Product details

British Interactive Broadcasting (BiB), a company created to deliver digital interactive services to TV viewers in the UK from 1988, is a remarkable, speculative £500 million venture at the cross-roads of previously distinct industries: media, telecommunications and information technology. BiB involves four shareholders operating on a global scale: British Sky Broadcasting (the UK analogue satellite broadcasting monopolist, controlled by Rupert Murdoch''s News Corporation), British Telecom, Midland Bank (HSBC) and Japanese electronics giant Matsushita. BiB''s parent companies, the case shows, are motivated by radcally different reasons to enter the interactive alliance. BSkyB seeks to protect its existing broadcasting business against a technological wave while BT, Midland and Matsushita each seek to open new, but essentially different markets: Midland in electronic payment systems, Matsushita in digital consumer electronics, BT indeed in interactive services. The deal has produced one of the most innovative corporate constructions in recent years: the ''subsidy-for-capacity'' deal. BiB gets access to BSkyB''s digital satellite network against subsidising the cost of BSkyB''s set-top box needed to receive digital services.