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.

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(credit: Markus Unger, Creative Commons)

Up in the middle of the night to watch a Champions League match, some SingTel subscribers must have been rubbing their eyes in disbelief when they found themselves cut off from the live broadcasts this season.

They will have to pay S$10 more a month, the pay-TV operator later clarified, because the cost of sports programming has risen and it could no longer bundle the Champions League matches with the Barclays Premier League shows for free.

Considering how football broadcast rights have cost more everywhere, that could hardly be surprising.

What’s worrying, though, is that SingTel may be starting to feel the pinch of paying millions of dollars in its previous costly bid three years ago – and transfering that cost to viewers. 
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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.

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It’s turning out to be a busy week in front of the telly for Singapore’s couch potatoes, as National Day draws near on August 9.

While StarHub is giving viewers free access to almost all its channels this week, rival pay-TV operator SingTel is offering its on-demand movies for just S$1 each from August 8 to 12. Among the 47 titles on offer are Hollywood blockbusters and Asian, Bollywood and Malay favourites, said the mio TV operator on Saturday.  …

The way couch potatoes pay for and view their Hollywood movies and other TV content is set for a big change this year, as a new wave of smart TV apps start offering on-demand video services from SingTel and StarHub that don’t require users to subscribe to a monthly pay-TV service.

The new apps running on Samsung’s 2011 and 2012 TVs are possibly the first concrete step in Singapore to bring compelling content to so-called connected or smart TVs, which use an Internet connection to offer services and apps much like a PC or tablet would.  …

Pay-TV challenger SingTel came up with a pretty interesting proposition today: How would you like to watch the latest episodes of Lost, Prison Break and other hit US drama series just 24 hours after they are screened over there?

It said it has signed a deal with three major US studios – Disney-ABC, 20th Century Fox and Warner-Bros – to bring these shows to its mio TV service as soon as a day after they are shown in the States.

Why is this good news?
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