Has the pay-TV bubble burst?

[Diable Rouge]

Even Murdoch seems resigned to the fact that sports subscriptions are on the slide, with Sky set to move from numbered channels to an a la carte menu of stations for specific sports, in a last bid to attract casual viewers. BT may gain extra rights briefly, but it seems inevitable that streams and torrents will put paid to the pay-TV economic model, just as occurred in the music industry.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/20...l-golf-cricket

[Antepli Ejderha]

BT sport will cost £3.50 for BT customers from August, that's a decent price for what you get. The cheapest Murdoch package is £18.

[My Name Is Ian]

This is going to confuse the shit out of my dad.

[Levin]

The cheapest Sky package is currently £49.50? Is that right? I'm fine with me paying £5 per month for BT sports, I can't imagine spending that much for Sky.

[Janik]

BT Sport is currently free for people with BT broadband, isn't it? So a charge of £3.50 a month, although small, is still an increase.

Going to the opening post, TV rights are actually rising fast at the moment. And it's online that is driving that, specifically BT deciding they had to compete with Sky. Not in TV, BT are a telecoms company that doesn't really give a toss about that, but for broadband customers. Just as sport (and films) was used to sell satellite dishes, it is now being used to sell subscriptions to online services. How much do people pay for their mobile phone and home broadband contracts? Probably more than they were paying for subscription Sports TV channels. That is where the money is, along with premium content sold as add-ons or pay-per-view.

Sport may actually benefit from Music's experience, as the idea that popular content can be accessed legally for free is slowly disappearing. The strategies Music is in the vanguard of for controlling and therefore being able to monetise it's products online will be basically applicable to sports as well.

[Exiled off Main Street]

NBC Sports has announced a shake up of its Premier League offerings for the 2017-18 season. Basically if you (have) cut the cable cord, you will now have to pay $50 for the season to see only a few games, via streaming, as compared to what you can see on cable. If you are still tied to cable, you will now lose games to this aforementioned pay per view option of $50. So to guarantee being able to watch every game of *your team* (which was available for the last few season), you either re-up with cable and add the additional streaming option, or revert to watching Russian web streams for free (with added super strength virus protection). People are pissed off.

[Walt Flanagans Dog]

Does this mean I can subscribe to 'Arena' for the Super League, and say the cricket channel, and not pay top whack for Premier League football which I rarely watch (and some bit of whack for golf, which I never watch?).

[Kevin S]

I was wondering what they'll do about NFL, which I imagine is high on their popularity list.

[ursus arctos]

The pay TV landscape in the UK is quite different from that in the US, but I think it is likely that UK broadcasters will relatively soon face the same kind of challenges that that their US brethren are struggling with.

ESPN, which had been reliably producing more than half of the entire Disney empire's profits for years, has seen its results worsen materially (though it remains quite profitable). As a result, they have made over 400 people redundant in the last year, with 100 "on-air personalities" and writers jetisoned in May.

Fox Sports, which likes to think of itself as ESPN's primary competitor, eliminated its entire digital writing staff earlier this week. Their website is now nothing but clips from their tv shows.

This piece from Deadspin on the latest ESPN layoffs provides helpful context for what is going on over here.

ESPN laid off dozens of reporters, writers, analysts, talking heads, and behind-the-scenes folks yesterday. If the names were surprising—some of these people had worked at ESPN for decades, and some were practically synonymous with the network—the layoffs themselves were not. They’ve been coming for months, and really they’ve been coming for years.

ESPN has been making relatively invisible cuts for a long time. Hundreds of behind-the-scenes people—essential to ESPN’s functioning but unseen by and unknown to viewers—were laid off in Oct. 2015. Thousands of live games aired on ESPN and its sister networks, perhaps a majority of them, are now broadcast remotely, with as few personnel as necessary on-site. It was only a matter of time before the axe swung down on public-facing employees, too, even if the amount of money this saves is relatively trivial.

The causes of the layoffs are clear. As ESPN’s subscriber base, and the rate those subscribers paid monthly, grew in the late aughts and early 2010s, Bristol spent flagrantly. They created the Longhorn and SEC Networks, built a massive new SportsCenter studio, hired hundreds of writers to cover specific teams, and, most importantly, spent billions of dollars on live sports rights. They made big bets. They made wrong bets.


Right around the time the ink dried on a $15.2 billion deal to broadcast the NFL, subscribers began fleeing cable television in droves—not because of anything the Worldwide Leader did wrong, but because of secular changes in the way broadcast and video works. Phones, Twitter, and YouTube began instantaneously delivering highlights and entire games to fans, obviating the need for anyone to watch SportsCenter, or any other news shows, to catch up on what happened in sports, or even, in some cases, to watch live games. Terrestrial ad revenue never migrated online, and the revenue to be found there was largely eaten up by Facebook and Google, leaving little to pay those new ESPN.com reporters.

[Satchmo Distel]

ESPN push a lot of their games to the online channel ESPN3, so maybe the UK will follow that model. I don't see the point of Sportscenter except maybe its compilations of best plays of the week.

[Sam]

Argentine Primera rights are going back to paid services (Fox Sports and Turner) from the start of next season, after eight years of every top flight game being on 'free to air' (I put it in scare quotes because not all of the channels are actually free for large parts of this enormous country). The amount they're charging - AR$300 per month is the reported figure - on top of already-existing cable/satellite fees is high (about £15 a month), and I - as someone who'll actually watch perhaps eight or ten of the fourteen games each weekend - will be one of very few subscribers who'll actually be anywhere near to justifying the cost to myself. On top of which, some figures suggest that even at that amount there's no way Fox can break even over the five-year length of the contract they've signed. They need something like twenty million subscribers in order to do so, which is almost half the population of the country. The AFA have pulled a very fast one, and it's going to be fascinating to see how quickly the clubs next go on strike and the league gets thrown into chaos again.

You'll all be able to read my thoughts about it when it happens on ESPNFC. I hope.

[EIM]

Mobdro ultras. Why pay for something you can get for freemans?