Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
Especially if Sky loses the lucrative sport. As an outsider, it looks to me like the big rights battles and payments has totally divorced the Premier from the rest of football and distorted the pay and transfer fees of players to the point were it's not sport but a mad exhibition fuelled by money with Sport Subscriptions ripping off people (some in Ireland have needed three subs some years). They had football, rugby and cricket before there was pay TV and it was on TV too.
My wife watches a lot of tennis on Eurosport DE, or did before now.
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The idea is apparently to reduce it to one subscription to rule them all.
(And send all the money straight to Premiere.)
American sports leagues all have streaming services and are ready to phase towards a direct distribution channel when the numbers add up.
HBO is doing the same thing: it costs $15 a month via cable (of which the cable company keeps $6) and setting up a massively enhanced streaming service, HBOMAX, at $15 a month, of which all the money goes to HBO. They'll be transitioning customers away from cable to internet over time.
The tech is easy and available to all so there is little reason to pay middlemen to get to market. It is the same logic as authors going Indie; a bit more upfront effort, a much higher profit margin ever after and no need to surrender control of the product.