Larry Ryan: How do we strike a fair deal for our sporting fix?
DROPPING THE BALL: Gabe Davis of the Buffalo Bills fails to catch a pass while defended by Jonathan Jones of the New England Patriots during their NFL match in Orchard Park last weekend. Since the league switched to Amazon Prime for Thursday games this regular season, nearly four million viewers were shed, by some estimates. Pic: Timothy T Ludwig/Getty Images
Will I pay to watch a Gaelic football match on GAA GO this year? I’ve been pondering this — not so much an existential question, as a practical one. I’ll probably put the hand in the pocket for the odd hurling match alright — there are nine earmarked pay per view — even for non-professional reasons. But the football? Maybe if the Tipp bandwagon picks up speed again. Or David Clifford is behind a paywall, perhaps the only means of restricting him.
But will I pull out the credit card for one of the Leinster football semi-finals? Or for the Tailteann Cup ‘Game of the Week’ on May 13? Hands up, it seems unlikely. If you came in of a Saturday evening 10 minutes after one of these games had started, no doubt you’d leave it on the box, half-watching, even if just to grumble about it. And maybe the game would turn out to be brilliant.
You’d have paid already of course, either way, via your subscription, if it had been on Sky. But planning your day, and your budget, around it, seems a bit of a stretch.
Of course, there will be supporters of the counties involved who will be happy to stump up the €12. There is a season ticket option too, currently at €79, which gives you 38 matches, which seems a fair deal. But then there are a lot of fair deals out there at the moment. And if you availed of all the fair deals, you wouldn’t have much left for a square meal.
This poser came to mind because there has been some analysis this week, Stateside, of the viewing figures for Thursday night NFL, since it switched to Amazon Prime for this regular season. Analysts seem to agree that the figures were decent, all things considered, that it wasn’t a disaster, and that punters largely didn’t go bananas because it invariably started buffering just as the QB was going to launch one.
But all the same, they all accepted that the numbers were down, nearly four million viewers shed, by some estimates. “In context, it’s a big decline. It shows you are going to lose people when you go to streaming,” media consultant Patrick Crakes told the . Though the NFL was happy enough to swallow this since Amazon reportedly paid $1.2 billion for the rights this season, seemingly about 80% more than the previous broadcast deal.
Also this week in the US, more details emerged of the fair deal the MLS was putting together, now it has handed its coverage over to Apple TV. $99 for the season or $15 a month is the price point, which punters might consider reasonable. “But if not done correctly, then MLS has already buried itself out of sight,” wrote Sam Fels on .
Being buried out of sight on a stream is something that seems to be concerning even the folk with deep pockets behind the LIV Golf tour, with reports last week suggesting they are trying to give away the rights to TV broadcasters, rather than have GMac and co spreading golf as “a force for good in the world” on a neglected YouTube channel.
Baseball, basketball and ice hockey have their own fair deals out there. A study on CNET this week estimated one-quarter of Americans now have at least nine streaming subscriptions, concluding the wheel may be turning to the extent that it could now be cheaper to just keep paying the cable bill. “Ultimately, depending on your location, getting a cable subscription that includes sports channels might actually be cheaper and easier than streaming.”
But of course viewers are still ‘cutting the cord’, as they say, and cancelling old-school TV subscriptions. As an indication the networks remain concerned, there was also word this week that police in the UK would be ‘going door to door’ in a clampdown on illegal streaming, specifically targeting rogue consumers of the Premier League. The kind of warning shot that seems to regularly make its way into the news. Though we have read of precious few court cases yet, sending down the poor addict who has paid for Sky Sports, BT Sport, Amazon, Premier Sports and all the rest, but still has to delicately dismiss a dozen pop-up ads to watch the 3 o’clock game on a Saturday afternoon.
On a local level, streaming must be swelling the overall audience for sport. There are people watching county championship matches online that might have never ventured into a club field. In this regard, club has arguably paved the way for county to cash in. And maybe people's relatively happy experiences with streaming is why the announcement that GAAGo would replace Sky Sports this season was pretty warmly received.
But there must be some risk involved too, that some of the matches will be buried from view, particularly at a time when everybody seems to be appealing for more profile for Gaelic football, and especially the Tailteann Cup.
And where is all this fragmentation of the sports market going to leave the casual viewer? The League of Ireland will have a fair deal out soon. Who knows how many subs you need to keep on top of the rugby?
We've spent the last three decades gradually watching more and more sport. Will all the new barriers being erected mean we spend the next decade watching less and less?
Is the natural end-game fans just paying to watch all the matches of the team they support, in their sport of choice? Will all commentary boxes eventually be repurposed as fanzones?
And how will you get people interested in your sport in the first place?
Basketball Ireland CEO John Feehan spoke on the podcast recently about his pride in their fair deal, which lets you stream all the Super League games for €49.99. But Kieran Donaghy spoke of the need to get a few more games on telly on a Friday night, to win hearts and minds. A gateway drug.
That's the balancing act, no doubt, for all sports, keeping just enough of their games free, as a teaser for the rest. Annual ratings released this week showed nine of the 10 most watched shows in Ireland last year were sport. And surely people only tuned into the other — the Late Late Toy Show — to see which sporting heroes made a kid's year?
But then we have never been short of takers for the big occasions. The smaller days can be a harder sell. Could there possibly be a market for something that gives you a small dose of all the sports… I dunno, call it Sports Stadium?
Nearly 45, but still pulled out a worldy against Inter in the Coppa Italia this week.
It’s the toughest weekend in the sporting calendar, the fierce continental pride we’ll summon later in the year utterly sundered.
Its integrity shot? Where are we now, that we can’t even rely on the formlines in this grand old competition?
Wout Weghorst may not break record shirt sales at the Theatre of Dreams, but to deride the man as “a lump up top”? Yet another egregious case of discrimination against the big man.
