BT Sport
- Thread starter Castia
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At the moment. it's £12 extra/month (might be £15 for HD) if you just add the BT Sports channel without taking Broadband. That will probably increase further by the time the CL deal kicks in, closer to £20+/month. The subscription costs for both channels are/will be too high.
Always nice to see Murdoch get a bloody nose,unlike Sentana sports BT seems to have deeper pockets.
BT are just looking to be the only company people have their internet with. Just switch to BT Internet (it's as good as any) and you get BT Sport for free anyway. They're definitely more arsed about subscribing people to their broadband rather than using their Sport Channels as a standalone product.
That's the only reason I have BT Sport, I wouldn't pay for it on top of Sky Sports. Just wish the feckers would hurry up with enabling my cabinet with Infinity, the local exchange has been ready for a couple of months.
Sure, fans are the biggest losers. But this was already the case with the Premier League and Sky. On that front, I have no sympathy with Sky -- they finally seem to have a competitor who is happy to give as good as it gets.
With all football seemingly going to pay broadcasters, maybe now people will realise how good they have had it with ITV's 21-odd year unbroken coverage of the Champions League. Sure I hate Chiles and Townsend, but I watched for the football, not the OTT analysis you see on Sky. In France, Champions League football has already moved to the subscription market. This was going to happen in time.
Streaming sites are going to be hit hard with this news. Nobody is going to spend almost £1 billion on sporting rights and have some upstart in his one-bed flat channeling the footage to half the world.
Can someone explain why they're opposed to BT Sport getting the rights to CL? Is it because you guys have to pay for Sky AND BT now?
You think when this comes in it'll still be free to broadband subscribers? I doubt it.
I dont think the monthly rate will change all that much. They paid a record fee for the PL rights and the channel is free for broadband, Virgin and Vision customers. I think it will be more of the same, they will try and 'kill' off the broadband market and make BT the only real choice with the offer of a free channel and all the sport you could want.
All they need is a decent punditry line up, maybe take a few from Sky (presuming they are offering top wages) and get rid of the stupid shit like Mark Halsey popping up in the commentary every 30 seconds.
All they need is a decent punditry line up, maybe take a few from Sky (presuming they are offering top wages) and get rid of the stupid shit like Mark Halsey popping up in the commentary every 30 seconds.
Errrr....how much did Sky pay for their PL rights? Because no-one streams their matches, ever
No, it's because the BT coverage of the PL so far is garbage in comparison to the Sky version; a lot of us, me included, get BT Sport for free currently anyway.
Errrr....how much did Sky pay for their PL rights? Because no-one streams their matches, ever
Sky have been fighting tooth-and-nail to clamp down on the streaming sites. Sky pay £300 million for these rights.
You think BT are going to pay three times that price and happily allow that to happen?
Yes. BT will raise their prices by a fair bit (and when the Premier League rights are next up for bidding, BT will for sure push harder for them) and Sky are unlikely to decrease their prices.
And for those who get BT for free for whatever reason currently, I doubt it'll be the same in a couple of years time.
I agree. I do nothing but whinge about ITV but I can certainly see it allows fans who can't afford the subscriptions the opportunity to watch some quality football. It begs the question, when does this hit the World Cup? Somebody above mentioned it, but I'd like to see things like the World Cup, Wimbledon and Athletics remain on terrestrial television for as long as possible.
I don't think they will happily allow it to happen but I think what he's saying is that it's obviously proving extremely difficult to stop.
Cheers. In Australia we're stuck with FoxSports with the excellent (not) Mark Bosnich. And I can definitely see BT incurring a higher fee for subscriptions.
As for streaming sites, I doubt they'd be able to shut down every site. Another one will most definitely pop up in their wake.
As for streaming sites, I doubt they'd be able to shut down every site. Another one will most definitely pop up in their wake.
I made the choice to have BT Sports as I couldn't afford both, if BT put their prices right up, then I will end up with neither, unless Sky reduce their prices.
You've missed the point, Sky have spent vastly more than BT in order to obtain contracts and still they haven't had any success in stopping streaming sites.
I can see it being the case.. But if not, that's why you sign up now
At the minute I get it free* with Virgin anyway. I expect that will change too though...
*kind of.
Exactly, you will never stop streaming of matches online. It's impossible to stop it completely.
Indeed. I've been using the same streaming site for several seasons, one of the big ones that was supposedly shutdown a year or so ago, and never yet missed a game that I've wanted to watch.
Firstrowsports was a leading player in the streaming of live football and that site was banned from showing live Premier League games earlier this year. The frequency of how many of these websites are being shut down is very telling and I can see them being very few and far between in the coming years. That goes for torrent sites and sites that stream movies, too (Movie2k was shut down earlier this year also).
On the contorary, a lot more people may be looking to streaming as an alternative so the demand for streams will always be there.
Banned stream sites never stay banned either, they just make a new one and the cycle continues.
The PL must be rubbing their hands. What does this value the next deal at?
Sky are going to be absolutely desperate to retain/win as much as it possibly can and will likely be taking a 'no chances' approach. Meanwhile BT will know they're potentially just one set of negotiations away from firmly displacing Sky as the premier football broadcaster in this country. This means that the Premier League are likely to be in for yet another enormous increase when the rights come around for negotiation in a couple of years time.
Sky are going to be absolutely desperate to retain/win as much as it possibly can and will likely be taking a 'no chances' approach. Meanwhile BT will know they're potentially just one set of negotiations away from firmly displacing Sky as the premier football broadcaster in this country. This means that the Premier League are likely to be in for yet another enormous increase when the rights come around for negotiation in a couple of years time.
As have I. We (as in my parents) have Sky Sports and BT Sports on their subscription but as I've been living out on with the past three years, I have been relying on streaming sites to watch my football. I watch up to seven/eight games a weekend depending on who's playing, and I never miss a match that I want to watch.
However, as I've said earlier, the frequency at which these sites are being identified and shut down is worrying. The fact that companies are willing to spend billions on the rights to show these football games must mean that they are confident of getting millions to purchase their subscriptions, not watch them illegally on their laptops like we currently do.
It's no different to the UK government attempting to stop people downloading torrents. The genie is already out of the bottle, it's going to be impossible to put it back now, stopping streaming relies on judicial and political bureaucracy, which move little faster than tectonic drift. The sheer speed and flexibility of the people providing streams means that trying to stop them is like trying to grab smoke. Every time they block or close down a site, within minutes the block is circumvented or a mirror or alternate site appears.
And what good has it done? You can still watch any match you want on a stream.
Close down one site and two more will pop up somewhere.
It could go either way IMO.
On the one hand Sky will be desperate for it. They won't be able to afford to lose it which you'd think would push the price up. However, for all we know this now means their main competitor (BT) can't afford to spend as much on domestic football and might leave Sky as being the only realistic bidder. In which case the price could stay around the same.
That said, I expect Al Jazeera to go hard at the next lot of PL rights.
How long before the bubble bursts? This kind of growth has got to be unsustainable. Although I suppose the US market hasn't been fully tapped yet, neither has the Asian market.
What annoyed me most was the government deciding that Sky shouldn't be allowed to buy all the rights packages for the PL in the UK. In effect, what they did was force customers who wanted to watch all the televised games to subscribe to more than one broadcaster. If Sky had got the lot they'd of increased their prices, but I reckon by less than the cost that subscription payers have to pay for BT Sport on top of the Sky subscription.
That's the funny part. The Premier League are greedy buggers. Don't release DVDs or merchandise of classic matches and close down YouTube videos -- for what, exactly?
Last full year results: BSkyB revenue £7.2bn - BT revenue £18.3bn...and its only going to widen when this deal kicks in. It will be interesting to see if BT go all out for the kill from here on out.
Not sure about Al Jazeera's intention. People thought they would put in a late bid for Premier League rights last time around -- the speculation scared Sky.
Sky apparently renewed their Football League rights earlier than planned because someone tipped them off that BT were after it.
It's not that simple though. For example, BT has to fix a £9bn hole in it's pension fund and it's revenue is actually falling, and is expected to continue to do so. Sky's profit margin is actually greater than BT, of that £7.2bn, the profit was £1.2bn. For BT, they made £2.4bn, double the profit but they required 2.5 times the revenue to do it.
Wait, no CL football on Sky at all?
That's an amazing coup for BT.
That's an amazing coup for BT.
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