Gyms that have the Life Fitness machines (or similar) that allow for the punters to watch TV as you go on the treadmill/bike/cross trainers etc…how many gyms have Foxtel, and of those how many channels do you guys get?
Mine has 3 channels allocated for Foxtel, all sports channels, plus one internal channel for music videos (Crowd DJ) plus all DTV channels up till recently (no 9Rush or 10Shake, will double check), with one vacant.
All of them are distributed via coax cable but not all the way around the building…this being a former bowling club. It goes to the cardio area to the LF machines, and then to big screens in the weights area.
The leaflet I got said “Austar” but the website says “Foxtel”. Again, it could be the good-old Austar Starter Pack, which looked more impressive than Foxtel’s “Get Started” pack back then.
Austar just resold the FOXTEL product in regional areas - they also had their own ‘My Star’ Set Top Box, which is essentially the same box as the FOXTEL one under the hood.
Something I thought about yesterday, we should all know the movie/TV trope of people disputing porn charges when checking out of hotels but how many hotels (or other places with additional TV channels) have you all encountered with a porn channel or even a porn on demand service?
The only one I have encountered was at Ibis at West Gosford. Their setup (or at least circa a decade ago) was that the remotes were used to unlock channels based on if you paid or not and I discovered that if you changed channels manually on the TV that you bypassed this. They had a softcore porn channel.
Herald Sun has revealed that hospital patients have to pay $11 per day to watch FTA channels, because hospitals get a percentage of the fee as a kickback from Hills Health Solutions (which provides the televisions in 43 per cent of public hospital beds around the country), and hospitals have no incentive to get patients a better deal.
The state government provides no funding to public hospitals to cover the cost of patient entertainment.
When I was in Mexico, they carried Sky pay-tv, and they had two actual hardcore pay channels. Not the usual pay-tv “porn”, but stuff you’d see online. Any Sky subscriber can have those channels, it was weird!
They do it because they can - some bright spark worked out that outsourcing the televisions probably saved them a decent amount of money in the first place and taking a cut is cream on the top
Still doesn’t excuse their behaviour. You’re meant to be making it as comfortable as possible, not looking to extract more money out as possible out of people at their time of need.
I wouldn’t have thought it was a new revelation that hospitals charge for the TV. I’m pretty sure that’s been standard practice for a decade, I’d suspect mostly because they used to make the cash on the landline phone, but now that everyone has mobiles they had to switch up their extra revenue stream.
Not reading a Herald Sun article, but I’d be surprised if you literally only get FTA. I was in a hospital a while back and while they had FTA, they also had two movie channels, which I think would be part of their justification.
I can’t remember if it cost money - but I remember that at least in the analogue era was that Geelong Hospital provided both the Melbourne and Ballarat FTA channels, with perfect signal for both. Being at the time basically the tallest building in the city helps reception I’d imagine. I believe they also sent through FM radio stations - at least KRock/Bay - but that’s testing my memory.
this is nothing new, though. My mum went into hospital to have me close to 50 years ago and even then if she wanted a TV at her hospital bed she had to pay to rent one. And that would have just given her a B&W portable.
Was about to post a similar sentiment. Hospitals were charging an exorbitant amount to rent cheap, piece of shit TVs with rabbit ears in the days before master antenna systems. Wouldn’t be surprised if those TVs had been paid for one hundred times over.
Is there free wifi access in public hospitals these days?
When I was in Gosford Hospital for a couple of weeks I had to pay $10 I think a day for access to TV and that was using a somewhat ancient system with a paper access card and a CRT TV mounted to the roof.
Staying at the Ovolo Hotel in Ultimo. Has an Apple TV and Amazon Echo Dot in each room. They also have their own Spotify 80’s channel/ playlist. Unfortunately there seems to be a problem with the Foxtel channels as all channels are coming up with a subscriber card issue. Not that it mattered much to us as we aren’t here to watch TV
