On 12/06/2021 06:52, Andy Burns wrote:
Steve Walker wrote:

Richard wrote:

tim... wrote:

what does being "a Freesat customer" mean?

Hmmm... Not sure, maybe similar to being a customer of pretty much
anything else? Sky customer, BT customer drug pusher on the corner
customer?

Except that you pay directly for all of those, while you pay for
Freesat through advertising.
Presumably there's some sort of fee from the box manufacturer to
'freesat' for use of the name and access to technical standards for the
EPG?


I don't see why there should be.

Certainly when I stuck a PC card in my PC and hooked it up to a dish,
there was no charge for downloading the EPG.

And the free software certainly understood its format.

There is a great deal of thought going into what is is useful to charge
for, what *can* be charged for as well as what *ought* to be charged for.

Take Linux as an example...its an open standard that many many salaried
people are paid to maintain, and yet it is essentially free.

What you pay for, is the router, the set top box, the
supercomputer...the web server - that use it. And for support, if you
need help using it.

Its in everybody's interest to make freesat as accessible as possible,
so that mugs buy the advertised products.

Why would they charge for it?



--
"I am inclined to tell the truth and dislike people who lie consistently.
This makes me unfit for the company of people of a Left persuasion, and
all women"