The Risk Professional: people power challenges Malaysia's ASTRO

The petition at http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/astro-malaysia-to-put-bbc-entertainment-back-on-air complains that ASTRO has removed BBC Entertainment and replaced it with BIO, a channel that carries little or no original programming, and much of what it does carry is a rehash of programmes already repeated to annoying levels on other channels.

But BBC Entertainment is not itself immune from criticism. It is heavily laden with repeats. Here the issue is not the bane of modern TV, "rotation" but entire series being run over and over again. The BBC has an excellent stock of drama - and BBCE carries excellent series from other UK networks, too. But it does exhibit a desperate over-reliance on a few series that are shown over and over again. For example, Doctor Who viewers have had the same two series shown for the past three years, each shown several times; My Family has been run, some series more than others, over and over and there are many more examples. And good as she is, there has to be a limit to the number of programmes featuring Tamzin Outhwait we get to see.

Even The Weakest Link - a flagship quiz show - is frequently repeated and nothing gets old as quickly as a quiz show where you know the answers because you've seen the programme before.

And what we do get is frequently old: when the station was yanked at the end of November, it was still running the first series of Hotel Babylon: the UK broadcast series 4 earlier this year; we were still getting the second David Tennant series: this week in the UK, he leaves the programme after five series.

Even so, gems such as Spooks, Robin Hood, Merlin and other original drama have a strong and loyal following.

ASTRO has a high-handed attitude to its viewers. Its Formula One coverage is horribly mutilated by adverts. The station says that it gets the ad breaks as part of its feed but it fills the breaks up with trailers, generally for soccer, and very few actual advertisements. In fact, we understand that the feed is available without the breaks.

It delays broadcast so that viewers cannot enjoy the race and co-ordinated online pit-wall data from F1.Com. It says this is so that content "unsuitable" for Malaysian viewers can be edited. Quite what the banal commentators employed by ESPN-Star, the monopoly service provider, could say to upset even the most sensitive viewer is difficult to fathom. Worse: ASTRO recently increased the price of its sports package - and increased still further the amount of time dedicated to soccer.

ASTRO censors to a ludicrous degree: some films are cut by as much as 20 minutes from their original length. ASTRO says that this is how the films are provided - but the same films from the same provider are supplied in Hong Kong with little cut out.

Last year, ASTRO scrapped its only international film channel having sabotaged its success by changing the broadcast policy to place a small number of local films on heavy rotation, showing international films rarely and with little or no publicity on other channels. When launched it featured a wide range of Australian, European, English, South East Asian and middle eastern films.

Now, ASTRO relies on a heavy diet of talk-shows and reality and pseudo reality TV from channels such as AXN, Star World, Hallmark, a swathe of Discovery Channel offshoots (which repeat both within each channel and from other Discovery channels)

Some subscribers have already cancelled their subscription to the "Metro" package which is made up of Discovery Turbo (renamed but still showing the same programmes, some in frequent repeats for at least two years), Discovery Home And Health (still showing John and Kate Plus 8 before John struck out on his own - or is it just struck out?), Crime and Investigation (some programmes of which are shown on Discovery channel, part of another package) and the waste-of-space Bio Channel.

How many more will follow if ASTRO fail to return BBC Entertainment, despite its flaws, remains to be seen. But one thing is for certain: the launching of the petition is, in itself, a big step in a country where people generally just accept poor service and high-handed behaviour, assuming that that is how it should be.

ASTRO might just have been instrumental in raising the profile of people power.