Premier kick-off puts Setanta back in big league
An ardent Liverpool supporter, Setanta’s marketing operations director was more than happy with his side’s 1-0 defeat of Stoke City at Anfield but his committed viewing began a day earlier and concerned numbers of an even greater personal import.
Earlier this summer the Irish broadcaster agreed a deal with BT which, allied to its existing agreement with the EPL, brought to 71 the number of live top-flight English league games they would broadcast over the course of this latest campaign.
When RTÉ renounced their hold on the highlights rights, Setanta swooped in once again and, at short notice, added Premier League Central to their Saturday and Sunday night scheduling.
“On Friday night I would have been at the laptop tracking the number of subscribers coming in because [that] Friday and Saturday are probably the two biggest days of the season for us subscriber-wise,” says Quinn as he reflects on a hectic few weeks, over tea in a Dublin hotel.
“So I was watching how our call centre was performing and how online was performing. We did incredibly well on Friday, which actually put me in a very good mood for Saturday.”
According to Quinn, it was approaching midnight before the volume of subscription calls began to slow and, though concrete figures are conspicuous by their absence, he described the difference in numbers between this year and last as “night and day”.
Quinn offers a wry grin when a suggested figure of 75,000 is put to him yet the ambition is to double its numbers in the next six months and there is no doubt the addition of BT’s three channels to Setanta’s existing pair has radically improved their offering.
BT brings with it not just those headlining live EPL rights with games on Saturday’s at 12.45pm and 3pm but much more, including the FA Cup, Bundesliga, Serie A, Aviva Premiership rugby and UFC, the last being the mixed martial arts organisation which Conor McGregor has just started to take by storm.
McGregor’s second UFC fight, in Boston, brought an end to a dizzying day of sport on Setanta’s overall sports package on Saturday. The one glitch was a fault in the feed emanating from France which meant plans to show Jonathan Sexton’s first competitive match with Racing Metro 92 fell by the wayside and he will instead ‘debut’ on Setanta tomorrow night, when Racing travel to Toulon.
Whatever the future holds, the last few days, weeks and months have confirmed a startling about-turn in the fortunes of an enterprise that gobbled up broadcast rights at a rate of knots during the boom times before a mountain of debt saw the UK arm of the business come crashing down.
It was a dizzying time for the company which at one point boasted the rights to screen live English and Scottish Premier League fixtures and a whole lot more, but Quinn believes the experience is standing to them now and they have alighted upon the best model.
“It was genuinely hugely exciting. It took massive effort and we were all genuinely heartbroken when it didn’t turn out right. It’s different now, we get all this content and we don’t have to build all these multi-million pound studios. We are getting English-language content that is incredibly well produced and ideal for the Irish market so the cost base now is so much more appealing to what it was five or six years ago. It’s much easier for us to offer a subscription at the right price.”
Yet the question remains whether the Irish market is big enough to cater for a Setanta, given Sky is so entrenched with such a long-term customer base. Will enough sports fans who already pay one subscription fee, be willing to fork out for another, or can Setanta sway the remaining ‘either-ors’ out there?
“It’s like any business, there is the element of a gamble to it as well but we have a lot of learnings from this market six and seven years ago when we really added customers at a rapid rate.
“We have taken all that into account and we still think that we can do the numbers we need to make the business work. In this last 20 days we have easily [reached] our numbers. The quality of the content and the quality of the partner that we are with will stand to us.”
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