LIKE any other football fan hooked on the Uefa Champions League and the Barclays Premier League (BPL), I too am having to take a hard look at whether I should give up my StarHub subscription, switch to Singtel's mio TV or have both.

So the logical thing to do was to look at what SingTel had to offer besides the football.

I have not arrived at a decision. There is no hurry as StarHub will still telecast BPL matches until the end of the season in May 2010. As for the Champions League, the matches are shown at such ungodly hours — and it gets worse in a few more weeks with kickoff times an hour later — that I am not enough of a football fanatic to sacrifice sleep and get annoyed when my favourite team loses.

What I am going to say here has nothing to do with the Champions League or the BPL. Rather, while looking at the various packages on mio TV, I noticed one thing similar with both pay-TV providers: Channels are grouped like racial segregation.

StarHub revised my plan some time ago. I was on the Ultimate Pack, which gave me most of the channels. I was told that the plan would be revised to let me keep the channels it thinks I would want to watch, take away those it thinks I am not likely to watch anyway and give me a few more. The revised plan would cost about the same, after throwing in a discount to match the previous price plan.

In the exact words (more or less) of the StarHub representative: "You get all your current Chinese channels, we add one more Chinese movie channel, and we take away all the Indian and Malay channels." Even the Japanese and French were not spared because I also lost NHK and TV5 Monde Asie.

Checking up on Singtel's mio TV price plans, I could not help noticing that the main packages were named SuperSaver English Pack, SuperSaver Chinese Pack and SuperSaver Indian Pack.

It made me imagine the day the $110 TV licence fee we pay annually to watch "free" channels is revised such that Chinese Singaporeans pay a certain amount for Channel 8 and Channel U, Malay Singaporeans are charged a different amount for Suria and Indian Singaporeans have their rate for Vasantham.

I remember in 1963 when television made its debut in Singapore and there was only one channel. All Singaporeans were united in watching programmes in all languages.

Chinese viewers got to enjoy Bollywood movies and sandiwara, while the Malays and Indians joined in the fun to watch the Chinese movies.

Those old enough would remember sitting or standing in front of the TV set from Majulah Singapura in the early evening to Majulah Singapura around midnight when transmission ended. In between, we were all united in enjoying whatever show was on, in any language.

One show even gave all of us a chance to learn each other's languages. That was the programme to promote the national language, Malay. Every word or phrase was translated into English, Chinese and Tamil — the other three official languages.

For instance, if our mother tongue was Chinese, this national language lesson would teach us what a certain word or phrase was in Malay or Tamil.

Then we started getting more channels, including Malaysian TV, and family members at home and fellow constituents at the community centre would quarrel over who got to watch what.

These days, one thing that might unite viewers regardless or race, language or religion is sports, especially football.

But, again, I am seeing a link between the distant past, when we had just one channel and very few homes had a TV set, and the present day in which many homes have a few TV sets each but may not have Champions League and BPL channels.

When very few homes had a TV set, the privileged ones would invite neighbours into their homes to watch some shows. For free, of course.

These days, though, some people might instead think of charging others to watch football and other sports on their pay-TV.