Some of the grumbling from SingTel in the past two days has been rather astonishing.

Right after being told to share its Barclays Premier League screenings with StarHub, it threatened to raise prices for football fans next season. It took things further yesterday, saying it might not be bidding for World Cup rights in 2014.

To which football fans should say “thank you”. Let someone else bid lower so viewers don’t have to pay so much.

Now, SingTel has a right to do what it wants in a free market. What’s strange is how it wants to convince football fans that it’s a victim of a refereeing error.

First, this so-called cross carriage rule has been in place since 2011. Just last year, StarHub won the Euro 2012 rights and screened the matches on SingTel’s mio TV without complaint. In fact, StarHub made a tidy sum from that, because SingTel viewers also paid it to watch the matches.

SingTel has much to gain by showing its matches on StarHub. It gets paid by more viewers, can charge more for sponsorship and it can even upsell SingTel services to them – right on a StarHub box.

Arguably, SingTel has benefited more from the cross carriage rule. Last year, it managed to grab hold of several important channels, such as National Geographic, when the exclusive deals with StarHub ended.

With that, SingTel’s mio TV looks more than just a box for football. By catering to the nature lover as well as the Manchester United fan, it has since signed up more subscribers, while StarHub faced its first sharp decline in the 20 years it ran a pay-TV service.

SingTel surely hasn’t helped its case with the wheeling and dealing that went on in the latest battle for TV rights. By trying to short-circuit the process, it left the Media Development Authority with little choice but to rule against it.

The real reason why SingTel is unhappy is because it cannot now lock in viewers and sell its more profitable mobile and broadband services to them. Those services are what have been “subsidising” costly TV rights, and even they are under pressure from slimmer margins.

SingTel is said to have paid about US$200 million for the rights, much less than the estimated US$400 million in the previous round.

Why can’t it lower prices? That’s possible, but only if it can make more money elsewhere. Don’t forget SingTel has had to pay millions too – S$150 million in the latest round – to upgrade its mobile network to cater to higher usage.

That’s what’s upsetting for the red team. In all honesty, it can’t be bothered with “guaranteeing” football fans some football action in Singapore, if that didn’t bring in the money.

SingTel’s CEO for its Digital Life unit, Allen Lew, had told Today: “I’ve got more important things to do in life than to make appeals and continually have discussions with regulators. The World Cup will happen, and if Singapore’s not part of it, good luck!”

Actually, SingTel’s the one who needs the luck. It will now have to consider how to recoup its investment in the BPL screenings. As for the World Cup, be very surprised if SingTel doesn’t cash in on the most-watched sporting event.

To be fair, what the red team is doing is not new. Previously, the folks in green had carried out the same aggressive lobbying, by placing ads in the national papers to pressure SingTel to share its screenings after it lost its bid.

Football fans should be familiar with such on-field antics. By arguing with the referee, each hopes to win a penalty, avoid a card or claim a dubious goal. Eventually, the match has to be settled one way or other.

For now, the ref seems to have made the right call. In the long run, viewers will be better off if pay-TV players don’t bid so highly for exclusive content and pass on the cost. That’s what the cross carriage rule is for.

For the football fan, the decision probably comes down to price. If it goes up a lot more than the S$34.90 a month now, as SingTel is hinting, maybe it’s time to tune off.

Voting with one’s wallet has been the oldest way to protest in a free market, and surely, football is not something one can’t live without on weekends.

Clarification: We had earlier said that SingTel had paid S$200 million for the Barclays Premier League rights for the next three seasons. A closer estimate, we’ve been told, is US$200 million (US dollars instead of Singapore dollars).

Singapore’s football fans will be relieved the ref has got a crucial decision right on Wednesday evening.

Ignoring SingTel’s pleas of innocence, the country’s media regulator clearly told the team in red to show the next three seasons of the Barclays Premier League on rival services, such as StarHub’s cable TV, starting in August.

In a landmark ruling, it essentially laid out how it will deal with pay-TV operators that have somehow found a loophole in its efforts to open up the market and rid it of ruinous exclusive content contracts that have killed consumer choice for years.

For football fans, the equation is simple. They will likely be watching live BPL matches on either SingTel’s mio TV or StarHub’s cable TV service, like they did with the Euro 2012 competition. In other words, no more having two set-top boxes to watch football and other programmes.

Crucially, the Media Development Authority’s (MDA’s) decision also means no going back to the dark days, when rival pay-TV operators kept bidding up prices for exclusive content in a badly distorted market.

The situation now is still in flux, to be sure. While StarHub promptly released a statement applauding the decision, a clearly upset SingTel said it will appeal – likely to the minister in charge – and “seek legal recourse if necessary”.

Despite its protestations, SingTel will have a lot of convincing to do.

Back in October 2012, when it surprised everyone by announcing it had signed a “non-exclusive” deal with the Football Association Premier League (FAPL) to show the next three seasons of live matches, it probably thought it had beaten the system.

On paper, this meant the door was open for StarHub to negotiate a separate deal. Soon, however, it became clear that things didn’t quite add up.

For months, the English rights owners apparently declined to speak with StarHub despite the deal with SingTel being non-exclusive. Then, StarHub complained to the regulator that its rival had in place a deal that came with a rebate – if the FAPL dealt with someone else, they would have to pay out a hefty fee to SingTel.

Though not in the same words, MDA now appears to have agreed with StarHub.

It said in a statement to the media that SingTel’s deal came with clauses which could have prevented or restricted the live broadcast feeds from being shown on another TV service.

This means SingTel is subject to new “cross carriage” rules that the MDA has just put in place to discourage operators from bidding up prices for exclusive content. SingTel has to show its exclusive football content on rival TV channels.

In the past, the wrong type of competition had pushed up costs and tied subscribers to one pay-TV operator, which the MDA is now against.

Perhaps SingTel has miscalculated the industry referee’s reaction this time. In truth, it left the regulator with little choice. The matter concerns more than just football rights.

If the MDA had allowed SingTel to do things its way after finding this “loophole” in the system, more content owners, who sell programmes for the hundreds of pay-TV channels in Singapore, may follow in the footsteps of the football rights owners and bypass MDA’s ruling in future.

That will be a big step backwards for the industry and its audience, just as things are looking up. An out-smarted, toothless regulator is what the MDA will be seen as.

Football fans will remember how all this unhealthy competition in football rights and exclusive content almost culminated in Singapore viewers not even being able to watch the World Cup on the telly in 2010.

Knowing the country’s operators would bid crazy amounts to acquire exclusive rights, the beautiful game’s rights owners had asked for astronomical amounts for TV rights. Only in the final days in the run-up to the World Cup was a deal struck to show the live matches here.

Fortunately, that appeared to be the much-needed wake-up call for the regulator. Up until then, the MDA had left things alone, to the detriment to pay-TV viewers as well as the industry’s development.

This time round, it has done right to safeguard consumer interest and make sure the market is not lopsided in favour of content owners, or an increasingly powerful SingTel keen to muscle its way into the market with its football rights.

This episode won’t be the last challenge for the MDA. In the hours after its decision, SingTel warned that non-mio TV viewers may have to pay “significantly higher monthly fees” to watch the live matches.

Is it trying to price out rivals? Will things drag on beyond August, when the new season kicks off? Many tough calls ahead for the referee, for sure. For now, it earns plaudits for standing firm.

Being a referee is never easy.

In the latest wrangle between SingTel and StarHub for English Premier League TV rights, the Media Development Authority (MDA) has found itself exactly in that tight spot.

But unlike a match where at least one set of fans will be pleased, a bad call by the officials here will have serious impact beyond just football rights. It will drastically drag back Singapore’s pay-TV industry, just as it is showing signs of opening up.

At the heart of the problem is how SingTel had negotiated for the right to broadcast live Premier League matches for the next three seasons.

It has done a “non exclusive” deal with the rights owners, which on paper should mean that rival StarHub should be able to sign a separate deal. In other words, football fans can watch matches on either set-top box.

Yet, that does not seem to be happening. Since October, when the “red” camp surprised everyone with its deal, StarHub has been unsuccessfully trying to talk to the Football Association Premier League.

It says it has been rebuffed, because the rights owners are in an “exclusive” negotiation period with SingTel. The “green” camp has gone further in recent weeks, alleging that SingTel has a condition in place where the premier league has to pay SingTel a “rebate” if it decided to sign on with another pay-TV operator.

SingTel has not addressed this “rebate” directly, citing the confidentiality of its agreement, but did argue that it had not prevented StarHub from signing a separate deal. The truth of that is what the authorities have to find out.

First, why was there an exclusive negotiation period when the deal was non-exclusive? Second, what exactly is the deal that SingTel has signed and does it come with any conditions to delay or prevent rivals from signing up?

Those questions are important because they set an example for future negotiations. If a pay-TV operator can find a way to sign a “non-exclusive” deal yet insert a clause in the contract to “penalise” or make it extremely hard for a rival to sign up, then it has found a loophole in the MDA’s rules.

These so-called cross-carriage rules, set up as Singapore almost missed out on watching the last World Cup, mean that a pay-TV operator has to show its exclusive programmes on a rival’s set-top box.

That was what happened for Euro 2012, when StarHub got the rights for the live matches and showed them on SingTel’s mio TV service. Separately, when channels such as National Geographic stopped being exclusive on StarHub, SingTel went in and grabbed the rights for its own TV lineup.

Sadly, that may have been a false dawn for viewers hoping for more common channels on either set-top box. The wheeling and dealing that is happening for the English Premier League rights now could signal a return to the dark days.

SingTel will feel that it has the momentum now, six years after it entered the fray to challenge StarHub’s cable TV service. It had 398,000 pay-TV subscribers at the end of 2012, while StarHub had 536,000, or 9,000 fewer than a year ago, in the first decline since beginning operations 20 years ago.

But you can be sure StarHub won’t be sitting idle. It might hit back by tying up other content providers in a “non exclusive” way, like how SingTel has done with the football rights.

Maybe this will be for Wimbledon. Or, perhaps for non-sports programmes. Either way, if StarHub and SingTel start playing the kind of game they used to, the same problems return: the bidding up of content prices and costs being passed on to viewers. Back to square one.

For the authorities, the way out of the situation is to make sure that everything is always done above board. They have set the rules, but the rules have to be updated if they are found wanting.

Here’s an example. Several years ago, when that mega-million-dollar fibre optic network was still on the drawing board, the Infocomm Development Authority proposed a new ruling that any other separate, private network built by anyone else (hint: SingTel) would also have to play by the same rules.

The reason? So that SingTel could not keep the same dominant position, even if it decided to build a separate national fibre network on its own. SingTel eventually joined the national project.

The same kind of tough rule-making may be necessary from MDA this time. If there is any unfair advantage that SingTel has got with its non-exclusive deal, the regulator has to flag it and remedy the situation.

How can MDA change a commercial deal? No, it cannot, but it can deem the deal an exclusive deal if it looks like and smells like one. That will be a signal to other content owners not to look for loopholes to bypass the rules.

Conversely, if SingTel’s deal is fine, MDA should rule in SingTel’s favour and basically tell StarHub to just pay up for the rights. What the referee cannot do is wash its hands of the situation, or delay things until they are too late to be changed.

That’s telling the industry it’s taking one step forward, two steps back.

SingTel has been told to pay an unprecedented S$180,000 fine for problems in its TV service that cut off the last dramatic minutes of last season’s Barclays Premier League for about a third of its pay-TV customers.

Some 115,000 households had missed out on the few extraordinary minutes on May 13, 2012, when two goals for Manchester City in their last game clinched the title in one of the most thrilling endings to a season.

The latest penalty, meted out to SingTel subsidiary SingNet, will do little to dispel questions on how resilient Singapore telecom operators’ networks are, after several high profile outages in TV as well as cellphone services.

In the past year, government regulators have handed out fines of hundreds of thousands of dollars, while also regularly ticking off the three telcos for the problems caused.

Less than five months ago, SingTel had incurred the ire of both the infocomm and media regulators. Problems with its network caused a disruption to its home phone and TV services, which attracted a total of S$380,000 in fines.

In the latest case, the problem was down to the “higher level of channel switching activity” by subscribers watching the live matches, according to the Media Development Authority (MDA). This led to a congested network that brought numerous problems for viewers, it revealed on Thursday.

Some found their screen freezing, while others suffered from blurred images on their TV until the matches had ended at past midnight. The issue affected those in Yishun, Choa Chu Kang, Clementi, Bukit Timah, Toa Payoh, Marine Parade, Punggol and Pasir Ris.

Since then, SingTel had offered subscription rebates to angry customers that cost it S$5 million.

Live football matches in the Barclays Premier League will continue to be shown on SingTel’s mio TV in the next three seasons, after the current exclusive broadcaster said this evening that it had won the TV rights for Singapore again.

Whether StarHub viewers will get to watch the matches on their cable set-top boxes, however, is a big question mark now, despite earlier efforts by the government regulator to force pay-TV operators to share their exclusive content with rivals.

SingTel has won non-exclusive rights to the 380 live matches from the next season starting in August 2013. This means it does not have to show the matches on StarHub’s TV channels.

That would have been the case if the content was exclusive, thanks to the cross carriage rules that the Media Development Authority had put in place to prevent pay-TV players bidding up prices for exclusive content.

After the Euro 2012 matches were shown on both SingTel and StarHub in June, football fans here have expected the same sharing of content for the next three seasons of the English League. But the arrangement looks to be different now.

Technically, StarHub is open to get the Barclays Premier League rights and show the matches on its cable TV channels too. Yet, that hinges on what price the FA Premier League in Britain will ask from StarHub.

If SingTel had paid a high price, it is unlikely the FA PL will give StarHub a discount. If StarHub can’t pay, then StarHub viewers don’t get to watch the football on their set-top boxes.

Should that scenario play out, it would indeed be bad news for football fans. The most-desired content on pay-TV will remain exclusive to one pay-TV operator and viewers will still need to get two set-top boxes to watch the most popular programmes.

At the moment, SingTel has not announced any prices for watching the upcoming seasons of the English league.

In a statement this evening, StarHub said it would only acquire the rights to the matches “if the price is right”.

(updated with StarHub comments)

When SingTel’s mio TV website said this weekend that “it’s all here”, it wasn’t an empty boast.

Its pay-TV subscribers can now sign up for National Geographic, Star World and a range of other educational and entertainment channels that were once the exclusive property of cable rival StarHub.

Five years after the pay-TV market opened up in Singapore, SingTel finally got its hands on the cherished channels through a deal with Fox International Channels, which had previously struck only exclusive deals with StarHub.

For football fans, it means they no longer need two set-top boxes to watch football on SingTel’s mio TV box while switching over to StarHub to view National Geographic programmes. Indeed, all couch potatoes in Singapore should welcome the news that there would no longer be so many exclusive deals to tie them down to one operator.

When the Fox channels start being available on SingTel’s mio TV set top boxes in October, they will help roll back years of ruinous competition for exclusive content that has resulted in higher prices and inconvenience for consumers in Singapore.

SingTel’s deal is possible largely because of tougher laws that the government regulator pushed through in recent years. These so-called “cross carriage” rules mean that an operator’s pay-TV content has to be shown on a rival’s set-top box as long as there is demand for it.

This has given the pay-TV market a long-overdue shake-up. It means there is less incentive to bid crazy amounts of money for exclusive programmes to lock in subscribers.

Sure, there are limitations. A broadcaster can still bid for exclusive rights and get paid by a rival operator’s subscribers, but it no longer can lock in consumers by making them buy channels they don’t want to watch.

The 40 new channels acquired by SingTel now boosts its number of channels to 111. Among the new packages, there is one for 36 channels for S$26.90 a month. The good news is SingTel will does not charge extra for HD programmes. On StarHub, it costs S$8 for each group of HD programmes.

To be fair, the incumbent, which has been operating in Singapore since 1991, has a bigger lineup of channels. Despite losing the rights to broadcast the Barclays Premier League in 2009, it had not suffered a big loss in customer base.

That’s because it has not been sitting idle. Just this week, it said it is streaming as many as 23 channels on the Net, in a bid to draw tech-savvy users who are not interested in scheduled programming.

For couch potatoes, these changes are a sign of long-overdue competition.

The biggest test for both SingTel and StarHub will probably be when the bidding begins for the next three seasons of Premier League rights. Both will go in the bid knowing that even if they lose, they can still keep their customers as long as their other programmes are great and their service is reliable and convenient to use.

That means a breakdown, like in the last minutes of the last season in May, would be catastrophic for SingTel if it happened again. Viewers can switch sides almost as fast as they switch mobile operators.

The day is still far away when the most popular programmes are all available on both operators so you choose based on the niche programmes on offer or on other factors like customer service. Also, for some reason, SingTel is still allowed to make users sign up for its phone or fibre service before they can view its mio TV channels.

Yet, all things considered, things are not as bad as before. Two years ago, the unhealthy competition here meant that the operators – and indeed the country – was subject to any price that content providers fancied. Viewers here were seen as always willing to pay.

Hopefully, operators here have seen the light and will refrain from the type of ruinous exclusive deals where they pass on unnecessary costs to customers. Similarly, the content industry, which has complained bitterly about the Singapore government’s stance, will see the light too – more customers in this little red dot is ultimately a good thing.

Here’s a contest that is actually a little meaningful and also has some rather attractive prizes for Singapore’s young online surfers.

How would you like to travel to Google’s headquarters at Mountain View, California or win some brand new Android phones? What you need to do is create a video that brings up issues to do with cyber wellness and stand out against the many dozens other entries.

Put together by Google and the Media Development Authority (MDA), the contest is open to youths between 13 and 19 years old.

The grand prize of a trip to Google in the United States is an all-expenses-paid one consisting of four days, three nights. The team that finishes as the first runner up will get Android phones for each member of the group.

Submissions are open from now until September 30. Judges from Google and MDA will review the entries and pick the winners by October 16.

Check out the details here.

But instead of being the one box to rule them all, the Singapore government’s idea of a common, standardised set-top box has now come to nought, despite earlier plans to unveil it this year. The real reason: it was just impractical.

This set-top box project, dubbed Next-Generation Interactive Multimedia, Applications and Services (Nims), was started in 2009, according to The Straits Times.

And last May, when the government asked for proposals for the box, SingTel, StarHub and M1 came forward. But none of the bids were awarded because none of them were “likely to achieve the desired outcomes”, said the Infocomm Development Authority to The Straits Times today.

Did anyone tell them that a common set-top box won’t work? For sure. We did too, in a commentary piece on the issue in 2009, as did some pay-TV and telecom experts.

For starters, Singapore is too small a market to produce a cheap set-top box of its own. Unlike the more common StarHub- or SingTel-branded set-top boxes that are made by the likes of Cisco, this new Singapore box would probably have to be customised. That means expensive.

If the hardware ends up as an expensive upfront cost of providing a pay-TV service, guess who pays for it through expensive monthly subscriptions? Yes, consumers.

But back in 2009, the government was getting heavy flak for fostering the wrong type of competition in a distorted pay-TV market. SingTel had just won the bid for three years of Barclays Premier League coverage and many football fans suddenly found that they had to get a second mio TV box to catch the live action.

The government’s immediate answer? Let’s consider a common box, where couch potatoes can tune in to both StarHub and SingTel. The intentions were good, but the thinking, flawed.

Fortunately, since then, the Media Development Authority (MDA) had done a lot more to sort out the real reason why the market had become distorted – exclusive content.

With new “cross carriage” rules in place, certain types of “qualified content” will be carried by more than one pay-TV operator. The UEFA Euro 2012 next month is going to be the first time such exclusive content is shown on both StarHub and SingTel. For consumers, it means no longer any need for two set-top boxes.

It also means there is no longer a need to have this common set-top box that had been talked up. An expensive piece of equipment, it would have weighed down on all operators and their subscribers, considering pay-TV is a much lower-margin business than, say, broadband or mobile roaming services. And don’t even say that the government has to pay for it, because not all taxpayers watch that much TV.

There’s another reason why the common box, and indeed any set-top box, might be heading for the junk heap in the future – Internet TVs. Today, you can already watch snippets of BBC’s news reports streamed over the Internet straight to your TV. There’s also Facebook, YouTube and just about any content you enjoy on your tablet or smartphone, only on the big screen.

The technology is new but it is coming. In the United States, people have been logging on to video-on-demand services and watching movies at low, low prices of just a few bucks a month. What’s to stop these so-called over-the-top (OTT) services that bypass traditional pay-TV operators from reaching the homes of fibre broadband users here?

Nothing, except that content is controlled by owners still too happy to deliver their movies, drama series and documentaries through traditional pay-TV operators and their set-top boxes. But even these folks are having a rethink about using the Net for delivering their content.

Thus it’s a good thing that Singapore’s indulgence of a common set-top box is over. It’s really a fantasy piece of equipment that would not have done much to make the market more competitive and which would have shown a regulatory zeal that exceeded practical considerations.

Couch potatoes in Singapore will find it easier to switch pay-TV operators come March 2012, when new rules unveiled today kick in to prevent operators from locking in users with long-term or punitive subscription plans.

The media authorities said today that operators would no longer be allowed to lock in consumers with subscription contracts longer than two years.

While they still have to pay for terminating a subscription early, this payment will be based on the length of time left on the contract, on a month by month basis, and subject to the discounts they received at sign-up.

Currently, users often end up paying the full amount for terminating a subscription, which varies in the hundreds of dollars, even if they are in the final month of the contract.

Though the new rules revealed by the Media Development Authority (MDA) will not encourage viewers to switch overnight, they will find it much easier to do so next year, when it becomes clearer which pay-TV operator, or operators, will be showing live Barclays Premier League football on the telly.

Rights to the hottest TV content here go up for bidding again next year and the two biggest operators – SingTel and StarHub – could end up both broadcasting the matches should a content sharing deal be struck, like the one for the World Cup last year.

With less onerous contracts tying them down, viewers will be much freer to switch to any one operator, no matter which one wins the rights to the live football screenings.

Certainly, that seems to be the goal for the MDA, which said today that pay-TV viewership has grown from 490,000 in December 2006 to more than 857,000 today.

Consumers already enjoy the same rights when it comes to mobile or broadband contracts, thanks to similar rules pushed through separately by the infocomm authorities in March 2010.

The new rules for pay-TV will spell things out even more clearly for telcos, since they often bundle pay-TV services along with mobile, broadband and home telephone services in what are termed quadruple-play packages.

SingTel and StarHub are the two main pay-TV players in Singapore, while M1 also sells a limited package of programmes as part of its broadband offering.

Until now, home owners paid S$110 a year for a TV licence while car owners paid S$27 a year for tuning in to FM radio on the go. With this change, users would save about S$120 million in such fees a year, revealed Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam today.

He told Parliament that the licence fees were losing their relevance. Many users now watch TV and listen to radio on the Internet, bypassing the traditional channels, he also pointed out.

The licence fees had been justified in the past as necessary to fund public broadcasting programmes made by free-to-air broadcaster Mediacorp as well as other TV programmes supported by the Media Development Authority. The government regulator collected S$132.5 million of licence fees in 2009.

However, over the years, many users have asked if public funds should be used to prop up programmes made by Mediacorp, a private company. They have also questioned if the amount collected was more than what was needed to fund public programmes.

It seems the authorities have finally got the point. Under the new measures, those who have already paid up their licence fees would get a refund from the government by April this year. More details are available here.

Budget 2011 for the Singapore government is being closely watched as it is expected to include incentives meant to sweeten the ground for an election this year. Some of these include cash grants for small and medium enterprises and help for lower-income families to own public housing.