Friday, May 10, 2013

Free Sports at the same time as YouTube decides to charge for viewing and Idea #118 is Nationalism

The world of TV subscription does not stand still as BT announces free sport  YouTube is set to start charging a monthly subscription  for some 'channels'.

And in a battle where it looks like BT might be trying to steal its competitors lunch..  

There's a fairly well known maxim in business that if you give something away it devalues it (not to forget also that there's no such thing as a free lunch), if you're thinking that BT's gone mad in paying over the odds for Sports rights and almost immediately providing it to their subscribers for exactly  nothing you might like to stop and have a bit of a think.

Sky have been capturing BTs' broadband customers of late with deals that almost throw in the telephony and broadband so it seems almost logical that BT have taken a similar view and in order to retain the Telephony customers they've decided to throw in a load of TV sports content for 'free'.

Strangely at almost exactly the same time a well known provider of videos of amusing cats has decided to start extracting a charge for what they distribute- let's look in a couple of months to see how this pans out.

Idea 118 is Nationalism

Crofton notes that Nationalism might be characterised as a more emotional than rational reflex in that it calls for the peoples of the nation state to stand together against the 'other' in a 'romantic' allegiance to what is many examples a  somewhat fictional creation of  a  historic 'quasi-sacred' entity like England for example.
A number of nation states in Europe have been created from what were semi autonomous states ( Italy and Germany being prime examples).
Nationalism is often associated with racism and the reactionary right.

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