Paul Rouse: Cocktail of choice scores best with GAA audience
IN FOCUS: A view of Sky Sports covering a game at Páirc Uí Chaoimh. Picture: INPHO/James Crombie
Coverage of Gaelic games has been transformed in the nine years that have passed since Sky Sports were given the rights to broadcast provincial All-Ireland hurling and football matches by the GAA in 2014.
Giving exclusive rights to broadcast 14 championship matches (and shared rights to six others) to Sky Sports was a dramatic change by an organisation which had categorically and repeatedly ruled out such a deal as being against the ethos of the Association.
Over the past nine years the coverage has been good. The presenters (notably the excellent Gráinne McElwain and Damien Lawlor), commentators, co-commentators and analysts were also usually very good. From Peter Canavan to Nicky English, there were former players who had interesting things to say about matches and teams and players.
But it is not accurate to claim that it is Sky Sports that has transformed coverage of Gaelic games over the past nine years. Indeed, it is an insult to the abilities of people who have worked for RTÉ, TG4 and TV3 (now Virgin Media) in the production of GAA coverage over the years to imagine that they needed Sky to show them how to do their job properly.
It is difficult to think of a significant innovation in coverage introduced by Sky Sports to GAA coverage. Perhaps something can be said for the touchscreen, but really this felt like a bit of a gimmick when the more interesting thing was to listen to the words.
The sense of a missed opportunity is best exemplified by the fact that Sky Sports have had the exclusive rights for the past five years to broadcast a mid-week show on Gaelic games. They did not use this opportunity to deliver innovative programming. So the coverage was good in the presentation of matches, but to claim more than that is not really credible.
There is also the undeniable logic of the numbers. Year after year, viewership of championship matches on Sky Sports remained stubbornly low in Ireland, while in Britain it was negligible. This was true from the very beginning. When Cork played Clare in the hurling championship in 2015, the average viewership on Sky Sports who had exclusive rights was 37,700 in Ireland. This is about one-tenth of the viewership that the match would get on free-to-air television. In the United Kingdom, the average home viewership for the 2015 All-Ireland Hurling Final on Sky Sports was 29,700, from a population of about 65 million. The figures remained poor season after season.
So if not Sky Sports, what is it that has transformed coverage of Gaelic games since 2014?
Two basic transformational processes are responsible. The first is technology. We are only at the beginning of the change that the Internet is bringing to how sport is organised. This is most obvious in the broadcast of games which has now clearly entered a new era. It is evident across every significant sport that the broadcast market is rapidly evolving in a way that is leading to increasing diversification of sports broadcasting.
Live sport is still shown on free-to-air broadcasters (such as RTÉ) and pay-TV companies (such as Sky Sports), but also can now be found on streaming services (such as Amazon Prime), on media websites (such as the Irish Examiner) and on apps run by sports organisations themselves (such as NFL Game Pass).
In this context, the aspect of the GAA rights deal that brought Sky Sports into the market in 2014 actually contained another aspect that has proved more important in the longer run. This is the establishment of GAAGO – a streaming service owned in partnership by the GAA and RTÉ.
When GAAGO was set up in 2014, it was designed as a subscription service which was only available outside Ireland. It meant that emigrants could pay an annual subscription to watch all GAA matches broadcast on television in Ireland.
This service enjoyed a steady increase in popularity and profits, until the second transformational event occurred – Covid-19 and, in particular, the lockdowns which meant the playing of GAA matches behind closed doors.
Even before the Covid crisis, there were clubs and organisations in various sports in Ireland live-streaming their own sporting events and trying to get people to buy passes on-line. But, as history reveals time and again, one of the things that crises do is to accelerate change that is already underway.
And so it is that, in Covid, GAAGO became available in Ireland and was no longer restricted to people who lived outside the island. When inter-county GAA matches returned in autumn 2020, GAAGO was allowed for the first time to stream live National Football League matches within Ireland. This allowed for coverage of every match in every division. After the provincial and All-Ireland championships started, GAAGO streamed every match not shown live on television.
The cost of each match was €5. It meant that 35 championship matches were carried live on television before Christmas 2020; with the remaining 12 games broadcast on GAAGO.
This innovation built on a revolution in the broadcast of club matches that had taken place earlier in the summer of 2020, where county boards had worked with local providers to stream their club championships.
What the evidence of GAA broadcasting during the Covid-19 pandemic showed was that a mix of public service partners – RTÉ, TG4 and BBC NI – with GAAGO at national and international level, coupled with county boards working with local partners, offers the most comprehensive service, and one that carries sustainability. At least until the technology renders it redundant.
