On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 at 3:33 PM, Adam Bowie <[email protected]> wrote: > A couple of things worth adding to this: > > - BT will almost certainly make their games available to other platforms > since doing otherwise won't make the numbers work. Nobody really expects the > die-hard football fan to have two different boxes under their TV. That said, > they've not formally announced how they'll be marketing them (currently they > retail some, but not all of BSkyB's sports, so expect getting full access to > those channels to be part of the discussion). BT Vision is very much the > fourth most popular platform in the UK, but the AT&T comparison is a good > one for telecoms and broadband.
Help me understand this: according to the BT Vision site, you can get Sky Sports 1 and 2 on their service. Are you saying that a user wouldn't get a box that runs both if they subscribed to BT Vision? > - The comparison with the NFL is interesting. Considering the UK is roughly > a fifth the size of the US marketplace, that makes this an excellent deal > for the Premier League. The difference is that UK viewers have to pay > premium subscriptions to get that football. Sky Sports is not a basic cable > service as ESPN essentially is. Sky Sports costs an additional £20 a month > ($31). And there's no free-to-air Premier League coverage aside from the > highlights that run on the BBC. Although I know some NFL coverage is run at > a loss, the scale of the US market means that Fox, CBS and NBC certainly go > a long way to mitigate their costs with advertising. ITV, Channel 4 and > Channel 5 looked at the rights for some live games, but at over £6m a match > under this new deal, there's no way they could earn back that in advertising > in the much smaller UK market. I'd add that the EPL is effectively further along than the US when it comes to pro sports moving completely to pay TV (with a couple exceptions: Detroit, for example, is in year eight of a 10-year deal that puts *every* non-national-TV Red Wings, Tigers, and Pistons game on Fox Sports Detroit). But the unique nature of the EPL (with the awesomeness that is no postseason) means it's hard to try to get a real similar format (maybe college football as it stands now), because the cheapening of the regular season puts the premium in getting those rights. I'd say MLB is closer to going full-pay than the other leagues (I believe the next TV contract will see an NHL-style World Series format, where two of the first four games are on cable only), because they really are all about the broadcast dollars, more so than the other two. > Adam (who is writing this to take his mind off a tense European Championship > England v Italy quarter-final that's taking place right now. It's just going > into extra time...) And with the match now going into penalties, be brave. -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en
