Now that’s what I call good news!
In this household’s occasional ruminations upon whether we could justify paying for a subscription-based cable or satellite TV service, FilmFour represented the main motivation for doing so (along with the Italian football, since its departure from Channel Four). However, the obstacle was always my fundamental opposition to subscription TV… I refuse to pay upwards of £15 per month in order to buy the right to *then* pay additionally for channels I want to watch. If the whole thing was truly “pay per view”, based on single payments for major sporting events (or even single films) or subscriptions for individual channels, I’d be all too willing to sign up, but I’m not paying for a load of “free” channels I’m never going to watch.
(Obviously, I’m already paying a subscription of sorts via the BBC licence fee, but I’m talking specifically about commercial channels here.)
But lo… a golden ray of hope amid the dumbed-down cheapness and corporate sponsorship. The free-to-air relaunch of FilmFour coincides perfectly with the sad end of the weekly “Director’s Chair” feature at my local cinema, a rare alternative to the usual “free overhyped blockbuster with every kilo of junk food purchased”. Watching films on the small screen is never ideal, but it’s better than nowt, and there’s still the good old NFT for the proper cinema experience, as well as the really unusual stuff that they’ll never show on FilmFour.
The cynic in me would probably wonder if all this is just a PR stunt, building viewer loyalty in preparation for some as-yet-unnannounced revolution in subscription TV. For the moment, though, I’m making the most of it and keeping my cynicism at bay!
I understand that Film Four moved from subscription to free to air because of the successful of Freeview meant that advertising would bring in more money than subscription revenues.
My Film four experience has been frustrating- the signal dropped very low and the picture and sound got unwatchably choppy. Still it’ll be an improvement to my cultural life too.
Yeah, I wondered if it might be a question of advertising. Oddly, our FilmFour signal is the one channel we can actually use… until we can be bothered to get our aerial (and its ancient, threadbare cable) replaced, we’ve pretty much given up watching any digital TV, but on F4 the digibox manages to hold the channel for several hours.
Another improvement to my cultural life is BBC 4- what BBC 2 used to carry only in less hours in those “good old days”. Lots of good programmes on music and documentaries.