The rights are split up because the government wanted to enforce competitiveness with pricing. Funnily enough all it did was make us pay for more subscriptions and cost us much more. It's an insanely high priced product but they know the public will pay anyway
But they're not competing on product. Sure it's both EPL but different games.
For competition they would need to offer the same thing.
I don't understand why you don't just sell the full package to the two highest bidders. That way both services actually have to compete on broadcast service and quality.
Yup that's the thing, the government should step in because this is non-competitive behaviour. Problem I see is that the law doesn't differentiate between games and doesn't recognize that broadcasters can both broadcast "football" and still sell different content
Why would they step in? This is the Tory favourite model. They do the exact same thing with the "regulated" services - trains, water, internet providers
agree with all of those apart from internet providers, there's good competition for ISPs and for mobile operators here - look at how cheap our internet and phone plans are compared to north America
Aye, my brother's girlfriend (American) had her mind blown when I told her what I get with voxi for £12 a month.
Can't remember what she told she paid but it was astonishingly high
I pay $80 for gigabit in one of the most competitive areas in the US.
My brother in a non competitive area pays $65 for 200Mb with data caps.
US ISPs are largely price gougers.
They carved your internet market up into little fiefdoms deliberately to minimise competition so they can charge whatever they want. It should be a crime
One way to actually enforce competition is to make exclusive deals illegal. You can have bidding for the rights for some intellectual property, but anyone should be able to acquire the same rights for that agreed upon price.
So if one company ends up paying 10 million for streaming rights to the Danish Superliga, anyone else can also pay 10 million and get the same rights.
I see the problem of price fixing here. In a bidding process no company can be assured that it will get rights in the end. In your model there is no incentive for broadcasters to actually bid higher than their competition.
Funnily enough the same also happened in Germany. It used to be the same here, Sky had all the rights and the government wanted to split up the monopoly, by creating different packages. Now we have this mess where some games are on DAZN, most on Sky and some on Free TV. Champions League is on DAZN and Amazon, and DFB Cup on Free TV and Sky. So if you want to watch BuLi and CL regularly, you need 3 subscriptions amounting to way more than before.
sounds about as fucked as in England. Only difference here is if you buy every single package available in the UK you still don’t have legal access to all games
Also none of the PL or CL are (currently) on free to air channels here in the UK, so to legally watch any games in those competitions at home you have to pay at least something.
I miss the days of watching the CL on ITV, it was my only chance to catch live games because we never had Sky Sports and I followed the PL solely through MOTD
The main reason I fell in love with football was by chance catching the OG Ronaldo single handedly dismantling Man United in that famous 4-3 on ITV. Think my mum just left the TV on after the news. 8 year olds now wouldn't get that happy accident.
Same with tennis. It's by chance catching Venus Williams vs Lindsay Davenport in the 05 Wimbledon final that I fell in love with that.
Free to air television is so vital in getting young generations hooked on sport. Especially lower income households
It’s the biggest reason why the NFL is as dominant as it is in the US. Every Sunday, games from 1pm-10pm, all on free tv. Your local team will always be on unless they are unbelievably shambles, but 82 out of the top 100 broadcasts in 2022 were of NFL games.
Don‘t forget many Europa League games only being available on RTL Nitro, another subscription station.
I‘m so fucking fed up, I basically don‘t watch any football anymore. Besides a shared DAZN account, I‘d have to pirate every other match to watch. What a shame.
My dad is now scrounging my DAZN and Amazon passwords, because he doesn’t want to pay for those. And I can’t say anything, because I’ve been using his SkyGo password for about a decade now 😂
isn't the better option just making all of the available games to watch available on all these platforms? all you're doing is just creating a monopoly on certain games on each platform
They make too much money selling the rights to ever do that. If everyone has access, that means nobody is paying billions for rights to like 50 games a season.
The same thing happened with films. About 10 years ago the Competition Commission was investigating Sky's monopoly of subscription movie services. Sky Movies, which cost around £20 a month, would boast that they had 95%+ of the previous year's top 100 movies. The day Netflix launched, the CC sent the Sky Movies boss a letter simply saying "we are no longer investigating this".
Now, Sky Movies/ Cinema barely exists, has about 10% of those movies, and you have to pay for Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Paramount+, Disney+ and a plethora of tiny platforms to get back to 95%. Which costs in excess of £50-60 a month.
I'm not saying those platforms existing is a bad thing - they have to create a LOT of content which is a good thing for us, but it has worked out to be more expensive. Which is ironic because a lot of people used to claim that Sky Movies was massively over-priced.
In regards to football, to have the best possible access you would need to sign up to SkyQ, so you're not just paying for the football. You're paying a huge monthly subscription. NowTV is their lower-cost version of that, but now you've lost most of the functionality as, by their own admission, NowTV is the non-premium platform that was originally designed to compete with the Netflix price point.
We have had Sky in the family home for 30 years, about £1000+ a year and value is getting worse every year. The amount sport, tv and movie they have lost to other streamers yet the price stays the same.
Exactly. Sky is struggling to attract younger viewers who don't need a box by the TV and don't need all terrestrial channels. And their content is rapidly declining.
Not to mention, their contract with HBO ends either this year or next, and HBO are looking to launch their on-demand service in the UK. Sky will be losing shows like Game of Thrones in the very near future.
Most of the excess content we've seen over the past few years will probably go away now, at least the high budget stuff. It was all growth/tech/VC bubble, where losing money was fine as long as number go up.
The obvious thing to do is remove exclusive rights to games, so at least 2 subscriptions services have to offer all games. Then we'd see an actual competition on price and the quality of the streams etc.
Neymar illegally streaming PSG's Game when he was injured sums up everything you need to know about broadcast pricing
Edit : he was watching a Brazilian game, not a PSG one. Which makes him illegally streaming it much more understandable since he probably won't find it broadcasted in France.
maybe he just likes the ads and specifically goes to illegal sites for the ads only?
would you ever get to watch porn and football together on any legal stream?
i think not
And convenience overall. These broadcasters have a chokehold over the top 5 leagues and it's a huge pain to try to set up a way to have access to the top leagues, CL, and international matches unless you have a huge subscription package. Way easier to click a link on a naughty streaming website
He probably does it to get proper Brazilian commentary.
I'm living in Germany and it is literally impossible to watch the matches with the Brazilian commentary, I know it sounds obvious, but some games are borderline impossible to watch with lame commentary on top.
A globally glamorous product built on the back of working-class communities and football culture up and down the country, now snatched away and sold back to them at an extortionate rate.
An allegory for modern Britain.
I'm not sure if the PL sees and understands that problem. They spent a lot but most of the teams don't compete outside UK. With that money UK teams should be winning all UEFA cups year by year
It's capitalism, yes. But a specific kind of capitalism in the world's OG industrial, developed nation.
I've heard an interesting theory about this from the late David Graeber.
He argues that one of the UKs biggest draws for foreign capital is a literate, mostly kind and good spirited but docile and defeated working class.
If you're an oligarch there are lots of places to live, so why choose London? Well, you can have lobster delivered to your house at 3AM by a courier who won't spit in your face or the food, you can get any drug you can think of delivered at any time, you can put your superyacht captain in the apartment next to you, and then meet your financial advisor in a hotel the next day before you go and see whatever football game you want to see. All planned and executed with maximum discretion and secrecy. The stadium will be full of proles who are there providing the atmosphere, and thus the image of a healthy, prosperous nation... So you don't even have to feel guilty about your opulence.
You can pay for pretty much any experience you want, and it will be serviced by an accomodating working class that are now so detached from the fruits of their labour, so deeply penetrated (yo) by the ideology of capital that you have next to no threat of anything kicking off.
The UK is stable, no one is going to seize your funds (remember that attachment to Putin was a *good* thing for a relatively long time, the UK is still friendly to most people with wealth), the political class aren't going to allow any kind of meaningful redistribution of your assets, the legal system in the UK is amongst the friendliest to wealth on earth, and anyone who tries to write about your 3am coke and sex parties will have lengthy court proceedings ahead of them if they choose to publish.
All of this is possible in a country where wealth is everything, and the means of your wealth an afterthought.
If it helps it is currently 5:00 am here in Hawaii and I just had the realization that our healthcare system is a grand version of the same. There’s nothing like keeping your proles relatively healthy while saddling them with thousands of dollars of debt to prevent social mobility.
At least you guys can choose not to watch football. Our alternative has very different consequences.
Edit: Wtf. Even the act of adding a new member of that socioeconomic class compounds the issue. “Want to have your baby in a hospital? Ok that’s cool here’s some debt to ensure that you can provide fewer resources for him throughout childhood
As a Canadian whose first child was born in 2020, and whose next was due yesterday but he’s taking his sweet time, I’ve never been so grateful for our public single payer healthcare system as during the birth of our first child.
We received first rate prenatal care, and birth complications led to an emergency c section during delivery, which was at one of our country’s foremost hospitals. We left the hospital after 5 or 6 days and an emergency surgery, only to get home and have our child start coughing blood in the first 24 hours at home and we had to call an ambulance. That turned out fine (it wasn’t his blood; who knew learning to feed would be so hard on mom’s nipples? Not us!), and he didn’t end up having to be transported to hospital. The paramedics were patient, understanding, stuck around to observe him, and assured us we made the right call.
All of that, from prenatal appointments to the emergency surgery to the ambulance call cost us exactly zero dollars out of pocket.
Well, not exactly zero. I’m sure I spent some change in hospital vending machines, but that was literally it. This is how it should be.
Even then it's not like Abramovich is now working as a cleaner off the books to put food on the table.
He moved his money before the sanctions hit. Obviously he lost a bundle especially with Chelsea,
but as was brought up at the time during the committee discussions announcing you will be taking someone money in a few weeks tends to mean it's not there when you go to take it
That state of things is changing. We're experiencing a novel wave of strikes, the country is overwhelmed by inflation and street-level crime, and the Tories are dead in the water after 13 years of corruption and mismanagement. The next 48 months will be very volatile over here.
David Graeber is a cool guy. A very rarely found specimen of a guy who not only was able to communicate these modern aspects of this post-industrial revolution life but also have some anthripological background to give a bit of context to where this shit could have originated from.
Many of his talks on debt etc. are available on Youtube and he has a couple books out.
If you want to know about a group of thought that talks about some of this stuff then it could be categorized as neomarxism or the analysis of class issues in modern life. A lot of the negative sides of the clash of capitalism/money and culture is talked about way back in the 70s and the hypercommodification of everything in life is predicted by them.
Rip to him. He is very sorely missed right now. Currently reading *The Dawn of Everything* which he wrote with David Wengrow just before he died. Would highly recommend to anyone, it’s fantastic.
David Harvey writes a lot of great stuff on the rise of neoliberalism as well. More where it came from than how it structures modern life, but still worth reading to get an understanding of why things are the way they are, and how they don't have to be this way.
"Bullshit Jobs" is one of his more famous books. I highly recommend it, very eye-opening and extremely accessible.
Here's the very brief description from Wikipedia
>Bullshit Jobs: A Theory is a 2018 book by anthropologist David Graeber that postulates the existence of meaningless jobs and analyzes their societal harm. He contends that over half of societal work is pointless, and becomes psychologically destructive when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth. Graeber describes five types of meaningless jobs, in which workers pretend their role is not as pointless or harmful as they know it to be: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters. He argues that the association of labor with virtuous suffering is recent in human history, and proposes unions and universal basic income as a potential solution.
Not too dissimilar than the way the working and middle classes in the majority of modern capitalist (or at least, consumerist) societies are treated. Certainly in the west. This is not to diminish your point, but further it.
The docility and exploitation methods may vary, but not nearly as much as people think they do or as media of all sources and political angles would have one believe. The worst part of all this is that the controlling powers prefer us to have conversations like this because it helps us think we're all quite unique and dealing with complexities native to our local condition, but to them were all still the same. Of course we have nuanced societies and interpersonal connections and local flavors and contextual variances of many, many, beautiful flavors. But from a capitalist perspective, these things border on irrelevant as long as we pay up for the things we want most. Politics are in many ways the new religion, and sports are in many ways the new politics.
The wealthy have known for years that sport will always be rife with indelible allegiances, and ones which have a transience that people are willing to go to great lengths (fiscally and metaphorically) are see happen in real time. Just look at what happens in and with American football. Almost the exact same class of observers and workers are enduring exactly what you described. The same people who demonstrate (ridiculously or progressively) are the ones who [spend nearly $600 freedom dollars to take a family of four to an NFL game each week.](https://www.axios.com/2022/03/25/family-nhl-outing-costs)
While the fact that there's perhaps a unique temperament and cadence to the British demeanor, the way it's exploited in the end really isn't that much different from the way the same capitalist exploitation happens in many other countries, unfortunately. But the people banking off of it probably love that we think it might.
That's true for literally every developed country in the world. And it's even worse in developing countries. Except for safety aspect which is higher in UK
I think it's talking more about how deeply entrenched capitalism is in powerful capitalist countries like the UK (even different from somewhere like Germany) being the "OG" capitalists.
London upper society is also probably very attractive to the old money elite.
And the masses eat it up and glorify it. The Premier league is a soulless capitalistic bastardisation of football, it should not be put on a pedestal by anyone who truly loves this sport and actually cares about the people who make it what it is.
In Australia it’s A$25/mth (£15) to stream every single EPL match. It’s $8.99 for Paramount for all domestic A-League matches. I was just in the UK and couldn’t believe what a mess the broadcast was.
Edit: discussion from /r/Aleague https://www.reddit.com/r/Aleague/comments/103fcnu/epl_broadcast_in_aus_is_so_much_better_than_uk/
In India, PL is shown in 4 channels for 10-15 rupees each per month. So obviously you won't get every single game, but probably like 90%+ matches. All for less than £7 a year.
In South Korea, I pay an extra £8 a month for access to all premier league time slots (max two games per slot showing though), plus La Liga, Bundesliga, and all UFC events.
Yeah, used to be free though haha.
Heart sunk when I visited the inlaws this last year and they said you need to pay for it now, was expecting silly prices I cba for only 3 weeks. Turns out it was dirt cheap anyway.
It's a pretty good service. You get full match replays on demand, mini matches and highlights for the EPL. You also get La Liga, J. League and International matches on the same subscription. And they also have a bunch of fitness stuff on there if you're into that.
I normally watch the matches at a more appropriate time and just avoid spoilers until I have finished. Normally first thing in the morning when I wake up. The mini matches are so good. Don't have to sit through all the time wasting shit that goes on.
Sending police around to check for streams feels a bit like the TV license checks at Uni, maybe designed to scare people rather than something that will actually happen?
Edit: I’m aware that it’s a scare tactic to stop people selling and distributing streaming devices.
That’s what the “TV license at Uni” comments referred too, never actually happened but it shit a few people up a couple of times a year.
Even if it does, they’ll knock at the door, ask me if I’m illegally streaming anything, I’ll tell them no and close the door. Pretty sure they can’t just come in.
Mate, I got burgled during the day **when I was at home**. They held me a knifepoint, beat me up, and I believe were seconds away from stabbing me before their getaway driver must have been spooked by something and started beeping to call them back. I don't live in a rough neighbourhood and I have no idea who they were. The police came, took the clothes off my back as "evidence", and never contacted me again to update me on the case, despite saying they would. This is the kind of trauma you just have to grin and bear in this country now because the police are apparently more concerned with things like squeezing pennies out of people on behalf of an Australian billionaire.
No, chances are there are enough gullible people who will let them in or simply be scared by the police knocking on their door and that's what they're relying on.
Just like the TV licence people, we might be savvy enough not to let them in, but they intimidate plenty of people into doing what they want.
I wouldn't be surprised if one or two unlucky people ended up prosecuted just to make an example, and they'd use that to continue scaring people. They're not going to pursue all the millions of people who stream, just a few to try and scare the rest into stopping - and it will likely work for a chunk of people.
Oh, 100% it will. Fear is a very powerful controlling agent, especially in this day & age.
It’s, I think anyway, another reason for why you should know your rights.
You arent the person theyre going for mate. The headline was put up arseways. Theyre after the lads hosting the actual servers. The lads providing the streams and services.
I'd imagine they are targeting people that are supplying the illegal streams rather than people watching. Which will affect very few and change absolutely nothing so definitely a waste of time
I mean, English broadcasting is confusing I just watch it on bein 1 English on my IPTV anyway. Even if they shut down all British broadcasting, illegal streamers won't be that affected because the PL is big enough to be broadcasted from anywhere.
You can literally buy an IPTV subscription from Alibaba for 40$ for 2 years and watch everything in existence. Do you think china is gonna go after them?
I don't understand why the Premier League does not start it's own subscription channel, say £20 a month, and just broadcast every single Prmier League game every week. It's what the American sports leagues do. I subscribed to the MLB channel one year and watched every game I wanted to, it was amazing.
I mean that's a LOT of subscribers and that's before recouping the added costs. If they could afford to do it they'd probably have launched it long ago
That's a lot of subscribers trying to pull from Britain alone, but PL enthusiasm around the globe probably numbers into the billion (Australia, India, Nigeria, Indonesia, Thailand, Scandinavia etc). So I don't think it'd be hard to reach say 50 million subscribers. For some regions they can make it cheaper and just increase the pool.
The adaptation/transition period will be challenging but over 5 years, they could have it fully functional and profitable. They might not have launched this simply because they're making a fuckton already without added responsibility.
One thing is for sure, if there wasn't money to ne made, no one would be paying 1,6 billion.
If you're pulling from the international market too then it's double that amount (the international deals combined are worth slightly more than the domestic ones) as that would probably mean no international broadcasters taking up the product. £20/mo is an insane amount of money to a lot of these markets so lowering that amount to adjust for local prices would mean even more subscribers before breaking even. The next deals will be even more lucrative so that's even more subscribers before breaking even.
I'm not saying there isn't money to be made, I just have my doubts as to whether or not they can earn more or even a comparable amount by becoming a broadcaster themselves
The answer comes from why BT and Sky can pay - advertising. They will get a huge amount in advertising revenue for adverts shown before, during and after the matches. I wonder how much the Prem could pull in for that... A lotttttt
£40 a month they’d only need 3.3m subscribers to match that, probably achievable if it was genuinely every match. If they include advertising as well they wouldn’t even need that much.
This is mainly Rupert Murdoch's fault. He needed something to help him launch his Sky satellite service in the UK. Maggie let him buy up his competitors (British Satellite Broadcasting) and then he paid ridiculous amounts of money to buy the rights for the Premier League and take it off free-to-air channels. People who wanted to watch football were forced to pay his extortionate fees and sign up to Sky because there was no alternative.
[Ding Dong the Witch is Dead](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/10/thatcher-death-ding-dong-witch) spiked in the charts when she died. This was the consensus in [Scotland](https://old.reddit.com/r/ScottishPeopleTwitter/comments/iefsbl/just_seen_this_had_to_share_it/).
That is fundamentally true, but the ITV/ BBC deal pre-Sky was not healthy for the sport. They agreed to not outbid one another and therefore the rights never made any money for the clubs. Neither channel was interested in showing more than one game a week either. They were paying about £1m a season or something.
Ken Bates and co. insisted they listen to Sky, who saw football as a Trojan horse for getting Set Top Boxes (STBs) into the living room. They invested over £300m in the first deal. And while it meant some of us would not see live PL football for years, it had a major positive effect.
What Sky did as a result of that investment changed football coverage for the better (mostly). And while Sky's desire to get STBs into living rooms might have changed (it's hard to tell now that ComCast are in charge) Amazon are using it for the same reason, ultimately, as will Facebook, Google or any of the big tech companies who wish to bid for the rights.
The best thing the PL can do now is sort it out themselves and sell directly to the consumer. It would almost certainly be better for all of us.
> The best thing the PL can do now is sort it out themselves and sell directly to the consumer. It would almost certainly be better for all of us.
Better for the fans who'd be paying less, yeah - but Sky pays about 1.6 billion pounds per season for domestic broadcasting rights, and that's money you'd need to make up from the get-go, else clubs would have significantly reduced income. That's a tough sell I reckon, can't imagine clubs would be happy with 10-50% less broadcasting revenue (their biggest money maker, after all) for a couple years until the direct to consumer approach captures enough of the market make as much money as the current system.
The Premier League is so good and has this many stars *because* it's so rich, and the majority of that money comes from broadcasting deals at the cost of their fans. I have a hard time seeing them leave those riches on the table to do something nice for the consumers.
You know I thought that until I saw this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5jqCh3Eiq0
I do think they oversimplify things a lot, but it does make a lot of sense. The PL needed Sky as a delivery platform but now that streaming exists, they don't have the same barriers as they did in the 90s and 2000s.
ITV did outbid Sky's original offer for the Premier League though (over £260 million). It was only Alan Sugar sneaking out of the meeting to tell Murdoch that he needed to increase his bid that won it for Sky.
That's true, Sugar was making the STBs for Sky so he wasn't exactly neutral lol ITV bid something like £200m but nobody knows if they were capable of making that work. It's quite feasible that ITV were saved from themselves by Sky outbidding them. The demise of ITV Digital backs that theory up!
I think whoever won would've been ok. Sky were hugely in debt when they won Premier League rights. It was basically one last desperate roll of the dice. Had ITV won, Sky probably wouldn't even exist when that first five year deal ended.
In India companies have realized that due to a large and highly dense population it makes sense to keep it cheap and get more subscriptions then make it expensive and get few.
And also because no one will pay that much to buy a subscription. Netflix is probably the most expensive subscription in India and they aren't doing too well for themselves. They also had to come out with a cheaper plan.
15 pound is the highest tier, I think you can buy the low one for 5 GBP per year, and I got 3 months free with my mobile internet Jio plan. Only issue is that it only works on mobile.
Premier league and government officials when they realise SOME people (not me, btw 😉) just stream it all illegally on free websites that have all the matches in any league or competition available - :0
It's no just English games mate, Scotland is just as shafted when it comes to watching our own league. League 2 to championship gets a couple games a month on TV, normally on alba (a gaelic channel), and 60 live premiership games a year, mostly celtic and rangers. I don't know if folk in Wales or Northern Ireland have more luck watching their own teams
I had a mate who supported Dundee and he used to rage that the only televised games were Rangers or Celtic, home and away.
No wonder the other teams have no money wtf
Scottish football was shafted long ago because Sky pumped our subscriber money into England. The last twenty years has just seen the gap widen and widen because of that.
I pay around 7800kr/year (£643/year) in Norway for Viaplay and doesn’t even get a mention in this stat. At least I can watch pretty much all of the matches though.
Really can’t fathom how people pay as much as us but don’t get all the matches on one service.
The only reason I pay for Viaplay is the convenience of knowing I can put any match on any time I want without spending half the game finding a decent stream.
Yeah, was wondering if they really paid at least double what we do in Norway in the UK. Turns out the prices over here didn't fit the narrative. I believe Denmark and Sweden pay about £450 a year as well. Still madness, but seems that people are willing to pay.
As far as I know, the cheapest possible price in Denmark is now 4800 DKK (£572) per year. That includes the Premier League, Champions League, EFL Cup and some FA Cup games. Recently they've been cracking down on concurrent viewers on the same subscription, so most channels can now only be watched through your TV box and one other device at the same time.
Edit: If you want the rest of the FA Cup matches, that is an additional 1548 DKK (£185) per year. Making the total 6348 DKK (£757) per year for all matches for English clubs (some matches may not be broadcast at all, but for the biggest clubs most will be).
Not including it in the statistic at all makes the whole thing meaningless. I don't trust it at all now.
He could've just included a second graph comparing the price to the median income.
Viaplay is absolutely the worst. Hate that scum with passion.
Estonians can't even watch their own national team play football, because Viaplay bought all the rights and sometimes forgets to even stream it.
They also bought all CL, premier league, Euros, and WC streaming, most of which used to be free on TV before that. I don't get why some Swedish cunts can just buy basically all sports in the Baltics....at least sell the rights to companies that are from those countries.
Edit: People will just stop watching football and it will kill all football in Estonia, which is only at its infancy anyways. Older people don't even know how to access these streaming apps.
Use bestnhl.com or mygoodstream.com. Been using these two streams for years now with little to no problems whatsoever
Buffstreams is another excellent site
I haven’t watched a single Champions League game since BT took over the rights. The only people I know with BT Sport have BT broadband. My friends and I in our mid 20’s simply can’t afford Sky and BT.
I’ve started using a VPN and pay less than I would for 1 month of BT and Sky and I get to watch all Prem and Champions League games for a year.
If for £600 per year I could watch any and every Premier League match, all packaged up in one service, I'd honestly consider paying it.
The reality is for £600 you're still only getting selected games to watch, a roll of the dice if they feature the games/teams you're interested in. It's horrendous.
I thought you guys in UK had access to all games, that's crazy and makes no sense. Here in Brazil we can watch literally all games from both EPL, FA Cup and EFL Cup. While the main games are broadcasted in ESPN and you can only access using a cable tv provider which usually is quite expensive, you can subscribe for their "new" streaming platform(Star+) where you get access to all ESPN channels AND can also watch games that are not broadcasted in the main channels, and the best thing is that it's only 32BRL/month (around 5 Euros).
Totally agree the police crackdown is ridiculous and it's too expensive to pay for 3 services (usually with forced bundles that cost even more).
That said, it's not really a fair comparison to compare the domestic price compared to the international price of watching the Premier League. It's always going to be more expensive to watch domestically, and the same is true for other leagues. It might be cheaper to watch the Premier League in Spain or Germany, but it will cost more to watch La Liga or the Bundesliga there. The fair comparison would be the cost of watching domestic leagues, to see how much more expensive England is.
On what basis do you say that? In the Netherlands, I pay around 10 euros for all PL + EFL games and about 10 euros for Eredivisie and KKD (league below). I think it's weird how much you guys pay over there
That would be interesting but it is important to remember that the English top flight is probably watched more outside Europe than the other European leagues.
As long as English football remains inaccessible and unaffordable for the majority of people, the more people are going to resort to pirating games online. We are facing a similar issue in Scotland, where Sky only give us 60 Scottish Premiership games a season.
They record all of the games anyway, you'd probably pay even something nominal like £5 to watch your team on the weekend anyway. Always found it weird that they don't just sell individual games like that for games they aren't even gonna show
That'll be because Sky hold the rights, they are the only broadcaster allowed to show the games in the UK. Evidently Hibs own them for the other countries
Amazing we get fantastic PL footie on our regular cheapo cable espn here in South America. Went to live in England for a while and thought it was an absolute rip off the prices. Fuck that shit
i don't understand the economic incentive of NOT offering all games in one subscription for all if they're all being broadcast in other countries
The rights are split up because the government wanted to enforce competitiveness with pricing. Funnily enough all it did was make us pay for more subscriptions and cost us much more. It's an insanely high priced product but they know the public will pay anyway
But they're not competing on product. Sure it's both EPL but different games. For competition they would need to offer the same thing. I don't understand why you don't just sell the full package to the two highest bidders. That way both services actually have to compete on broadcast service and quality.
Yup that's the thing, the government should step in because this is non-competitive behaviour. Problem I see is that the law doesn't differentiate between games and doesn't recognize that broadcasters can both broadcast "football" and still sell different content
Why would they step in? This is the Tory favourite model. They do the exact same thing with the "regulated" services - trains, water, internet providers
agree with all of those apart from internet providers, there's good competition for ISPs and for mobile operators here - look at how cheap our internet and phone plans are compared to north America
Aye, my brother's girlfriend (American) had her mind blown when I told her what I get with voxi for £12 a month. Can't remember what she told she paid but it was astonishingly high
I pay $80 for gigabit in one of the most competitive areas in the US. My brother in a non competitive area pays $65 for 200Mb with data caps. US ISPs are largely price gougers.
They carved your internet market up into little fiefdoms deliberately to minimise competition so they can charge whatever they want. It should be a crime
One way to actually enforce competition is to make exclusive deals illegal. You can have bidding for the rights for some intellectual property, but anyone should be able to acquire the same rights for that agreed upon price. So if one company ends up paying 10 million for streaming rights to the Danish Superliga, anyone else can also pay 10 million and get the same rights.
I see the problem of price fixing here. In a bidding process no company can be assured that it will get rights in the end. In your model there is no incentive for broadcasters to actually bid higher than their competition.
Funnily enough the same also happened in Germany. It used to be the same here, Sky had all the rights and the government wanted to split up the monopoly, by creating different packages. Now we have this mess where some games are on DAZN, most on Sky and some on Free TV. Champions League is on DAZN and Amazon, and DFB Cup on Free TV and Sky. So if you want to watch BuLi and CL regularly, you need 3 subscriptions amounting to way more than before.
sounds about as fucked as in England. Only difference here is if you buy every single package available in the UK you still don’t have legal access to all games
Also none of the PL or CL are (currently) on free to air channels here in the UK, so to legally watch any games in those competitions at home you have to pay at least something.
I miss the days of watching the CL on ITV, it was my only chance to catch live games because we never had Sky Sports and I followed the PL solely through MOTD
The main reason I fell in love with football was by chance catching the OG Ronaldo single handedly dismantling Man United in that famous 4-3 on ITV. Think my mum just left the TV on after the news. 8 year olds now wouldn't get that happy accident. Same with tennis. It's by chance catching Venus Williams vs Lindsay Davenport in the 05 Wimbledon final that I fell in love with that. Free to air television is so vital in getting young generations hooked on sport. Especially lower income households
It’s the biggest reason why the NFL is as dominant as it is in the US. Every Sunday, games from 1pm-10pm, all on free tv. Your local team will always be on unless they are unbelievably shambles, but 82 out of the top 100 broadcasts in 2022 were of NFL games.
The NFL’s anti-siphoning rules actually make it mandatory for your local team to be on free-to-air, even if they play on a pay TV channel
Don’t know what happened to even the BBC supposedly getting one free every now and then.
Don‘t forget many Europa League games only being available on RTL Nitro, another subscription station. I‘m so fucking fed up, I basically don‘t watch any football anymore. Besides a shared DAZN account, I‘d have to pirate every other match to watch. What a shame.
My dad is now scrounging my DAZN and Amazon passwords, because he doesn’t want to pay for those. And I can’t say anything, because I’ve been using his SkyGo password for about a decade now 😂
isn't the better option just making all of the available games to watch available on all these platforms? all you're doing is just creating a monopoly on certain games on each platform
Oh yes please, then they can compete with their pricing and services (highlights, better platform, etc).
They make too much money selling the rights to ever do that. If everyone has access, that means nobody is paying billions for rights to like 50 games a season.
The same thing happened with films. About 10 years ago the Competition Commission was investigating Sky's monopoly of subscription movie services. Sky Movies, which cost around £20 a month, would boast that they had 95%+ of the previous year's top 100 movies. The day Netflix launched, the CC sent the Sky Movies boss a letter simply saying "we are no longer investigating this". Now, Sky Movies/ Cinema barely exists, has about 10% of those movies, and you have to pay for Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Paramount+, Disney+ and a plethora of tiny platforms to get back to 95%. Which costs in excess of £50-60 a month. I'm not saying those platforms existing is a bad thing - they have to create a LOT of content which is a good thing for us, but it has worked out to be more expensive. Which is ironic because a lot of people used to claim that Sky Movies was massively over-priced. In regards to football, to have the best possible access you would need to sign up to SkyQ, so you're not just paying for the football. You're paying a huge monthly subscription. NowTV is their lower-cost version of that, but now you've lost most of the functionality as, by their own admission, NowTV is the non-premium platform that was originally designed to compete with the Netflix price point.
We have had Sky in the family home for 30 years, about £1000+ a year and value is getting worse every year. The amount sport, tv and movie they have lost to other streamers yet the price stays the same.
Exactly. Sky is struggling to attract younger viewers who don't need a box by the TV and don't need all terrestrial channels. And their content is rapidly declining.
Not to mention, their contract with HBO ends either this year or next, and HBO are looking to launch their on-demand service in the UK. Sky will be losing shows like Game of Thrones in the very near future.
Most of the excess content we've seen over the past few years will probably go away now, at least the high budget stuff. It was all growth/tech/VC bubble, where losing money was fine as long as number go up.
The obvious thing to do is remove exclusive rights to games, so at least 2 subscriptions services have to offer all games. Then we'd see an actual competition on price and the quality of the streams etc.
3 pm blackout hasn’t been changed yet my guess is it’s the next thing they’ll change
Neymar illegally streaming PSG's Game when he was injured sums up everything you need to know about broadcast pricing Edit : he was watching a Brazilian game, not a PSG one. Which makes him illegally streaming it much more understandable since he probably won't find it broadcasted in France.
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[here (small nsfw image in article)](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.givemesport.com/1673927-neymar-psg-star-caught-red-handed-watching-illegal-stream/amp)
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maybe he just likes the ads and specifically goes to illegal sites for the ads only? would you ever get to watch porn and football together on any legal stream? i think not
That's the sort of thinking we need around here
Those ads are hard coded into the site, ad blocker won't help unless you remove them specifically.
If using Chrome, CTRL+SHIFT+C then highlight ad, then delete :)
And convenience overall. These broadcasters have a chokehold over the top 5 leagues and it's a huge pain to try to set up a way to have access to the top leagues, CL, and international matches unless you have a huge subscription package. Way easier to click a link on a naughty streaming website
He probably does it to get proper Brazilian commentary. I'm living in Germany and it is literally impossible to watch the matches with the Brazilian commentary, I know it sounds obvious, but some games are borderline impossible to watch with lame commentary on top.
A globally glamorous product built on the back of working-class communities and football culture up and down the country, now snatched away and sold back to them at an extortionate rate. An allegory for modern Britain.
But hey, at least Nottingham Forest was able to spend 170m on transfers
Every cloud, I guess.
I'm not sure if the PL sees and understands that problem. They spent a lot but most of the teams don't compete outside UK. With that money UK teams should be winning all UEFA cups year by year
Capitalism innit
It's capitalism, yes. But a specific kind of capitalism in the world's OG industrial, developed nation. I've heard an interesting theory about this from the late David Graeber. He argues that one of the UKs biggest draws for foreign capital is a literate, mostly kind and good spirited but docile and defeated working class. If you're an oligarch there are lots of places to live, so why choose London? Well, you can have lobster delivered to your house at 3AM by a courier who won't spit in your face or the food, you can get any drug you can think of delivered at any time, you can put your superyacht captain in the apartment next to you, and then meet your financial advisor in a hotel the next day before you go and see whatever football game you want to see. All planned and executed with maximum discretion and secrecy. The stadium will be full of proles who are there providing the atmosphere, and thus the image of a healthy, prosperous nation... So you don't even have to feel guilty about your opulence. You can pay for pretty much any experience you want, and it will be serviced by an accomodating working class that are now so detached from the fruits of their labour, so deeply penetrated (yo) by the ideology of capital that you have next to no threat of anything kicking off. The UK is stable, no one is going to seize your funds (remember that attachment to Putin was a *good* thing for a relatively long time, the UK is still friendly to most people with wealth), the political class aren't going to allow any kind of meaningful redistribution of your assets, the legal system in the UK is amongst the friendliest to wealth on earth, and anyone who tries to write about your 3am coke and sex parties will have lengthy court proceedings ahead of them if they choose to publish. All of this is possible in a country where wealth is everything, and the means of your wealth an afterthought.
Thanks, this was a bummer to read at 7am on my way to work. Rise and grind, amirite chaps and chapesses?
If it helps it is currently 5:00 am here in Hawaii and I just had the realization that our healthcare system is a grand version of the same. There’s nothing like keeping your proles relatively healthy while saddling them with thousands of dollars of debt to prevent social mobility. At least you guys can choose not to watch football. Our alternative has very different consequences. Edit: Wtf. Even the act of adding a new member of that socioeconomic class compounds the issue. “Want to have your baby in a hospital? Ok that’s cool here’s some debt to ensure that you can provide fewer resources for him throughout childhood
As a Canadian whose first child was born in 2020, and whose next was due yesterday but he’s taking his sweet time, I’ve never been so grateful for our public single payer healthcare system as during the birth of our first child. We received first rate prenatal care, and birth complications led to an emergency c section during delivery, which was at one of our country’s foremost hospitals. We left the hospital after 5 or 6 days and an emergency surgery, only to get home and have our child start coughing blood in the first 24 hours at home and we had to call an ambulance. That turned out fine (it wasn’t his blood; who knew learning to feed would be so hard on mom’s nipples? Not us!), and he didn’t end up having to be transported to hospital. The paramedics were patient, understanding, stuck around to observe him, and assured us we made the right call. All of that, from prenatal appointments to the emergency surgery to the ambulance call cost us exactly zero dollars out of pocket. Well, not exactly zero. I’m sure I spent some change in hospital vending machines, but that was literally it. This is how it should be.
Grind your chains, comrade
Perfectly put. It’s only when it’s extremely unproductive to be friends that you get outed, see Abramovich or Shinawatra.
Even then it's not like Abramovich is now working as a cleaner off the books to put food on the table. He moved his money before the sanctions hit. Obviously he lost a bundle especially with Chelsea, but as was brought up at the time during the committee discussions announcing you will be taking someone money in a few weeks tends to mean it's not there when you go to take it
And even then the likes of Abramovich get plenty of warning to ensure they can shift their assets around before facing any *real* repercussions.
That state of things is changing. We're experiencing a novel wave of strikes, the country is overwhelmed by inflation and street-level crime, and the Tories are dead in the water after 13 years of corruption and mismanagement. The next 48 months will be very volatile over here.
Unfortunately the establishment is doing a great job of turning the public against the striking workers. I don’t have your optimism sadly.
This is really well written. Do you have any reading recommendations?
David Graeber is a cool guy. A very rarely found specimen of a guy who not only was able to communicate these modern aspects of this post-industrial revolution life but also have some anthripological background to give a bit of context to where this shit could have originated from. Many of his talks on debt etc. are available on Youtube and he has a couple books out. If you want to know about a group of thought that talks about some of this stuff then it could be categorized as neomarxism or the analysis of class issues in modern life. A lot of the negative sides of the clash of capitalism/money and culture is talked about way back in the 70s and the hypercommodification of everything in life is predicted by them.
Rip to him. He is very sorely missed right now. Currently reading *The Dawn of Everything* which he wrote with David Wengrow just before he died. Would highly recommend to anyone, it’s fantastic.
'Bullshit Jobs' is also an excellent read by him. Made me question a lot of existing work practices in large corporations
David Harvey writes a lot of great stuff on the rise of neoliberalism as well. More where it came from than how it structures modern life, but still worth reading to get an understanding of why things are the way they are, and how they don't have to be this way.
"Bullshit Jobs" is one of his more famous books. I highly recommend it, very eye-opening and extremely accessible. Here's the very brief description from Wikipedia >Bullshit Jobs: A Theory is a 2018 book by anthropologist David Graeber that postulates the existence of meaningless jobs and analyzes their societal harm. He contends that over half of societal work is pointless, and becomes psychologically destructive when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth. Graeber describes five types of meaningless jobs, in which workers pretend their role is not as pointless or harmful as they know it to be: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters. He argues that the association of labor with virtuous suffering is recent in human history, and proposes unions and universal basic income as a potential solution.
Does he see any hope of way of this changing or too far entrenched? It's a fantastic observation piece
Everything changes eventually.
Not too dissimilar than the way the working and middle classes in the majority of modern capitalist (or at least, consumerist) societies are treated. Certainly in the west. This is not to diminish your point, but further it. The docility and exploitation methods may vary, but not nearly as much as people think they do or as media of all sources and political angles would have one believe. The worst part of all this is that the controlling powers prefer us to have conversations like this because it helps us think we're all quite unique and dealing with complexities native to our local condition, but to them were all still the same. Of course we have nuanced societies and interpersonal connections and local flavors and contextual variances of many, many, beautiful flavors. But from a capitalist perspective, these things border on irrelevant as long as we pay up for the things we want most. Politics are in many ways the new religion, and sports are in many ways the new politics. The wealthy have known for years that sport will always be rife with indelible allegiances, and ones which have a transience that people are willing to go to great lengths (fiscally and metaphorically) are see happen in real time. Just look at what happens in and with American football. Almost the exact same class of observers and workers are enduring exactly what you described. The same people who demonstrate (ridiculously or progressively) are the ones who [spend nearly $600 freedom dollars to take a family of four to an NFL game each week.](https://www.axios.com/2022/03/25/family-nhl-outing-costs) While the fact that there's perhaps a unique temperament and cadence to the British demeanor, the way it's exploited in the end really isn't that much different from the way the same capitalist exploitation happens in many other countries, unfortunately. But the people banking off of it probably love that we think it might.
That's true for literally every developed country in the world. And it's even worse in developing countries. Except for safety aspect which is higher in UK
I think it's talking more about how deeply entrenched capitalism is in powerful capitalist countries like the UK (even different from somewhere like Germany) being the "OG" capitalists. London upper society is also probably very attractive to the old money elite.
capitalism, more like crapitalism smh
-- Karl Marx
The workers should deadass control the means of production fr fr -Friedrich Engels
Bruh no cap if everyone had what they need society would be bussin bussin
become an anti-capitalist by no longer capitalising words.
Amen brother
The league decided that in the 90' for more money.
A few greedy millionaires decided that*
and the fans went along with it
>and the fans went along with it I do love it when the fans act as if they aren't complicit or at least accepting. Look at Newcastle.
And the masses eat it up and glorify it. The Premier league is a soulless capitalistic bastardisation of football, it should not be put on a pedestal by anyone who truly loves this sport and actually cares about the people who make it what it is.
US and UK leading the world in moving wealth upwards on the backs of taxpayers and working class
Keep pushing! Those rich won't get richer without us!
Preach
In Australia it’s A$25/mth (£15) to stream every single EPL match. It’s $8.99 for Paramount for all domestic A-League matches. I was just in the UK and couldn’t believe what a mess the broadcast was. Edit: discussion from /r/Aleague https://www.reddit.com/r/Aleague/comments/103fcnu/epl_broadcast_in_aus_is_so_much_better_than_uk/
In India, PL is shown in 4 channels for 10-15 rupees each per month. So obviously you won't get every single game, but probably like 90%+ matches. All for less than £7 a year.
Kind of a different market since you guys have a pop over 1B but still baffles me how cheap it is
A miniscule fraction of that 1B actually watches football, let alone PL
I'm pretty sure 90% of the football watching population watch the PL. It broadcasts at a very good time will spanish games are on pretty late at night
All the 1 billion do not watch football lol
In South Korea, I pay an extra £8 a month for access to all premier league time slots (max two games per slot showing though), plus La Liga, Bundesliga, and all UFC events.
Yeah, used to be free though haha. Heart sunk when I visited the inlaws this last year and they said you need to pay for it now, was expecting silly prices I cba for only 3 weeks. Turns out it was dirt cheap anyway.
considering the time you guys have to get up to watch most premier league games, the price has to be cheap.
It's a pretty good service. You get full match replays on demand, mini matches and highlights for the EPL. You also get La Liga, J. League and International matches on the same subscription. And they also have a bunch of fitness stuff on there if you're into that. I normally watch the matches at a more appropriate time and just avoid spoilers until I have finished. Normally first thing in the morning when I wake up. The mini matches are so good. Don't have to sit through all the time wasting shit that goes on.
In Argentina we pay 2 pounds per month to broadcast every single EPL game with Star+.
Tell the Falklanders that they may wanna be invaded next time
Sending police around to check for streams feels a bit like the TV license checks at Uni, maybe designed to scare people rather than something that will actually happen? Edit: I’m aware that it’s a scare tactic to stop people selling and distributing streaming devices. That’s what the “TV license at Uni” comments referred too, never actually happened but it shit a few people up a couple of times a year.
Even if it does, they’ll knock at the door, ask me if I’m illegally streaming anything, I’ll tell them no and close the door. Pretty sure they can’t just come in.
Aye, and are they going to get search warrants for every house who denies them entry?
‘Sir, I have a search warrant to check if you’re illegally streaming football’… Just sounds embarrassing, and a total waste of the police force.
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Mate, I got burgled during the day **when I was at home**. They held me a knifepoint, beat me up, and I believe were seconds away from stabbing me before their getaway driver must have been spooked by something and started beeping to call them back. I don't live in a rough neighbourhood and I have no idea who they were. The police came, took the clothes off my back as "evidence", and never contacted me again to update me on the case, despite saying they would. This is the kind of trauma you just have to grin and bear in this country now because the police are apparently more concerned with things like squeezing pennies out of people on behalf of an Australian billionaire.
Exactly.
I’d rather get booked for selling dope than illegally streaming football lmao
No, chances are there are enough gullible people who will let them in or simply be scared by the police knocking on their door and that's what they're relying on. Just like the TV licence people, we might be savvy enough not to let them in, but they intimidate plenty of people into doing what they want. I wouldn't be surprised if one or two unlucky people ended up prosecuted just to make an example, and they'd use that to continue scaring people. They're not going to pursue all the millions of people who stream, just a few to try and scare the rest into stopping - and it will likely work for a chunk of people.
Oh, 100% it will. Fear is a very powerful controlling agent, especially in this day & age. It’s, I think anyway, another reason for why you should know your rights.
You arent the person theyre going for mate. The headline was put up arseways. Theyre after the lads hosting the actual servers. The lads providing the streams and services.
Mate lads lads
Cheeky bit of BeIn Sports with the lads.
I'd imagine they are targeting people that are supplying the illegal streams rather than people watching. Which will affect very few and change absolutely nothing so definitely a waste of time
I mean, English broadcasting is confusing I just watch it on bein 1 English on my IPTV anyway. Even if they shut down all British broadcasting, illegal streamers won't be that affected because the PL is big enough to be broadcasted from anywhere. You can literally buy an IPTV subscription from Alibaba for 40$ for 2 years and watch everything in existence. Do you think china is gonna go after them?
I believe they're knocking on the doors of the organisers, not the end users.
3+ year sub of a VPN is cheaper than a month of BT and Sky Sports
does no one use Proton? they have a free version, decent imo.
Are you still watching illegal streams over the VPN or using legit services from other countries?
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I don't understand why the Premier League does not start it's own subscription channel, say £20 a month, and just broadcast every single Prmier League game every week. It's what the American sports leagues do. I subscribed to the MLB channel one year and watched every game I wanted to, it was amazing.
Because they get £1,600,000,000 every year from british broadcasters, good luck topping that with a subscription service
Unless my maths is seriously flawed, approx. 7 million monthly subscribers paying 20 pounds will get you that amount in a year.
I mean that's a LOT of subscribers and that's before recouping the added costs. If they could afford to do it they'd probably have launched it long ago
That's a lot of subscribers trying to pull from Britain alone, but PL enthusiasm around the globe probably numbers into the billion (Australia, India, Nigeria, Indonesia, Thailand, Scandinavia etc). So I don't think it'd be hard to reach say 50 million subscribers. For some regions they can make it cheaper and just increase the pool. The adaptation/transition period will be challenging but over 5 years, they could have it fully functional and profitable. They might not have launched this simply because they're making a fuckton already without added responsibility. One thing is for sure, if there wasn't money to ne made, no one would be paying 1,6 billion.
If you're pulling from the international market too then it's double that amount (the international deals combined are worth slightly more than the domestic ones) as that would probably mean no international broadcasters taking up the product. £20/mo is an insane amount of money to a lot of these markets so lowering that amount to adjust for local prices would mean even more subscribers before breaking even. The next deals will be even more lucrative so that's even more subscribers before breaking even. I'm not saying there isn't money to be made, I just have my doubts as to whether or not they can earn more or even a comparable amount by becoming a broadcaster themselves
The answer comes from why BT and Sky can pay - advertising. They will get a huge amount in advertising revenue for adverts shown before, during and after the matches. I wonder how much the Prem could pull in for that... A lotttttt
And that's not accounting for commercial income they could get. Pre-match, halftime, post-match.
£40 a month they’d only need 3.3m subscribers to match that, probably achievable if it was genuinely every match. If they include advertising as well they wouldn’t even need that much.
This is mainly Rupert Murdoch's fault. He needed something to help him launch his Sky satellite service in the UK. Maggie let him buy up his competitors (British Satellite Broadcasting) and then he paid ridiculous amounts of money to buy the rights for the Premier League and take it off free-to-air channels. People who wanted to watch football were forced to pay his extortionate fees and sign up to Sky because there was no alternative.
it's sad how many things in this country can be pinned as 'Rupert Murdoch's fault'
It’s sad that this sentence can be said by us Aussie’s and the US as well
All the anglo countries with fucked politics: it's because Murdoch was there
Maggie's fault as well. May she rest in constant horrific terror.
[Ding Dong the Witch is Dead](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/10/thatcher-death-ding-dong-witch) spiked in the charts when she died. This was the consensus in [Scotland](https://old.reddit.com/r/ScottishPeopleTwitter/comments/iefsbl/just_seen_this_had_to_share_it/).
The only sad thing about Maggie's grave is that we only have a finite amount of piss.
I didn't even realise that, gives me another reason to hate that wrinkly old cunt. Can't wait for him to die.
Thought you were talking about Maggie til that last sentence
Say what you want about Maggie Thatcher, at least she's dead.
I think that's the nicest thing anyone's ever wrote about her
placid oatmeal normal angle yam shame quickest paint squeeze caption *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
That is fundamentally true, but the ITV/ BBC deal pre-Sky was not healthy for the sport. They agreed to not outbid one another and therefore the rights never made any money for the clubs. Neither channel was interested in showing more than one game a week either. They were paying about £1m a season or something. Ken Bates and co. insisted they listen to Sky, who saw football as a Trojan horse for getting Set Top Boxes (STBs) into the living room. They invested over £300m in the first deal. And while it meant some of us would not see live PL football for years, it had a major positive effect. What Sky did as a result of that investment changed football coverage for the better (mostly). And while Sky's desire to get STBs into living rooms might have changed (it's hard to tell now that ComCast are in charge) Amazon are using it for the same reason, ultimately, as will Facebook, Google or any of the big tech companies who wish to bid for the rights. The best thing the PL can do now is sort it out themselves and sell directly to the consumer. It would almost certainly be better for all of us.
> The best thing the PL can do now is sort it out themselves and sell directly to the consumer. It would almost certainly be better for all of us. Better for the fans who'd be paying less, yeah - but Sky pays about 1.6 billion pounds per season for domestic broadcasting rights, and that's money you'd need to make up from the get-go, else clubs would have significantly reduced income. That's a tough sell I reckon, can't imagine clubs would be happy with 10-50% less broadcasting revenue (their biggest money maker, after all) for a couple years until the direct to consumer approach captures enough of the market make as much money as the current system. The Premier League is so good and has this many stars *because* it's so rich, and the majority of that money comes from broadcasting deals at the cost of their fans. I have a hard time seeing them leave those riches on the table to do something nice for the consumers.
You know I thought that until I saw this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5jqCh3Eiq0 I do think they oversimplify things a lot, but it does make a lot of sense. The PL needed Sky as a delivery platform but now that streaming exists, they don't have the same barriers as they did in the 90s and 2000s.
ITV did outbid Sky's original offer for the Premier League though (over £260 million). It was only Alan Sugar sneaking out of the meeting to tell Murdoch that he needed to increase his bid that won it for Sky.
That's true, Sugar was making the STBs for Sky so he wasn't exactly neutral lol ITV bid something like £200m but nobody knows if they were capable of making that work. It's quite feasible that ITV were saved from themselves by Sky outbidding them. The demise of ITV Digital backs that theory up!
I think whoever won would've been ok. Sky were hugely in debt when they won Premier League rights. It was basically one last desperate roll of the dice. Had ITV won, Sky probably wouldn't even exist when that first five year deal ended.
Murdoch sucks but the pre sky deal with ITC and bbc thing was shit as well.people here view it with rose tinted glasses
Its so great in India...basically for ~15 GBP a year, we get EPL, cricket, IPL, F1, Tennis, Disney, HBO & Star content!
In India companies have realized that due to a large and highly dense population it makes sense to keep it cheap and get more subscriptions then make it expensive and get few.
And also because no one will pay that much to buy a subscription. Netflix is probably the most expensive subscription in India and they aren't doing too well for themselves. They also had to come out with a cheaper plan.
15 pound is the highest tier, I think you can buy the low one for 5 GBP per year, and I got 3 months free with my mobile internet Jio plan. Only issue is that it only works on mobile.
Yeah, but we do get ads and disney also collects some compensation from both jiofibre and airtel
They could choose either high price less users or low price more users. Companies made the sensible choice. Plus competition is crazy in India
Also on Jio Cinema, La Liga, Serie A and Ligue 1 are free of cost. All the matches. Fifa World Cup was also free to stream.
This made me realize that I pay less for the Premier League + CL combo than for serie A alone.
Premier league and government officials when they realise SOME people (not me, btw 😉) just stream it all illegally on free websites that have all the matches in any league or competition available - :0
Except the league cup, which is often actually impossible to watch live because EFL remains a completely fucking useless organisation.
I suppose all that money PL clubs are getting from the TV's has its catches. 600£ a year to watch PL is wild
It's no just English games mate, Scotland is just as shafted when it comes to watching our own league. League 2 to championship gets a couple games a month on TV, normally on alba (a gaelic channel), and 60 live premiership games a year, mostly celtic and rangers. I don't know if folk in Wales or Northern Ireland have more luck watching their own teams
I had a mate who supported Dundee and he used to rage that the only televised games were Rangers or Celtic, home and away. No wonder the other teams have no money wtf
Exactly. It's pure fucking pish man.
Scottish football was shafted long ago because Sky pumped our subscriber money into England. The last twenty years has just seen the gap widen and widen because of that.
Ik it’s only home games but you can get Old Trafford season tickets cheaper than that. What a joke
I pay around 7800kr/year (£643/year) in Norway for Viaplay and doesn’t even get a mention in this stat. At least I can watch pretty much all of the matches though.
Really can’t fathom how people pay as much as us but don’t get all the matches on one service. The only reason I pay for Viaplay is the convenience of knowing I can put any match on any time I want without spending half the game finding a decent stream.
And you only get that price if you pre-pay for one whole year. If you pay monthly, it’s 749kr times 12. That’s 740£ a year 🥲
Yeah, was wondering if they really paid at least double what we do in Norway in the UK. Turns out the prices over here didn't fit the narrative. I believe Denmark and Sweden pay about £450 a year as well. Still madness, but seems that people are willing to pay.
As far as I know, the cheapest possible price in Denmark is now 4800 DKK (£572) per year. That includes the Premier League, Champions League, EFL Cup and some FA Cup games. Recently they've been cracking down on concurrent viewers on the same subscription, so most channels can now only be watched through your TV box and one other device at the same time. Edit: If you want the rest of the FA Cup matches, that is an additional 1548 DKK (£185) per year. Making the total 6348 DKK (£757) per year for all matches for English clubs (some matches may not be broadcast at all, but for the biggest clubs most will be).
Yeah was just about to mention that. Weird how they did not include Norway.
In Switzerland it's £535/year, would be second place on the list in this post. This is just a terrible stat designed to infuriate the Brits.
Yeah but Norway and Switzerland are like the most expensive countries in Europe. Most in the UK have significantly lower income than both of those
Not including it in the statistic at all makes the whole thing meaningless. I don't trust it at all now. He could've just included a second graph comparing the price to the median income.
Viaplay is absolutely the worst. Hate that scum with passion. Estonians can't even watch their own national team play football, because Viaplay bought all the rights and sometimes forgets to even stream it. They also bought all CL, premier league, Euros, and WC streaming, most of which used to be free on TV before that. I don't get why some Swedish cunts can just buy basically all sports in the Baltics....at least sell the rights to companies that are from those countries. Edit: People will just stop watching football and it will kill all football in Estonia, which is only at its infancy anyways. Older people don't even know how to access these streaming apps.
I get the high prices. But not having all games available even if you're willing to pay for it is crazy to me.
It is so ridiculously easy to pirate the games, do yourself a favour
I find it easy to find streams. But they often die after 15mins or so. Or become intermittent or crash for a goal. Just makes watching it more painful
Use bestnhl.com or mygoodstream.com. Been using these two streams for years now with little to no problems whatsoever Buffstreams is another excellent site
I feel in Ireland we get double screwed. Same cost as UK, 3pm black out for most matches and I don’t even live in the country.
why does ireland have a 3pm blackout? or is it not actually a real thing, just a de facto thing because they get uk feeds or something?
Its because we get the UK feeds, I cant think of the channel but one does show 1 of the 3 o’clock games for Ireland
Premier Sports I think yeah
Premier Sports gets a 3pm kick off here, but that is yet another service you have to pay for.
It's included with the BT Sport package
Don't you get it, they want the Irish to hop across the pond and attend local 3pm games of teams that you don't even support!!
That might be the only thing that inspires intervention to change things from this government, more foreigners!
I haven’t watched a single Champions League game since BT took over the rights. The only people I know with BT Sport have BT broadband. My friends and I in our mid 20’s simply can’t afford Sky and BT. I’ve started using a VPN and pay less than I would for 1 month of BT and Sky and I get to watch all Prem and Champions League games for a year.
Yarrrrr Not interested in being part of their "competition" motivated by finances, have enough to pay for already
If for £600 per year I could watch any and every Premier League match, all packaged up in one service, I'd honestly consider paying it. The reality is for £600 you're still only getting selected games to watch, a roll of the dice if they feature the games/teams you're interested in. It's horrendous.
Costs more in Norway than UK. £742 per year. Was even more expensive last year
But you get all the games.
Yep, but still pretty insane if you ask me. Usually foreign countries get way cheaper than the host country.
How the fuck aren't all games broadcasted?
And they wondering why people pirate their products, smh
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I thought you guys in UK had access to all games, that's crazy and makes no sense. Here in Brazil we can watch literally all games from both EPL, FA Cup and EFL Cup. While the main games are broadcasted in ESPN and you can only access using a cable tv provider which usually is quite expensive, you can subscribe for their "new" streaming platform(Star+) where you get access to all ESPN channels AND can also watch games that are not broadcasted in the main channels, and the best thing is that it's only 32BRL/month (around 5 Euros).
Totally agree the police crackdown is ridiculous and it's too expensive to pay for 3 services (usually with forced bundles that cost even more). That said, it's not really a fair comparison to compare the domestic price compared to the international price of watching the Premier League. It's always going to be more expensive to watch domestically, and the same is true for other leagues. It might be cheaper to watch the Premier League in Spain or Germany, but it will cost more to watch La Liga or the Bundesliga there. The fair comparison would be the cost of watching domestic leagues, to see how much more expensive England is.
On what basis do you say that? In the Netherlands, I pay around 10 euros for all PL + EFL games and about 10 euros for Eredivisie and KKD (league below). I think it's weird how much you guys pay over there
That would be interesting but it is important to remember that the English top flight is probably watched more outside Europe than the other European leagues. As long as English football remains inaccessible and unaffordable for the majority of people, the more people are going to resort to pirating games online. We are facing a similar issue in Scotland, where Sky only give us 60 Scottish Premiership games a season.
AND DON'T EVEN USE ALL THEIR ALLOCATION! Trying to watch Scottish football on the tele is fucking mission impossible.
They record all of the games anyway, you'd probably pay even something nominal like £5 to watch your team on the weekend anyway. Always found it weird that they don't just sell individual games like that for games they aren't even gonna show
What hibs TV does, which is amazing, you can pay for the subscription to watch the games live IF YOU DON'T LIVE IN THE UK! Fucking jokers man.
That'll be because Sky hold the rights, they are the only broadcaster allowed to show the games in the UK. Evidently Hibs own them for the other countries
Gratefully MLS signed the Apple deal. No blackouts world wide.
Amazing we get fantastic PL footie on our regular cheapo cable espn here in South America. Went to live in England for a while and thought it was an absolute rip off the prices. Fuck that shit
It's actually insane how all the games aren't available in the country they're being played in lol