"this Faustian pact"

TV As the fog clears, I'm catching up with this and that and some of the that is this excellent piece from James Cooray Smith in the New Statesman about how Sky has to some extent ruined UK tv, hiding the best shows in the world in what amounts to the televisual equivalent of the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying beware of the leopard.

When Sky’s deal for American Movie Classics' Mad Men kicked in between series, the programme lost three quarters of its UK audience as it switched from BBC Four to Sky Atlantic. By season six, Mad Men was pulling in 58,000 viewers. Those are the numbers you’d expect for a channel rotating listlessly through music videos in the afternoon.

It was later estimated that, given the high cost of acquiring Mad Men versus the number of people watching it, each viewer was costing Sky around £5 an episode.

He'll be unpleased to know that I recently succumbed and joined NowTV so I could finally catch up with some of these shows (Elementary) and watch others during broadcast (Agent Carter, Supergirl) having had to deal for years with the wait for a blu-ray release and then Lovefilm-By-Post to send them to me.

But you can imagine the moral quandary inherent what with my anti-Murdoch boycott.  My key rationalisations for this Faustian pact is that I'm only spending birthday and Christmas money and buying NowTV boxes when they're discounted and utilising the vouchers which takes the cost of the service down to half price.  Yes, I know.  He gets you in the end.