I must admit that I watched that and thought it wasn't anything too
outstanding or contraversial. But it's true that most ads for sports TV (and
in the UK, that's Murdoch's Sky Sports) lead on footage from their sports
coverage.

ESPN UK's problem is that it doesn't really have the best in UK sport. Of
the seven Premier League live rights packages, they have one - something
like the 4th pick of the weekend. They have a bit of other football
including plenty of European football, but not from Spain which is the
second best league in the world. Sky has that. Otherwise it's a bit of a
hotchpotch.

I do subscribe to ESPN on top of Sky because they have a bit of football
that I'll watch as well as quite a lot of US sport which I'm happy to dip
into (MLB, NBA, NFL (MNF - Sky Sports has the majority, although the NFL
dishes out rights to C4 and the BBC because they're always looking to grow
the sport's fanbase), NHL, College sports etc). Indeed it's their sister
channel ESPN America that airs SportsCenter (US version). They just haven't
invested enough to produce a proper definitive nightly homegrown sports news
show.  Sky Sports has a 24/7 Sky Sports News channel that does nothing but
news.

There's also an issue about rights to clips. In the UK you can only use
footage from other networks fairly minimally, whereas from what I can tell,
SportsCenter happily uses clips from any network's coverage of sport without
concern. In the UK you can do that in the "proper" news bulletins with a
limit of perhaps two plays for a clip, but even Sky Sports News won't show
footage from - say - Wimbledon which is 100% BBC.

That said, I think that Sky Sports could learn an awful lot from ESPN in
terms of programming beyond straight coverage. There is little in the way of
original documentaries and serious discussions about sport. I'm not
pretending that ESPN does lots of this either, but at least there is a
strand like E:60 which aspires to do something a bit beyond live coverage.


Adam

On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 4:01 PM, Mark J. <[email protected]> wrote:

> This is a commercial for ESPN's relatively-new UK channel, which shows
> domestic sports with some U.S. sports (including MNF in the fall) and
> studio shows (including a UK version of "PTI," but strangely no
> "SportsCentre" at all)--one wonders if the Worldwide Leader would dare
> make an American version of this ad and show high-fiving bros in slow
> motion to the narration and stirring music:
>
> http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/ad-day-espn-134163
>
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