As of the time when this post was originally written by @babe_tv, (2nd November 2013), something small, has turned into something big. And that’s not me rehearsing my phonesex lines for Xpanded TV’s Lily Rose – it’s a comment on a live babeshow attribute which came from the backwaters of babe TV, but which in 2013 has been adopted by the biggest babe channels of all. I’m talking, of course, about reduced rate calls.
36p per minute – sometimes, on some babe channels, even less. It’s a long way away from the way things used to be on the night of March 23rd 2010, when Babestation 1’s Freeview show began it’s campaign to increase its standard call rate for mobile phones from £1.50 per min to £2 per min. At first the increased rate only applied to a small period of time during the broadcast but by Summer 2010 the new call rate was running for the whole night, and in 2011 Babestation Xtra changed their call rates too. So where did it all go wrong? Why are all of Babestation’s Freeview channels now having to offer heavily reduced rates?
One possible reason is that xxXpanded TV have hit Babestation and other babe channels hard with their budget babeshow on the Freeview platform. xxXpanded have taken their basic charges as low as 26p per minute at times, and that must have raised some eyebrows among those who were used to paying Babestation’s comparatively higher rates.
But there are a few precedents for reducing rates for cheap phone sex on the Freeview shows. The TVX call channels Cream Live and Honey Nights offered much cheaper calls than Babestation, with rates between 45p and 75p per minute, and even the odd 35p per minute line. TVX’s tenure on Freeview was, however, short-lived, lasting only from November 2010 to April 2011 – and one of the two shows (Cream Live) was taken off in Feb ’11 to be replaced with encrypted movies such as what can be viewed on BSX by becoming a Babestation VIP member. So why didn’t the TVX channels drive down Babestation’s prices in the way xxXpanded have?
A great number of babe channel fans remember TVX’s cheap rates, but it’s perhaps less well remembered that on Freeview, the reduced prices only lasted for about a month. By mid December 2010, both Cream and Honey’s lines were priced at £1.50 per minute, and by 2011 when they went off air, TVX’s pricing mirrored Babestation’s, including the £2 per minute for mobile calls. So TVX’s reduced rates on Freeview were really not much more than a publicity stunt and not intended to be permanent, unlike xxXpanded. With TVX, Babestation only had to weather a fairly brief storm, but with xxXpanded, they’ve suffered a sustained and relentless war of attrition. And it soon became apparent that they would have to fight fire with fire.
No that Babestation has thrown it’s hat into the reduced call rate ring, are prices going to drop further? Will they go back up? And will it come at the cost of value for money?
Value is a relationship between what you give, and what you get. If people genuinely believe they’re going to get something better, they’ll feel a higher price is justified, and they’ll pay more. But it’s more complicated than that, because value also encompasses elements such as perceived risk. If people know or strongly believe they’re guaranteed to get precisely what they want, they’ll pay more than they will in situations where they feel the spend has risk attached. Babeshows have a major problem with perceived risk, because simply, when the audience is big, there’s no way every interactive caller will get through to speak to the girl on screen. It’s a gamble of sorts.
Some babe channels like Red Light Central or S66 have attempted to alleviate this problem by making it appear to viewers that they have more chance of getting through than is really the case. In the short term, this inevitably works. But it’s also an extremely risky stategy as it can create mistrust in the long term, and when word spreads among fans on Twitter or on the babeshow forums babeshows can gain a very negative reputation.
xxXpanded, however, have not to my knowledge used any shady tactics to manufacture false expectations for the audience, and I think this could well be another reason why they’ve had what looks like considerable success on Freeview. The prices are attractive, the models look attentive and motivated, and the programme doesn’t make you in any way suspicious. That sounds very basic, but following these simple rules help keep their audience coming back for more.
If a babeshow is able to provide more attractive and risk-free services, then there is the scope for prices in general to head back upward. But lower prices have some less obvious advantages on the Freeview platform. The economy of scale on Freeview makes lower prices more viable than they would be on Sky-only channels, and that looks to give Freeview channels with reduced call rates the potential in the longer term to ‘starve out’ rivals on Sky. Not only that, but there are implications for competing web services too, which don’t have anything like the economy of scale to rival 36p per minute. Babestation’s price reductions don’t just fight xxXpanded’s budget model – they also take business away from other facets of the industry.
It’ll be very interesting to see where things do go from here, but with lower prices starting to become the rule rather than the exception on the Freeview babeshows, the future of Sky-only operations now seems under much greater threat. This might mean better prices for customers, but could it also mean a lot less choice?
