New F1 TV deal

[clippedgull]

I only brought age up, as I don't know if you remember when the only live games were the cup final, that's all - agree, it has nothing to do with anything else.

I do have a small issue with the Sky pricing, as you say, switching it between channels, is rather cynical IMO. As a parallel, my 72 year old mum has just taken up playing golf and is completely addicted and loves to watch it. Money is very limited for her as dad has Alzheimers and costs about £700 per week. We though the Sky golf was always on 2, so eventually decided on her spending £12 a month for it only to find it's split between 2 and 3 - our fault I guess for not checking, but still not good.

All five sports channels are now £20.25* as a pack. All bases covered?

*online upgrade price

 

[Herne Hill Seagull]

Sky household in my case, with the Sports channels, still think it's rubbish. Yet again the exigencies of Mammon have come before consideration for what might actually be in the best interests of the sport. Got to wonder what the major sponsors of many of the teams will think about it.

 

[keaton]

Bad news for me as I don't have Sky and still won't be getting it. BBC coverage this season has been excellent, no doubt Sky will dumb it down and then you've got all the breaks in the build up to cope with as well.

Why would Sky dumb it down?
Their cricket and rugby coverage is hardly dumbed down, and while their football stuff's is hardly intellectual it's still much better than ITV or BBC.

Also it's not really a case of Sky poaching more that the BBC can't afford it anymore

 

[Seagulls4life]

Oh that is really annoying, i love watching the F1!

 

[Pavilionaire]

The BBC coverage of F1 is exceptional. Everything about it is good. We can see with QPR that Bernie is a man out to get the best deal possible, regardless of other factors like the size of the TV viewing audience.

If Sky keep the Beeb's presenting team and keep ads out of the race then I don't have a problem with with Sky taking over. Money clearly IS a problem because we've lost the French Grand Prix, almost lost the British one and the German one is under threat. If Sky's money means securing some of these races then that has to be a good thing.

There's a lot of anti-Murdoch feeling at the moment but you have to remember what life was like before Sky. What's happened to cricket with all the Sky money in recent years has been incredible. Sure, the Channel 4 coverage of the Ashes 2005 was memorable, but it didn't pay for new stands, refurbished pavilions, floodlights, youth academies etc.

 

[Herne Hill Seagull]

Sure, the Channel 4 coverage of the Ashes 2005 was memorable, but it didn't pay for new stands, refurbished pavilions, floodlights, youth academies etc.

No, Pav, but it did show the sport in its best possible light to a lot more people who could then potentially fill those stands, enter those academies, benefit from the floodlights. All those shiny things are useless without people interested in the sport.

 

[Tricky Dicky]

Sky household in my case, with the Sports channels, still think it's rubbish. Yet again the exigencies of Mammon have come before consideration for what might actually be in the best interests of the sport. Got to wonder what the major sponsors of many of the teams will think about it.

Why should Sky have the interests of the sport at heart, they are a business and in it for making money. The people whp look after the sport are the sports administrators, presumably Bernie et al, so if they think it's in the sports interests then so be it. I doubt the teams will care less, they will be geting more money which certainly wouldn't have been guaranteed under the BBC. As to Sky sports being rubbish, that's a very general statement and probably depends on how much of it you want to watch - I happen to watch Cricket, Golf, Tennis and the footie, so think I get reasonable value - and the coverage you get with those sports is far greater as befitting dedicated channels. I don't think the footie coverage it as good as it could be, but I very much respect and like the golf, cricket and tennis coverage - oh, and there's always Di Stewart.

* I'm not trying to defend Murdoch, I think he and everything he stands for is a blight on the British society.

 

[Pavilionaire]

It's not as if nobody watches Sky. They have just over £10million subscribers in the UK, so that's about just over 40% of UK households. And the deal includes the BBC getting half of the races and highlights. Therefore, the TV audience for F1 is not going to get chopped massively.

The problem for the BBC is it's getting harder to justify charging the licence fee. Pretty soon the only sport they'll be able to afford to cover will be monkey tennis or car park sumo wrestling.

 

[beorhthelm]

Got to wonder what the major sponsors of many of the teams will think about it.

i was thinking this. the eyeballs will drop very significantly in the UK. i wonder if the other major F1 spectator nations have thier coverage on free to air or pay to air? as i recall, the teams dont necessarily see the fruits of the TV licencing Bernie arranges, so they migth not be too impressed with this.

 

[Pavilionaire]

No, Pav, but it did show the sport in its best possible light to a lot more people who could then potentially fill those stands, enter those academies, benefit from the floodlights. All those shiny things are useless without people interested in the sport.

Hasn't Sky's audience gone beyond that point though? 20/20 cricket has never been anywhere else but Sky, and yet the matches are well-attended and the money continues to flow back to the counties. Test matches have been exclusively shown on Sky for a while and are still sold out despite aggressively high prices for days 1-4.

 

[Gwylan]

There's a lot of anti-Murdoch feeling at the moment but you have to remember what life was like before Sky.

There's a bit of myth that there was no live sport on TV before Sky. It's true that was not the saturation coverage there is now but there was plenty of it.

There was a live 1st Division football match televised on Sunday afternoon (I played football in the mornings, went for a couple of pints and back home to watch the match... bliss); every round of the FA Cup was televised live (the game when we beat Liverpool at home was on telly); all cricket test matches and ODI internationals were live and every round of the Nat West cup was televised; there was live rugby league, live golf tournaments, live tennis - just about everything.

Yes, you now have choice of five sports channels but you still have only one set of eyeballs.

The other thing about Sky is that it's bloody expensive. All five channels cost £40 per month, which is pretty much what I pay for my 100 cable channels, free off-peak phonecalls and broadband put together. And £480 is more than I pay for the Amex season ticket for my son and me.

 

[Herne Hill Seagull]

Why should Sky have the interests of the sport at heart, they are a business and in it for making money.

To use the wretched business terminology that infects sport these days, and offer my opinion as to the reason they should be interested: if your product depends on the good health (not just financial) of another product, it's in your best interests to do everything you can to look after that other product.

If interest in the sport withers away, so will the amount of money going in from other sources, and the number of people prepared to pay Sky to watch it. I realise of course that it's just one sport among the many they cover, but it's one reason why they should care about the interests of the sport.

 

[Tricky Dicky]

There's a bit of myth that there was no live sport on TV before Sky. It's true that was not the saturation coverage there is now but there was plenty of it.

There was a live 1st Division football match televised on Sunday afternoon (I played football in the mornings, went for a couple of pints and back home to watch the match... bliss); every round of the FA Cup was televised live (the game when we beat Liverpool at home was on telly); all cricket test matches and ODI internationals were live and every round of the Nat West cup was televised; there was live rugby league, live golf tournaments, live tennis - just about everything.

Yes, you now have choice of five sports channels but you still have only one set of eyeballs.

The other thing about Sky is that it's bloody expensive. All five channels cost £40 per month, which is pretty much what I pay for my 100 cable channels, free off-peak phonecalls and broadband put together. And £480 is more than I pay for the Amex season ticket for my son and me.

Fair points indeed, but I don't think the pre-sky coverage was as rosy as you paint - just air time alone, on non-dedicated channels is/was limited. My memory is probably wrong here, and you're right, but I really don't remember league matches being shown live. Wimbledon was shown live, then as now, but none of the other tennis. The Open was shown live, but none of the other golf. Test matches were of course live, but that was not sustainable in the modern world, really.

As for value for money, as I said before, I guess it depends on how much you use it - if you watch one footie game a week and nowt else, then of course it's expensive. I can't go to games, and watch some prem games, a lot of golf, much cricket and lots of tennis, so for me, it's worth it on my current income. In fact when I was made redundant and didn't work for 14 months (I didn't claim a penny in benefits), I didn't get to the point of cutting off Sky.

 

[Herne Hill Seagull]

Hasn't Sky's audience gone beyond that point though? 20/20 cricket has never been anywhere else but Sky, and yet the matches are well-attended and the money continues to flow back to the counties. Test matches have been exclusively shown on Sky for a while and are still sold out despite aggressively high prices for days 1-4.

I think this article answers that question. How many of those 10 million pay for the Sports channels? The audience for Sky's cricket coverage is still some distance from its peak during the last Ashes series to be televised on terrestrial TV.

A quick excerpt for those who can't be bothered to read the whole thing:

The viewing figures tell the story plainly. For the final Oval Test which sealed England's great Ashes victory in 2005, Channel 4's free-to-air coverage averaged just short of 3m people, and a triumphant 7.2m peak in the final quarter of an hour when the Test was won. On Sunday, Sky's Oval coverage attracted an average of 856,000 viewers, and a peak, at 5.45pm, of 1.9m - remarkable for pay TV cricket, but not a great chunk of the nation.

I realise it's a couple of years old but that sort of gap simply has not been closed in the intervening period.

 

[Pavilionaire]

There's no comparison between the availability of sport pre-Sky and what's on offer now. The main sports have always been well represented but you couldn't watch 3 live NFL matches on a Sunday or the live Monday night match, live baseball, live Aussie Rules, live Tour De France every day, every major darts tournament live, every European Golf tournament live to name but a few.

As each year goes by more people are subscribing to satellite TV and the disparity between terrestrial TV and Sky audiences will diminish. 5 years ago Phil Taylor would not have finished 2nd in Sports Personality Of The Year, but he managed it in December despite having a relatively disappointing year by his standards.

 

[Gwylan]

Fair points indeed, but I don't think the pre-sky coverage was as rosy as you paint - just air time alone, on non-dedicated channels is/was limited. My memory is probably wrong here, and you're right, but I really don't remember league matches being shown live. Wimbledon was shown live, then as now, but none of the other tennis. The Open was shown live, but none of the other golf. Test matches were of course live, but that was not sustainable in the modern world, really.

That's what I mean about myth. There was one Div1 League match televised every week on Sunday afternoon (as I said in my original post). I think that started about the mid-80s, live FA Cup games were a bit earlier. There was lots and lots of live golf on telly - the Open was televised, so was the Masters and the Ryder Cup. I'm not really a big golf fan but there were several other minor tournaments on telly (my Dad always seemed to watching golf at home, it seemed to be on every week in the summer).

The French Open tennis was certainly televised live, I remember watching it the year Michael Chang won it (I was bored that afternoon as I'm not really a tennis fan either). There was also lots and lots of cricket - it wasn't just test matches, plenty of one-day stuff (Sunday league every week) and even the occasional CC game (but that was very occasional).
There were days when the BBC used to have Grand Prix on one channel and live cricket on another - used to drive my mother mad.

 

[Gwylan]

There's no comparison between the availability of sport pre-Sky and what's on offer now. The main sports have always been well represented but you couldn't watch 3 live NFL matches on a Sunday or the live Monday night match, live baseball, live Aussie Rules, live Tour De France every day, every major darts tournament live, every European Golf tournament live to name but a few.

Eh? I don't have Sky but watched loads of the Tour de France, it's on ITV (and used to be Channel 4 pre-Sky), I also watch live baseball on ESPN. There was also massive amounts of darts on TV before there was Sky and, as I said in the other post, there was too much golf on TV before Sky.

What has changed is that instead of one live football match per weekend, there are now four or five but do we need that many. Sky's too pricey for me but even if I were given free Sky, I doubt that I'd watch much of it. I have ESPN now that has live games and the only ones I've seen are the ones involving Brighton.

 

[Hillian1]

Just as F1 started to get watchable again, less people will watch.

 

[Tricky Dicky]

That's what I mean about myth. There was one Div1 League match televised every week on Sunday afternoon (as I said in my original post). I think that started about the mid-80s, live FA Cup games were a bit earlier. There was lots and lots of live golf on telly - the Open was televised, so was the Masters and the Ryder Cup. I'm not really a big golf fan but there were several other minor tournaments on telly (my Dad always seemed to watching golf at home, it seemed to be on every week in the summer).

The French Open tennis was certainly televised live, I remember watching it the year Michael Chang won it (I was bored that afternoon as I'm not really a tennis fan either). There was also lots and lots of cricket - it wasn't just test matches, plenty of one-day stuff (Sunday league every week) and even the occasional CC game (but that was very occasional).
There were days when the BBC used to have Grand Prix on one channel and live cricket on another - used to drive my mother mad.

At least they didn't have to compete with bloody Eastenders. Noi, that is one reason why I watch almost nothing on BBC1, because they insist on broadcasting that utter shite.

 

[brunswick]

watch online

in fact watch bbc online and ditch the tv and licence.