What follows is a blog about reduced rate calls on babeshows, originally posted by @Babe_TV on 2nd November 2013 on their Tumblr account. Their’s was an incredibly detailed account and charted many of the events of Babestation going back a long time. Unfortunately, it can no longer be accessed as the account has been deleted. Luckily we have a number of posts and we will be posting them here and on Babestationcams in tribute to the work that was done.
Lily Rose – xxXpanded TV
Recently, something small, has turned into something big. And that’s not me rehearsing my phonesex chat lines for xxXpanded TV’s Lily Rose (pictured above) – it’s a comment on a babeshow attribute which came from the backwaters of babe TV, but which in 2013 has been adopted by the biggest channels of all. I’m talking, of course, about reduced rate calls.
36p per minute – sometimes, on some channels, even less. It’s a far cry from the state of play on the night of 23rd March 2010, when Babestation 1’s Freeview show set in motion a plan to increase its standard call charge for mobile phones from £1.50 per minute, up to £2. Whilst initially the increased rate only occupied a small proportion of the broadcast, by summer 2010 the new charge was running for the whole night, and in 2011 Babestation Xtra followed suit. So where did it all go wrong? Why are all of Babestation’s Freeview channels now having to offer heavily reduced rates?
Well, there’s more than a suggestion 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 prompted some serious soul-searching among those who were used to paying Babestation’s much higher rates.
But there are precedents for reducing rates 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 all-told – and one of the two shows (Cream Live) was taken off in Feb ’11 to be replaced with encrypted movies. So why didn’t the TVX channels drive down Babestation’s prices in the way xxXpanded have?
Well, many fans of the channels 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 was exactly the same as Babestation’s, including the £2 per minute for mobile calls. So TVX’s reduced rates on Freeview were really just used as a publicity measure, and were not a way of life, as has been the case with xxXpanded. With TVX, Babestation only had to weather a fairly brief storm, but with xxXpanded, they’ve suffered a sustained and relentless drip-drip effect. You can’t weather a storm that isn’t going to end. Eventually, you have to fight like with like.
Above: Honey Scott on TVX’s Freeview Channel 191 – Cream Live, circa 2010. Honey is now an xxXpanded TV girl.
So where does that leave the current situation? Are prices going to drop further? Will they go back up?… Well, price is a factor, but what consumers are really looking for, is value…
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 channels 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 immediate term, this inevitably works. But in the longer term, I believe it creates an even bigger problem than the one it sets out to solve, resulting in mistrust, which spreads as more and more people consider that they’ve been misled. A channel that gains a reputation for misleading viewers will inevitably come to be regarded as a higher risk spend, and that lowers the perception of value.
xxXpanded, however, have not to my knowledge used any disingenuous tactics to artificially inflate viewers’ expectations, 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 these factors combined equate to a sense of good value, and that’s much more powerful than a low price alone.
If a babeshow is able to provide more attractive and (perhaps most tellingly as regards babeshows) more risk-free services, then there is the scope for prices in general to head back upward. But reduced call rates 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?
