https://www.skysports.com/football/...ve-year-efl-deal-over-1000-matches-per-season As part of the new Sky deal: Although I think the option remains for "international" fans so perhaps not much will change,,,
Doing the numbers, 59% of Championship games will be televised. 5/12 weekend games plus all midweek games available via red button. Presumably if it averages out, that means that 10 of 23 home games will be moved for TV. To do 5 games a weekend that will mean 5 from Friday night, early Saturday, Late Saturday, late late Saturday, Sunday lunchtime, Sunday 2PM, Sunday 4PM and Monday night. Will John Marks still have a job just for overseas viewers or will they just license the Sky broadcast?
I hope they announce all of these further in advance than currently so people can plan but I suspect not
Increased notice for fans With the substantial increase in the number of live matches, Sky Sports and the EFL will introduce a new commitment for clubs and fans which will provide longer notice periods on TV selections. The defined notice periods will enable clubs and fans to plan further in advance and this will include the placement of all live matches selected for broadcast for the period to FA Cup third round before the start of the season. Greater parity in the number of times that clubs are selected for TV coverage is also guaranteed.
It sounds like domestic audio broadcasts will still be done so perhaps he would stay on commentary for domestic listeners and overseas viewers.
Having more Prem games on the telly and 4 teams playing on Thursdays has meant that sometimes in the Prem there's been as little as 2-3 games at 3pm on a Saturday, I don't see why we can't do what the Germans do and have different kick off times for Prem and EFL games since we're heading in that direction anyway
Decent of Hive Live to essentially take themselves off the air intermittently through the season to ween fans off the product too...
As far as I can tell the title seems misleading and it hasn't been confirmed Hive Live will stop entirely? Only that games can't have video for domestic viewers.
Great if we are playing Boro, Plymouth or Swansea away on a Tuesday night but completely screws up most weekends if you are doing well
I don’t understand these days why they don’t broadcast all games and you subscribe to the team you want to watch. I know they have a thing about broadcasting 3’oclock kick offs but that has just led to the premier league moving all the games to other days and times, so guess championship will follow. if you broadcast all games this could be used to subsidise ticket prices and you could also go back to the traditional Saturday 3’oclock kick offs for most games. I may have have in the past (although if anybody from sky is here definitely haven’t) seen the odd dodgy stream and would much rather watch a decent quality legal stream(which rules out hive live and there inability to transmit an audio stream let alone video).
But that’s not the object of the exercise, is it? TV companies want all games to kick off at different times so they can broadcast live wall-to-wall football. Many armchair fans don’t just want to watch one team.
I think the PL/EFL are still too scared to consider moving away from the comfort blanket of Sky, they just give them a bundle of cash every four years which has worked well for a long while, but I think there is definitely a lot more money to be had for the respective leagues and clubs by looking at different models like selling individual club subscriptions on a platform you can sell worldwide as well, cutting out broadcasters like Sky.
Hmmm but the PL have the whole tendering process run by outside consultants / experts and they do plenty of market testing, research etc before they announce what rights packages are open for bids. So they must know whether that's right or not and presumably the market isn't there for it yet. It's not like them to turn their back on a more lucrative option if it really existed. Even Amazon Prime having a few games a year didn't really get much lift off - in fact Amazon chose not to bid in the most recent round, which suggests the margins on streaming services still aren't there. I think it's probably closer than ever but if it ever comes about I suspect the likes of Liverpool, Man Utd & City etc will use it as a chance to break up the collective bargaining / sharing model for tv revenues.
But Sky are obviously making a decent profit themselves as the middle man, as are every overseas network who buy the rights. It’s not like they need local TV networks to broadcast anymore, one platform could do it all globally. The only challenge is local commentators and punditry, but I think that would be very easily solved. Admittedly I think the opportunity is more with the global rights than domestic currently (Amazon was just a domestic experiment with a handful of games, so many people already have prime for delivery already, I can imagine it wasn’t worth the bang for buck for them specifically on a domestic scenario with so few games). But I think it’s more a case of it ain’t broke don’t fix it, especially with revenue bottoming out in recent deals, but I think the opportunity is definitely there for them to sell rights globally, and probably at a lower price as well which would attract more customers. Imagine the production costs someone like Netflix have, a global PL/EFL subscription service would only have a fraction of those costs.
The PL already have a lot of the production side of things in-house, so I don't think that's the issue: https://www.img.com/sports/our-news...ue-productions-one-of-englands-finest-exports I think it solely comes down to the delivery side of things. Like it or not broadcasters like Sky, NBC, BeIN etc have big audiences of their own and brand recognition, they've already absorbed the costs of setting up their networks and commercial arms and the PL just has to piggy back on them. It's a safer option. As you'll see from the article the PL though is slowly coming around to the idea of having a 'direct to consumer' offering but they're looking at Asia first and even then a comparatively small market in Singapore.
The leagues only care about the revenue that comes from the armchair watchers of football. They only pretend to care about the supporters who attend games. Apart from the big clubs who get tourist support attendances at all other clubs will fall as more games are on TV.
Absolutely. I was just thinking though that the whole EFL platform thing has multiple points of weakness because there's a lot of infrastructure is based within the clubs themselves. But with that platform going I dunno where the streams for bog standard non-televised Championship games will come from. Most of the ones someone I know who definitely isn't me watches seem to be ripped from either Watford or, more often, the opposition team's feed.
The more the broadcast landscape fractures, the more people will pick and choose and the broadcasters know that. It's why almost no challenger to Sky has lasted – ITV Digital, Setanta, even BT Sport is now part of the much bigger TNT / Discovery. The beauty of Sky is that the Premier League and the EFL are all on it. If one or other were to go elsewhere far from it persuading me to sign up for another service I'd be more likely to drop the lot and do without. I am sure there are lots of people like that. Likewise if my supplier didn't roll in TNT for 'free' (I know it's not free, but it doesn't require an additional subscription) I wouldn't bother with it. If the Champions League went to something else, say ViaPlay, I wouldn't bother with that either. Amazon I only watched because we already have a Prime subscription. For the big clubs it might seem tempting to have a Netflix style system but once that happens the pressure will be on for the clubs that get the most viewers to get a much bigger share of the money. And that creates more problems than it solves.
That’s no different to the current situation though, Liverpool and Utd will get far more viewers when broadcast on Sky than Sheffield Utd will, but the revenues get shared out in accordance to league position and more often than not bigger clubs finish higher and get more of the cash. I’d imagine the broadcast payments would still apply as part of the breakdown as well, so bigger club = shown more = earn more. Everyone knows big clubs get more viewers, I don’t think that being confirmed via streaming numbers vs being confirmed by sky viewers will make much difference.
Yup. I actually think they'd force it through up front. They've been looking for a way to break up the equal distribution model for over a decade now and surely moving from traditional broadcasters to some sort of subscription model by club would be the reason they needed to complete their money grab. The link between subs and specific clubs would be unarguable. They've already succeeded in watering it down for the international rights and ensuring they get a bigger part of that pot, but if they could unlock it for the domestic market as well they'd do it in a heartbeat. The only safeguard is whether 14 of them would vote for it... but then offer some of the (delusional) aspirational clubs in the middle a modest up front increase and that'd probably be enough to get them to vote against their long term interests.
