet deal, which has left me looking for a catch to. For S$23 a month, you get to tune in to the live matches on the broadband TV network. Add S$2 more, and you get ESPN and StarSports thrown in. Subscribe for a year, and the Champions League and Europa League are in for free as well.

Rental fees for the set-top box are included. And you don’t have to subscribe to a basic tier of services, which was what I was expecting should StarHub have won.

The only downside I can think of now is the $10-a-month SingTel phone line rental fee, for people like me who use a free phone line from StarHub and have junked SingTel’s long ago. You’ll need a phone line to hook up to a SingTel ADSL modem to hook up a mio TV set-top box.

Even so, SingTel Singapore CEO Allen Lew told Techgoondu this afternoon that there would be:

1) bundle packages for those to spend above a yet undisclosed amount on SingTel broadband and mobile services
2) no need to subscribe to a phone line should your home be wired up to the next-gen broadband network reaching homes next year.

So, it seems like “relatively” good news for consumers. For folks like me, the relative “low cost” of EPL opens up the possibility of keeping my StarHub set-top box for my wife in the bedroom, while getting SingTel for EPL in the living room.

If I keep my StarHub basic package – keeping my favourite National Geographic and Discovery channels – I pay, say, about S$25 to S$30 a month. Add another, say, S$25 on a SingTel EPL package, and I still only spend S$48 to S$53 a month. That’s lower than the S$60+ a month I spend now, which, to be fair, includes stuff like HD channels as well.

So, the biggest problem now is having to squeeze that SingTel HD box and, unfortunately, an ugly ADSL modem into my new TV cabinet.

Asked about sharing EPL content with StarHub, Mr Lew ruled it out. He also said he had not been directly approached by StarHub to do so.

Like you, I’m also scratching my head a little, wondering how SingTel is pulling this off without losing money and angering shareholders.

After all, it is said to have paid more than the US$150 million StarHub paid the last time round for exclusive EPL rights – and StarHub barely makes money from its pay-TV operations.

Still, there may be a few reasons why SingTel is doing this:

1) For the long haul
It looks very likely that it wants to win over users – and content owners – for the long haul. It’s showing its deep pockets here, and it wants to slowly persuade StarHub Hubbing users like me to switch service-by-service – starting from pay-TV – to the red camp.

Don’t forget StarHub didn’t build up its triple-play base overnight. Thus, SingTel maybe being patient in building its own triple-play base, as we approach the launch of a next-gen broadband network that will make things very competitive.

2) To get the volume
Allen Lew says SingTel is confident of pulling in people who were put off by having to subscribe to StarHub’s basic pay-TV package just to watch the EPL. Fair enough, though I question if this is a sizeable crowd. SingTel says it will get more than the estimated 250,000 to 300,000 that StarHub has for its sports programmes – we shall see.

3) More multimedia content
According to Mr Lew, SingTel wants to make use of its EPL content for more ‘Web-based multimedia’ in future. He is tight-lipped about what this is exactly, though you only have to look at InSing, for example, to see where SingTel is trying to go with content in future.

Some of this “repurposed” EPL content, says Mr Lew, will be pay-content, while some will be free. We’ll have to see what the content is. StarHub, by the way, gives EPL subscribers free access on the mobile and PC, so I don’t expect SingTel to make people pay for these.

To be honest, I really don’t see how SingTel can make money by simply asking people to pay S$23 a month. I don’t care as a consumer, of course. But as the EPL battle draws to a close this time round, it’d be interesting to find out how the telecom market shapes up with this turn of events.

For consumers, the most important thing out of this unpopular battle paid through subscribers’ pockets, is the price plans – SingTel has unveiled a nice surprise thus far.