Premier League 16/17
- Thread starter LionNYC
- Start date
I get a goal handicap, right? It is at the "theater of dreams" and all.Midas Mulligan wager on Sunday for sh!ts and giggles?
With the juggernaut that is Liverpool, it's still a coin flip on the road.
I started tweeting about him at halftime, and then started looking around and everyone was. He was horrible. I'm not his biggest fan anyway, but he looked like Lopez out there today.
Meh, that has a lot to do with streaming. Where in the past if City wasn't on TV you're screwed now just take your smart phone out and watch whatever game you want. I'm sure this applies to England as well.
I'd say one of the major reasons viewing figures in the UK are going down is because the TV companies essentially rack-rent their broadcasts out to the viewers, and they've reached about the peak of their system. The TV companies (or rather...basically Sky, since they have always historically dominated the market) here had two options in how they sell their services - either they could sell their services cheap and aim for the majority of the population or they could sell for a very high price and hope that they could create a captive audience out of those who were so desperate for live TV that they would pay the price. They of course opted for the latter, and it worked out brilliantly for them for a long time. However, they rapidly reached virtually peak capitalisation and now they have little further to go.
Pretty much everyone willing to pay money to watch sports, or any of Sky's other products such as syndicating major US shows, already has bought a Sky box. Everyone else is happy shunning Sky and getting a basic terrestrial TV service with no monthly payments required. So with no, or very few, new customers to target the only thing Sky can do is keep providing to their existing customers, some of whom will inevitably become tired of the service or will eventually struggle to continue to afford it while some others are tempted away by Sky's first serious rival, BT.
Undoubtedly illegal streams have an impact also, but I believe the above is the major reason.
Note that I am not predicting that the UK satellite TV market is going to crash soon. It would undoubtedly cripple Sky as a business if they lost Premier League rights but that doesn't look like happening and there will always be a market for subscription TV. However, Sky to my mind are simply in a position where for short term profit they have left themselves with no real ability to expand their service model without substantially undermining the basis of their current service by making things cheaper.
Yeahhhh that doesn't really exist here. I can always tune to local sports channels to watch the local teams play. Regardless of the sport. And for free I can watch every single premier league game on my phone because my provider has NBC Sports. The only thing I pay extra for is Fox Soccer 2 Go and that's for champions league streaming as I usually work Tuesday/Wednesday and that's $70 a year.
You can pay for a cable service for all major sports which gives you access to every single game (MLS does this too) and the only time that necessary is if you follow a team outside of your region (in my case).
It's one of the major ironies of the Premier League - it's far cheaper and easier for foreign viewers to watch it than us. Most PL fans could buy the most expensive season ticket available at their club and still pay less for it than a Sky Sports subscription (though they wouldn't get the access to other clubs and sports which Sky of course provides).
UEFA (and hopefully all of its countries) should offer a streaming service per month for all matches, domestic and continental. Bypass the broadcasting organizations.
Just like WWE did.
Just like WWE did.
That's crazy. There's so much competition here with cable companies that it's really not that expensive at all. At our house we pay $160 for cable and high speed internet. Couldn't even tell you the amount of channels and 3 HD boxes with DVR
True, the article mentions just live TV audiences (which I'll guess is down in general if you don't account for the internet). I didn't read a mention about streaming.
Yeah, but the US system works differently because few companies offer services across the entire country. That makes it relatively easy for sports leagues and broadcasters to syndicate on their product to a variety of other companies in the same country, including potentially rival companies in the same geographical area. Here, every TV company operates nationally - it simply wouldn't be sensible not to do so. That means that when leagues such as the PL sell the rights to live broadcasts, it becomes virtually impossible for them to sell the same product to more than one company without substantially depreciating the value of their product. That's why the PL operates the model it does, where companies have to bid for the rights to pick one match to broadcast every game round, and they won't allow any one company to win all of the bids - the exclusivity makes each package incredibly expensive, which in turn is passed onto the viewers.
Don't get me wrong here. My family pays absolutely nothing* for TV and we still get most of 100 channels, although by and large the new channels which have appeared in the last few years and aren't affiliated to any of the major companies are nothing to write home about. It's not like you can't watch TV here unless you buy Sky. The government has also passed various laws making it compulsory for various sporting events such as the FA Cup, World Cup/Euros, Olympics/Commonwealth Games as well as all England/Scotland/Wales/NIreland games etc to be shown on free-to-air channels, so I still get to watch the major international tournaments perfectly legally. I'm not completely starved of any sort of entertainment. But the sporting market is for the most part completely wrapped up.
*OK, not completely true. We do have to pay the "licensing fee", which is essentially a tax on watching TV. However, since this money is entirely pumped back into the BBC, and lets me watch all of their channels with no extra costs and with absolutely no adverts ever, I'm pretty happy with the deal.
