Kitz Forum
Chat => Chit Chat => Topic started by: Chrysalis on February 12, 2020, 01:54:49 PM
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It seems finally the EPL are looking at moving to streaming their games directly.
Sky has been very heavily reliant on EPL football for its business model, and has struggled to branch out from this.
I think when sold to comcast, the timing was not a coincidence, writing was possibly seen on the wall, now of course sky could end up been the provider of this streaming service, but I Would expect the EPL to move in a different direction as sky are hugely inflating the price consumers pay which is ultimately costing them money.
This affects BT also, but for BT, sport is just a small part of them, and they would just move on.
Thoughts?
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think you need to re-read the article.
this is NOT about UK rights, but about overseas rights where there is already on real relationship with a partner company.
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initially yes, UK rights will go this way, its inevitable.
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I thought Amazon had already sniped some of this from Sky?
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yeah they already have some games. :)
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initially yes, UK rights will go this way, its inevitable.
i disagree.
why would the EPL want to take ont he cost of running customer service, subscription payment services, and everything else involved in the provision of the service when they already have 2 partner broadcasters that are paying them billions for the rights to do it themselves?
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I thought Amazon had already sniped some of this from Sky?
just one days worth of games (and half another day) on a package that neither sky or BT could have bid on anyway - due to competition rules.
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think you need to re-read the article.
this is NOT about UK rights, but about overseas rights where there is already on real relationship with a partner company.
This. Not gonna happen in the UK.
The EFL already do this, allowing clubs to sell their games worldwide direct to fans where the league hasn't already sold the rights in that country.
The EPL would struggle to raise the same revenues they get from Sky by making every game PPV.
The EPL will continue to sell the rights to a broadcaster, like Sky, who will sell it to the fans.
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"Premier League executive director Bill Bush has said English soccer’s top-flight will continue to favour broadcast rights deals for the foreseeable future, despite developing plans to launch its own over-the-top (OTT) streaming service.......................
“We’ve done a fair bit of direct-to-consumer testing and obviously we’d move in a flash if that’s where we thought the consumer was… but at the moment the balance is still very much with a territorial broadcaster,” said Bush.""
https://www.sportspromedia.com/news/premier-league-tv-rights-territorial-broadcaster-ott-streaming-bill-bush
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i disagree.
why would the EPL want to take ont he cost of running customer service, subscription payment services, and everything else involved in the provision of the service when they already have 2 partner broadcasters that are paying them billions for the rights to do it themselves?
You remove the middleman, the Americans are doing this and its far more profitable.
Or they could choose employ Amazon or Netflix to do it so there is still a middleman, but the service would still be much superior to sky at likely lower cost, so much more consumers.
The feedback from the Amazon games is overwhelmingly positive, been able to watch VOD's of finished games and every single game over that period.
Its not going to be tomorrow, but it will happen in my opinion within 10 years for the UK.
My guess is the next bidding will keep SKY/BT, the EPL do have legal hurdles as well. But the bidding after that is where we may start to see larger scale changes happening.
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I disagree entirely.
If you remove the middleman and the EPL sell direct then they would make consistantly less money.
Sky make so much because they bundle so much p00 together in their sport packages.
I would have zero option but to pay a fortune for Sky Sports including the Premier League if I want to watch Scottish football. A tiny percentage of that goes to Scottish football.
They don't get a penny from me, but neither would the EPL.
People who currently pay for Sky Sports pay £30 a month if they are a Sky customer, more through some other providers.
If you want BT Sport on top that's another £10-15 a month, again depending who you buy it from.
For the (very) limited number of games available on Amazon that's more money.
PPV per game from your club of choice might be cheaper for a single game.
What about the other games in the league.
What about the Golf, cricket, F1, etc.
A broadcaster will continue to bid Billions for EPL and the EPL will continue to lap it up.
It makes zero sense to sell direct to consumers in this country.
The broadcasters do a much better job bundling multiple sports and multiple games and getting value from that.
The EPL can't sell direct to fans in this country or any country where a broadcaster has bought the rights.
That's leaves a whole chunk of the world to offer PPV.
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The only advantage of the current deal is that basically there is still a bunch of people who havent got to grips with IPTV so those would be difficult to sell to, and it offers a fixed income to the EPL for the 3 year period so you could say peace of mind,
But the growth potential is extremely limited at this point and even what we have now is not sustainable, the current momentum is pushing sky more and more as a service only for the affluent with the price increases. Subscriptions decrease, and to compensate the prices go up even further. If you are someone who only cares about watching the big 4 clubs, who most of their games get aired and you rich enough that paying £100 a month for TV doesnt dent your wallet, then maybe you have your point of view. If you a fan of Brighton, Leicester city, Southampton who only have perhaps 20-30% of their games on tv at the absolute most, why pay £100 a month to maybe get one game shown on average per month.
Some people just dont like change and progression.
So lets say if EPL IPTV was sold for £20 a month which is about 1/4 of what sky and BT charge. On top of that every EPL game is shown and every game has a VOD, they would need to only sell around 2 million subscriptions to reach 4.8 billion in revenue (per year), that is very easily achievable. As a reminder the current BT/sky deals are barely that for 3 years combined.
We at a point where illegal streams are a better service than the official option, people can literally have an illegal service straight to their set top box, switch channels like normal, and they can watch every single EPL game. A lot of these streams are sold for not much less £20 a month, so that is a price that could be charged en masse. Do not under estimate those cost of a middle man, middle men are a prime factor as to why inflation is so high now days, everyone wants their own piece of the pie.
Its got to a point where illegal streams are competition to the official service, the only way I can see sky and BT holding on is the combination of 2 factors (1) they drop prices significantly, which they wont and (2) they start showing every game which isn't in their interests due to the fact they are scheduled tv platforms. I could see BT may possibly adapt, but not sky.
In 20-30 years we probably wont have scheduled tv at all anymore, it will nearly all be IPTV on demand.
Also I didnt want to say it, but if you want some kind of substance to it, there is already 9 clubs in favour of changing strategy. So it wont need much more of a shift for it to happen. The EPL has also shown in the past they are prepared to take risks, when they took on BT as well as when they broke away from the football league if it means growth in the long term.
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so the EPL charge £20pm.
they will be covering the cost to produce live coverage for every game, the cost to provide the actual service, the cost of customer service and all that for £20pm?
if you think that service would cost just £20pm then i think you need to go lie down for a while.
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The majority of the costs of EPL football is the rights.
The production costs are a fraction of that.
Are you suggesting 4.8 billion annual revenue isn't enough to cover these costs?
Even if the figures were say 1/3 of what I suggested so maybe 600k or so subscribers, it would still be revenue in the billions.
Also I agree they probably would charge more, as capitalism been what it is entities tend to charge the maximum they can get away with in the UK, but if common sense was applied the charge would be kept low to kill of the illegal services and maximise customer count. With that said though I think it would be cheaper then buying a sky satellite tv package. So somewhere in between.
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you appear to be forgetting that if the EPL took everything in house and provided their own service they would need to provide their own customer services, their own billing systems, their own platform costs as well as taking on the production costs.
why is that "better" than simply selling the rights to a company and letting them deal with all those overheads? the EPL get the money and leave everything else to the rights holders.
the clubs, which are the EPL, are never going to vote for something that is going to cost them money and essentially mean they end up getting less income personally.
broadcast methods may change in the future, but the preference is always going to selling the rights and counting the money.
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Your completely overlooking that people pay Sky for Sports, not just football.
Their £20 a month (or whatever Sky currently charge for Sports, likely more) covers cricket, golf, tennis etc.
You're assuming people would stop paying Sky to solely pay for football or they would pay for both.
The EFL currently sell their games abroad on an individual game basis, PPV.
If the EPL followed suit I'd expect them to also sell PPV on an individual game basis. That risks people only buying the big games (probably why Sky only do annual contracts). So that leaves season packages.
No experience of what EFL/EPL charge but a couple Scottish clubs sell packages to their games directly to non UK/Ireland subscribers for £10 a week, which is often 1 game.
£20 a month from the EPL directly? You wouldn't get that for 1 teams worth of games never mind the entire league.
Sky have purpose built studios, production teams, teams of camera operators. Years of experience of the logistics involved.
They have dedicated sports reporters and a 24 hour news operation to back them up. A dedicated sports news channel.
That's just Sky and just in the UK. There's BT Sport with rights here too.
Take a look at the amount of broadcasting partners that have bought the next 3 years worth of rights...
https://www.premierleague.com/news/970151
The EPL are going to do all that themselves, in all those countries and languages, competing with every 1 of those broadcasters trying to take some of their marketing share (some of those are practically monopolies in their countries).
They are going to go to all that trouble, expense/investment, risk, what because they can?
Why is some Spanish customer going to pay the EPL for PPV access when they already pay their own local broadcaster for a Sports package that includes Spanish football and football from around Europe.
While we're at it why don't UEFA and FIFA do the same.
Rather than me just paying for my Sky Sports package and BT Sports for access to live Scottish, English, Italian, French, German, Spanish, European and International football, I could pay the SPFL, EPL, EFL, UEFA and FIFA directly, and get less!
I'll also need to keep paying Sky and BT for the cricket, golf, tennis, MMA, etc. I'll lose domestic European football as they'll also go the PPV route.
What makes you think the EPL is so special they can go down this route, alone, with everyone jumping on the bandwagon and then still making Billions, while massively disrupting a market that has worked for years?
I'm confident in 2022 we'll see similar deals done as last year, with simple rights being sold for huge sums with little work involved other than signing contracts.
Leave it to the broadcasters who know how, who tend to sell Sports as a package. Not everyone only cares about football, or English football specifically.
I for 1 wouldn't give them a penny.
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you appear to be forgetting that if the EPL took everything in house and provided their own service they would need to provide their own customer services, their own billing systems, their own platform costs as well as taking on the production costs.
why is that "better" than simply selling the rights to a company and letting them deal with all those overheads? the EPL get the money and leave everything else to the rights holders.
the clubs, which are the EPL, are never going to vote for something that is going to cost them money and essentially mean they end up getting less income personally.
broadcast methods may change in the future, but the preference is always going to selling the rights and counting the money.
I think you have said this twice, I havent forgotten it, just I dont believe that would be a major obstacle. BT entered the market with absolutely no TV experience whatsoever and set everything within the space of a few a months.
Here is the thing.
I think we are both right.
You advocate what is the "safe" option, to keep things as is, although inevitably the value of the rights will go down as the model is not sustainable for sky/bt. But it is safe in respect to its something that is already setup.
However in life if you want growth and progression, you take risks, and the EPL is a risk taker. Most of the owners of the clubs are non British, which reflects this.
Lets say e.g. you sell something to someone to sell on, they pay you £10 but it costs them £1 to sell it and sell it for £30, then you decide to cut them out and sell it for £20, are you going to worry about that £1 cost when you are making an extra £10 anyway?
There is history of this.
F1 now sell direct to consumers, as their new model, the only reason they not doing it in the UK is because sky are been stubborn and wont release their exclusivity, but most of the world now has consumers able to buy F1 footage directly from F1.
NHL went from using cable tv companies to doing it directly to consumers, its not like I am talking about something that no one has ever done, its a proven model.
The EPL would I expect either hire a company to handle it but sell under their own brand name, or they may still use a 3rd party, which could be amazon, netflix, sky, BT whoever is willing to do the streaming, but for me its the shift from schedule based TV to VOD type services I am predicting, with or without 3rd party.
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I think we are both right.
i don't
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Well i am not in a argumentative mood as you so for me the discussion is over.