stevegrant

There isn't really anything anyone in this country can do about the game being broadcast live on Setanta, because the broadcasters deal directly with the home team's FA when negotiating live rights. It is when it comes to the highlights package where the other broadcasters then have to negotiate with whoever's showing the game live. This is where Setanta have probably got it wrong. The 1.55m viewing figure isn't too bad considering their fairly low subscriber numbers, but for only 290,000 to watch highlights that were regularly watched by 2.5m in the past, that's pretty terrible.

Not much use "on the move", though, I'd have thought Mario Kart is probably the main example I can think of, if I remember rightly there are a few crossword/Sudoku-type puzzle games available as well.

I read it (and the near-identical one that was on the BBC website earlier this morning), and while the sentiment is all well and good - and I appreciate that he was on the fans' side of the fence in the past - it's all a bit late now and fairly irrelevant. Football at the highest club level will implode within 10 years, in my opinion. The economic climate is hitting your average Sky customer pretty hard at the moment (and is likely to continue for a fair amount of time yet), and one of the first things people will cut back on is Sky subscriptions. It's nearly £50 a month these days, money that could probably feed a family for a week. Without the subscriber levels, Sky will struggle to pull in the advertising revenue, and as a result won't be in a position to offer anywhere near the level of investment into Premier League football when the next contract is up for renewal. It's already obvious that Setanta have paid way over the odds (much like ITV Digital did, but without the likelihood of them going bust due to their operations in other countries) for their share and won't make that mistake twice. When the owners realise that there's not as much money to be milked from the English football fan anymore, they'll soon be walking away, leaving someone else to clear up the mess and to pay the £150k a week wages.

Not at all predictable, was it?

Nothing like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted... These are issues supporters groups, trusts and other organisations have been raising with both football authorities and government for years. Nobody cared enough then, because it wasn't in their interests to care, and I don't really see how anything's changed since then.

No idea what Sky used to get for England away games, to be honest. They have a much larger subscriber base, though, so it stands to reason that their viewing figures for comparitive games would be higher. However, I *think* viewing figures may be calculated based upon the number of people in a household, rather than simply the number of actual subscribers viewing. So while Setanta averaged just over 700k (see Mail comment/quote above), it's highly likely that that figure is not 700k subscribers, but may even be only half that amount taking into account the average number of people in subscribers' households.

Not an awful lot of chance of bowling them out twice at the Oval in two days, to be honest, particularly with the weather forecast predicting more rain and bad light. From the perspective of "must not lose", it makes total sense to keep batting as it reduces the amount of time Surrey have to win the game. They have to win to stand much chance of staying up, whereas we only really need to avoid defeat. There's no chance of a result, so the maximum number of points we're playing for is 12 (5 batting points which we've already got, up to 3 bowling points for taking 9 or 10 wickets in the first 130 overs of the first innings, and 4 points for the draw). That would put us on 150. A handful of points in the final game against Nottinghamshire should see us safe.

Why the **** couldn't England play like that when I went to Croatia away?!

This is the Oval, remember...

Tremlett gone first ball. Surprised we haven't declared now, given that Surrey need 9 wickets to get 3 bowling points, and we've already got the maximum batting points.

Dawson's best score is 38?! Are you sure?

Yeah, they've got a mass broadcast deal with both Virgin Media and BT Vision. No idea of the figures involved, but I think an Independent article earlier in the week mentioned figures of about 2m between the two of them, but yes, it'll definitely be less than 12.99 per month.

The Monopolies Commission and the Competition Commission at the EU ruled that Sky couldn't bid for all of the available live TV packages because it denied the opportunity for other broadcasters to enter the market. The idea of "competition" in the marketplace is that it improves the deal for the consumer. Before the current TV deal, you got a load of games with Sky Sports, and if you wanted, you could pay £50 for the Prem Plus season ticket (or less if you got in early like most people), and that would be it for the season. Under the current TV deal, you get a load of games with Sky Sports, but now if you want the other games, you have to pay £12.99 per month (£155.88). So despite competition increasing, it's had the opposite to the desired effect and actually INCREASED the cost to the consumer.

I've not received anything from them in the post since I signed up, with the exception of the waste-of-paper-and-ink welcome pack.

But if the UK arm of Setanta is losing too much money, I'd imagine they'd just cut the UK bit adrift or cancel its contracts here. They're looking at losing at least £50m this year due to low subscriber numbers. I don't claim to know how big the company is worldwide, but I'd suspect any company's directors would want to get rid of a part of their company that was expected to be profit-making but ended up making that sort of a loss. If they go off the air in this country, as far as the UK population is concerned they've disappeared. I pay £12.99 a month (which went up from £9.99 a month about two months ago without them even telling me - technically illegal, as far as I'm aware) and don't feel as if I'm getting anywhere near value for money. While I generally enjoy their football coverage because it doesn't have arse-licking presenters and pundits, the actual picture quality of the broadcasts is terrible. Given that I'm paying £47 for the full package on Sky (although I really should cancel the Sky Movies part as I hardly ever use it), an extra £13 a month is just too much for the quality of the product they're offering.

ITV Digital's collapse was a combination of a number of factors: 1. Paying WAY over the odds for the Football League rights - even now, Sky pay about a third of the amount ITV Digital bid back then! 2. Poor quality programming - they tried to do everything on the cheap, including lowering the signal strength to save as much money as possible, but all it did was drive customers away. 3. A massive overestimation of the demand for lower league coverage. Sky have it just about right, IMO, with two CCC games every week plus occasional games from Leagues 1 and 2. ITV Digital tried showing a game from what is now League 2 at least once a week. On occasions, the viewing figures for some of the games didn't even register on the ratings aggregators because they were so poor.

Don't get me wrong, I can see where Setanta are coming from with it, but given that they've already got a pretty dreadful reputation (see thousands upon thousands of complaints regarding the near-impossible feat of cancelling your "contract" - even though the adverts said there was no contract - for evidence) you'd have thought they'd want to keep as many people as possible onside. Also, don't forget that the way the England team are performing at the moment isn't lending itself too well to the task of gaining much support. If fewer people are watching and the unthinkable happens (i.e. we win tonight), nobody's going to get to see any highlights because Setanta over-valued them in the buyers' opinions, and as such people won't have as much of an appreciation of the performance. Had they been able to watch highlights and seen a decent performance, they might be persuaded to subscribe to Setanta so they can watch the whole game in future. Slightly speculative marketing, but given that they've put most of their eggs into this basket this season, it's a strategy I think they've possibly missed the boat on.

And BT Vision. There has always been an arrangement since Sky bought the rights to most of the England away games in recent memory whereby one of the terrestrial broadcasters would pay Sky to use the footage to broadcast a highlights package later that night, and the cost for that was apparently a fairly moderate 6-figure sum (according to the Independent, if I remember rightly). Setanta asking for £1m is either particularly greedy knowing that they've vastly overpaid for the live rights (£5m), or they have simply overestimated the price Sky were charging in the past. Setanta still have exclusive live coverage of the game. No other British broadcaster has that.

Important to note for those who want to go to the Wetherspoons at Shepherds Bush, the Central Line station at Shepherds Bush is closed for refurbishment.

For foreign broadcasts like the Andorra game (I'd expect the Croatia game to be the same, if not worse), they're entirely in the hands of the host broadcaster as to the quality of the picture. I also expect Setanta have tried to get away with as little bandwidth on the digital spectrum as possible, given that it costs them a fortune.

It'll be a couple of years yet, I'd have thought. While they're still apparently about 400k subscribers short of breaking even this year, they've got enough cash coming in from their links to Virgin Media and BT Vision to keep themselves afloat for a while. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see them try to wangle their way out of the England contract though, particularly if the Croatia game (quite clearly the biggest game in the group stage) fails to draw the required audiences. Apparently they averaged about 1m viewers (not including pubs) on Saturday, although arguably that low figure was due to the poor quality of opposition, the day of the week (easy enough to watch it down the pub and combine it with a night out) and the pretty-much inevitability of a tedious but comfortable victory. Tonight is quite possibly make-or-break time for Setanta's international football coverage.

Totally agree, although I can't help but think that Bransgrove would prefer a bigger name, perhaps Daniel Vettori who was linked earlier this season...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/cricket/counties/hampshire/7606267.stm

Likewise. I'm only a few miles from the Oval and it's been grey and grim all day.

15-man squad for the Stanford Super Series and India ODI series: Pietersen © Anderson Bell Bopara Broad Collingwood Cook Flintoff Harmison Patel Prior (wk) Shah Swann Sidebottom Wright I really can't understand the inclusion of Cook or Sidebottom. Neither of them are effective ODI or Twenty20 players, IMO. Considering Dimi (and probably a few other players I can't think of off the top of my head) has international experience and a proven reputation in those two forms of the game, it's bizarre that those two have been selected. Central contracts produced only one real surprise, and that is that Michael Vaughan HAS been awarded a central contract for the next 12 months. Stuart Broad is added to last year's list. The ECB has also implemented a 12-month "increment" contract for seven of the fringe players, and if they match certain criteria in their occasional appearances they'll also be upgraded to full central contracts. Those seven are Matt Prior, Tim Ambrose, Ravi Bopara, Samit Patel, Owais Shah, Graeme Swann and Luke Wright.