Committee told Pay-TV reduces accessibility to sport
That was the evidence presented by renowned academic Dr Paul Rouse to the Oireachtas Committee on Communications, Energy and Natural Resources yesterday.
The committee is investigating whether some sporting events should be disallowed for Pay-TV following the proposal by Minister for Communications, Eamon Ryan that competitions such as the Six Nations and Heineken Cup should be free-to-air.
Rouse and Dr Farrel Corcoran, who both have significant expertise in the area of broadcasting, made presentations to the committee, chaired by Fianna Fáil TD MJ Nolan. The former revealed the results of a research project to analyse the impact of Pay-TV on sport that RTÉ commissioned him to produce in 2007. The figures showed Pay-TV, although considered a vital revenue source for sporting organisations – the IRFU has claimed that it is worth between €10-€12m to its coffers – made their sports less accessible to the wider public.
“The report illustrates that the showing of sports events on Pay-TV leads to a collapse in viewership across the board,” said Rouse. “Indeed, the scale of this collapse is stunning and consistent.”
He went on to provide a comparison between the Heineken Cup quarter-final involving Leinster and London Wasps in March 2007 and the last eight battle between the Irish side and Toulouse 12 months previously. Both games took place on a Saturday, but while the Blues’ clash with Toulouse was watched by 255,000 people on RTÉ, the following season’s quarter-final had more than 80% less viewers on Sky Sports 1, with 47,000 tuning in.
Rouse’s report delved deeper into the type of people to whom the likes of the Heineken Cup is no longer available to at the moment. While the poor, elderly and those based in rural areas are those most deeply affected, the negative effect on viewership figures of Pay-TV goes deeper than that.
“While the strength of free-to-air broadcasting is that it provides equality of access to every community within a country, by contrast Pay-TV subverts this equality” Rouse stated.
“When a sport moves to Pay-TV, people who are older or poorer or who live in rural areas are substantially less likely to be able to watch it, regardless of their interest in that sport. But, even in wealthier areas of cities, significantly fewer people watch sport on Pay-TV than watch it on free-to-air channels.
“If we look again at the Leinster Heineken Cup quarter-finals from 2006 and 2007 we can see that the number of children under 14 watching the matches dipped from 27,000 on RTÉ in 2006 to 2,000 on Sky in 2007; the number of women who watched on RTÉ was 67,000 and on Sky the number was 9,000; the number of people in rural areas who watched on RTÉ was 111,000, while this fell to 9,000 on Sky; the number of farmers who watched the matches fell from 19,000 on RTÉ in 2006 to just 1,000 on Sky in 2007; the number of people over 55 who watched the matches fell from 98,000 on RTÉ in 2006 to 14,000 on Sky in 2007.”
Rouse also unveiled evidence that the sale of broadcasting rights to Pay-TV channels encouraged people to watch Heineken Cup games in licensed premises.
Meanwhile the IRFU last night issued a statement reiterating that a very real threat exists to the security and financing of the game at all levels if there is any change to the ability of the IRFU to negotiate on an unrestricted basis with broadcasters.
“It is erroneous to suggest that the IRFU is overstating the financial threat to the game in Ireland if changes are made to the broadcasting legislation.
“The figures of between €10 – €12m are based on expert calculations centred on the contracts existing between the IRFU, the Six Nations and ERC. These show that between the Six Nations and the Heineken Cup, the IRFU receives €16 Million per annum from the centrally negotiated TV contracts while the Irish TV markets for the combined tournament are valued at €5m.”
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