Risktaking and back to communism
I recently read with interest the FT article on recent developments at CME (”Communism to risktaking”, July 10). Adrian Sarbu, a Romanian manager in the company, gets a well-deserved praise from his boss, Michael Garin. However, I found intriguing the inset mentioning that Pro TV, the main CME channel in Romania, “broadcasts 24 hours a day online”. Visiting the ProTV website today is an experience no different than many years ago: three-minutes news and new book reports, five-minutes show fragments, and a huge amount of 30-seconds promos. The horoscope is broken down into signs, probably to save bandwidth or on a need-to-know basis. The station still does not stream live at all and does not to offer full records of any but a few shows, while the two main competitors offer both these services freely. This hardly makes an “internet virtuoso”. It is true that another CME station, ProTV International, a niche channel for the diaspora, streams over the internet, but it is not much of a technical accomplishment, when looking at a price tag starting at 9.50 dollars a month for a program including soaps that were on ProTV two years ago. One theory would be that ProTV uses geographic filters in order to prevent access me and anybody outside Romania from viewing for free its most valuable programmes. That is uncommon in Romanian market, but resembles iPlayer’s unavailability outside UK. Another, more likely, interpretation is that we are witnessing a return to practices from Communist times. During the last years of the Ceausescu regime, rationing and hour-long queues for bread were common across the country; at the same time, a large majority of the state-owned farms’ managers reported to “the Centre” and bragged on TV about yields of more than 20 tonnes of wheat per hectare, in order to be awarded medals as “Heroes of the New Agrarian Revolution”. We know the outcome of that “revolution”: the Centre saw it as a success, the deprived citizens - less so. In December 25, 1989, a more real Revolution, supported by millions of New Agriculture unsatisfied consumers, lead to the execution of Ceausescu. Oblivious, until his last moment, the man at the Centre did not believe there were bread shortages. Alas, with the fall of communism, that is a trial the London-based CME Centre and the credulous Mr. Garin will not have to go through.