Paying for it: Would you pay to watch Big Brother?

Fancy reading Phil Mitchell's private diary or going head-to-head with Carol Vorderman on Countdown? If TV companies have their way you'll soon be able to do all this online - for a small fee of course. In the second of a three part series on online content charges, Sally Watson switches on and settles down to watch how the broadcasters are doing it...

First published 16.10.2001

You would have to be living on a desert island to have missed the biggest media showdown of the year so far - the head-to-head battle between reality TV shows.

Whether it was Bubble taking on Mick, or Helen versus Charlotte the Harlot, Channel 4's Big Brother, and its less successful ITV rival Survivor, have raked in the cash for their creators.

But where was the battle online? Both shows launched 'ground-breaking' websites to run in parallel with the shows, offering hidden content, extra footage and live updates.

So how much did Channel 4 make from the 119 million page views on the website? Well, pretty much nothing. "We could have made the Big Brother website paid-for but we decided not to," said Mark Brandon, COO of Channel 4 Interactive.

According to Brandon, the broadcaster and the programme's creators Endemol agonised over the issue, but eventually backed away from the "quantum leap" of charging for content online.

"I don't believe [consumers] are there yet," Brandon claims.

But like their paper-based colleagues, broadcasters and programme makers are pushing ahead with online fees. ITV's Survivor website offered premium areas where users could fork out for access to unique content, although the broadcaster has - perhaps sensibly - declined to release figures on its take-up rate.

After the success of its Madonna gig in November, web portal MSN recently broadcast a live Elton John concert from Turkey, charging viewers £7 and £10 for the luxury of tuning in from their PC.

Tracy Balcher, the portal's consumer marketing manager, admits the audience was much smaller than previous free broadcasts but claims the experiment was a success. "We will definitely be doing more events like this in the future," she said, "this way the quality is much better for individual users."

According to Peter Cowley, portal director at Freeserve, user education is the key. "We're going to have to retrain the consumer. We dug our own hole," he lamented.

Earlier this year, the ISP made its first advance into the paid-for content market with a webcast of the Lennox Lewis training camp in South Africa. Since then it's teamed up with Channel 4 to provide round-the-clock racing coverage from Le Mans, and more recently launched an online soap, Mount Kristos, which includes additional premium rate services.

"We're not going to make our millions on this very quickly," Cowley admits. "It's about convincing the consumer first, so then we can bring more services to the market."

But if research from iSTRAT is to be believed, then broadcasters may be missing a trick. In a survey of UK users, the services consultancy claimed 52 per cent would be willing to pay for good quality information - and of these 80 per cent would pay for music webcasts and over a third would pay for sports webcasts.

So if it's not the customer holding providers back, what is? One of the biggest problems is that the final rights for many TV shows, concerts and sporting events are not held by the broadcaster.

Channel 4 has investigated producing premium online content for its sporting events like cricket and racing, but according to Brandon, finds itself locked in "tortuous negotiations" with the ultimate rights owner.

Freeserve's Cowley is even more explicit. "Something like Premiership football would never go online for free," he says. "We have to make sure the business model works so we can attract the good content owners."

One technology company working with the likes of Carlton, Channel 4 and Granada believes broadcasters are being too slow to commit to the web. PremiumServe's founder, Russell Allen, says he came up with the inspiration for his premium rate ISP service after watching Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and realising the show could make a fortune online.

"It's difficult to deal with internal politics of companies," he says. "They're no longer rushing to do stuff online, internet time has gone and we're now back to normal business time."

PremiumServe's competition site for GMTV pulls in around 5,000 paying entries per week, but this is small fry compared to the 600,000 premium rate phone calls the breakfast programmer receives from Monday to Friday.

Afraid of getting their fingers burned, broadcasters are taking a softly-softly approach to content charges hoping, perhaps, that the long-awaited advent of digital TV will make their task easier.

But convincing customers to pay up without offering compelling content is proving a challenging task, something MSN plans to rectify by rolling out some star names to tempt users. "We hope to do one big Madonna type event a year," says Balcher, "along with eight or nine smaller offerings, but they'll still be big international names."

So how long then before we get exclusive Eastenders episodes online? Or the chance to win the top prize in Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, the interactive version?

"There isn't any easy answer," admits Channel 4's Brandon. "But somebody will be lucky enough to catch the wave - maybe it will be us with Big Brother 3..."