i don't exactly like this shift... for one, it happened during the course of 2008 french open, which was being shown in balls (channel 34) a channel missing from global destiny. the coverage was very good, primetime, no need to stay up late to catch the big matches... the last matches are shown at around 1 am, so i could've definitely enjoyed seeing rafa demolish the opposition.
also, global destiny has a lot lesser channels than sky cable. no star sports, espn, star world, star movies, cinemax, anc, national geographic, among many others. ok, global destiny has discovery travel and living, living asia channel, al-jazzeera news, fox news... but it also has pointless channels (my own consumption, ehem!) like mgm movie channel, turner classic movies and zone reality. this cable provider only have 2 sports channels, basketball tv and solar sports, both of which do not address my choices because these 2 only show dated basketball and boxing matches, and does not even cover other sporting events like badminton, volleyball, beach volleyball, table tennis and worse, tennis!
so if you ask me, sky cable has it. all the channels that i want are in their roster: 4 sports channels, news channels, movies and they have a steadier service, almost no interruption and has less blurry signals.
however, during the last week of may, sky cable suddenly cut their services in bangkal. that is, even if we're already paid for the rest of june, up to june 18 actually. this was due to the company's move of curbing multiple tv connections to a single subscription. the company wanted to charge every subscriber on a per tv set basis, which means if the subscriber has 2 tv sets in the house, the subscriber needs to buy a tv transmitter box worth 152 pesos for the other one. this also means that sky cable wants at least 1 subscription per household, since this new move won't allow a subscription to be split between multiple households (our landlady has 3 units, including their house, 1 subscription divided in 3 households). all in all, aside from the 870 pesos (or so) monthly subscription fees, the subscriber would need to buy that transmitter box for 152 pesos (or so again!).
but the shitty thing doesn't end there. that tv transmitter thing would need to be plugged in 24/7, otherwise the configuration would need to be redone by sky cable... which of course could easily take weeks, given the "extra efficient" sky cable service. with the surging power rates, this would definitely add up to our monthly consumption of electricity.
is this another lopez way of re-allocating revenues to help one of their bleeding subsidiaries? meralco is under fire from all sectors of the society due to the rising eletricity rates... and could wound up losing billions when they return some of their "should-have-not-been-collected" portions of eletric bills like transmission cost and metering components to their customers. a lot has been discussed on how the lopez group recycles revenues from other subsidiaries to re-fund some of its under-performing units. of course, sky cable might say that they're actually moving to cable-less cable tv services, since transmission would be done via the transmitter box. but all these additional charges actually negate the advantages of the move. as a consumer, additional charges like these greatly tote up our monthly bills and you wouldn't want to have additional worries.
according to manang nila, 75% of the legal sky cable subscriber population in bangkal opted not to renew their subscriptions due to this unreasonable change. buti nga!
for now, i'll make myself contented with global destiny... only 500 pesos per month, 1 subscription can be split into 3 lines. plus, they have a promo of free first 2-months subscription. haaaayyy... but this means goodbye (for now) to live tennis matches, grrrr... wimbledon, u.s. open and the olympics coming up.
'nyetang kabli yan!
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