The Media Development Authority (MDA) has announced a public consultation on the recommendations to protect pay-TV customers.

Proposed measures include allowing consumers to end their pay-TV subscriptions without paying penalties should pay-TV providers increase subscription fees or remove channels from their packages.

This is a step in the right direction to force pay-TV providers to provide more value that consumers want.

I emphasised 'more value that customers want' because the current situation is problematic. Consumers are locked into pay-TV packages which include many channels they have no use for. They cannot customise the specific channels they want for a lower price.

It is understandable that pay-TV providers are not able to provide only top-tier channels in their offerings as they are forced to buy lower-tier channels from distributors. That does not mean they should pass that cost on to subscribers in the form of 'providing more value and variety'. Channels that go unwatched and unappreciated provide no value to consumers.

Lock-in plans do not incentivise pay-TV operators to do better

Apart from providing a glut of content that consumers may not want in a package, pay-TV operators, as a standard practice, lock consumers in on two-year contracts.

Aside from ensuring hygiene factors such as stable TV feeds and optimal picture quality, pay-TV operators do little in these two years to convince consumers to stay with them.

More often than not, operators are banking on the loyalty of consumers have towards the channels provided.

And then there are BPL channels

When pay-TV operators do not provide any value beyond just the channels they provide, the snafu that is the crazy bid war for the British Premier League and the subsequent high prices for the World Cup are the result.

The clamour for BPL rights was because pay-TV operators cannot provide any value for viewers other than possessing BPL coverage. That is a sad state of affairs for cable TV in Singapore.

Consumers are bitter and pay-TV operators are seen as the profiteering villains. Could this perpetuate the vicious cycle of having to lock consumers in subscription plans because there is no other way to keep consumers loyal otherwise?

So who provides value and are Singaporeans willing to go with them?

A March 2014 survey of 900 Singaporeans revealed that 61 per cent of adults downloaded pirated content online, of which 66 per cent of them acknowledged what they did was similar to stealing. Youths consumed more pirated content than adults and 80 per cent of them considered it a social norm.

Is there any wonder?

More Singaporeans are subscribing to Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) which enable them to use pay-services such as Netflix or to watch channels such as BBC and SkyTV for free.

And recently, M1 adjusted its fibre broadband pricing to closer match what was being offered by MyRepublic - an fibre-provider which uses VPNs as one of its selling points.

This points to the lack of value pay-TV operators bring to the table

It is quite telling that consumers are willing to either break the law by pirating content, or go through a complicated route of paying for VPNs and paying for subscription services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime, rather than subscribe to local pay-TV operators.

Pay-TV operators here are just not giving consumers what they want, or they are giving the same thing but charging more and want to lock people into a 24-month subscription.

If an overseas operator can provide the same content at $2 less, I would hazard a guess that many people would give up their existing pay-TV subscriptions and make the switch. There's no reason, as of now, to stay.

What does the future of pay-TV look like?

The most foolish thing pay-TV operators can do now is to lobby for laws to deter VPNs and piracy. CD-selling record labels had, for the longest time, focused their energies on fighting piracy and protecting its CD business. It did not innovate, it did not see that music-lovers just did not like buying CDs.

By doing all that, record labels effectively rolled out the red carpet for iTunes and Spotify to gain the dominant market share on music sales.

Following the current trajectory of banking on lock-in subscriptions and possessing top-tier channels, the future could be that pay-TV operators have to shut down their pay-TV arms and go back to being broadband providers.

Will they be able to take that bitter pill? Or will they finally realise that they have to provide real value to consumers?

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