I’ve wanted this for ages. Makes total sense. STHs who can’t go to away games miss out on nearly half the season if they don’t stream, and that’s daft.
How will it work though? The current TV deal is pretty chunky, and they can sell the rights as they wish. I doubt Sky/BT will be happy if the PL offer a cheaper rival platform to watch football.
Typical Toby, coming on here and defending Murdoch. [Blue touch paper lit, Andy walked away to a safe distance.]
In these days of increasing technology, I would like to think the Premier League could find a way of cutting out the middle men.
He is definitely a hero of mine... I just meant that the PL won't be able to launch this platform + charge the same amount from Sky/BT. I doubt they can recoup as much doing it either, and most PL clubs would go bankrupt if TV revenues decreased significantly. I'm all for the idea though, as long as the cash was redistributed fairly.
There are lots of technical issues too, and questions around payments. Is it a monthly payment or a yearly subscription? They can't guarantee income for a year if people can sign up/cancel on demand. Can accounts be used by several people at once? Nowadays you sort of have to have this feature, which means people can share logins.
Agreed..... The principle if they can get there would be great.... I would even pay £10 ( well I say so now!) to see a game online with no hassle
I watched the xmas games on Prime, was an amazing experience. I'd never pay for Sky, and I don't watch normal telly so no point in BT. They could get this up and running in no time, the main problem will be the financials.
I would never pay a penny or cent to line the pockets of Murdoch, byt seeing as he doesn't have a license to broadcast in France that is no problem, although many people have brought their Sky boxes with them and continue to use them. Netflix fr. has different content to other countries to protect licence holders, and the only way around that is by having a VPN. Netflix has realised that this was being used, and has found ways of blocking many of these systems. When I stream Watford games, depending on where the stream is coming from, I sometimes see that a site has a licence to stream to France. Quite what that means I don't know, but I just accept the fact. Sometimes I get a message at the start of a game that says this broadcast is only for viewing in the USA, with a Spanish commentary if I want it. That comes up when it is NBC, but doesn't if it is coming from Canada, which can be exactly the same programme, only the half time adverts are different. I did see a Watford game in England via Prime, but it was less reliable than my laptop due to internet speed I guess. In fact it was so poor we finished up plugging the laptop into the TV. There have been many streaming sites taken down mainly by US authorities, but they simply move to different servers. BeIN sports, the Sky of France is owned by Nasser bin Ghanim Al-Khelaifi, who has his eggs in more than one basket as he owns and controls Paris Saint-Germain FC. He now has a global empire of TV companies, and like Murdoch I don't think he would be too happy if Netflix tried to invade his market.
£10 a month to see every Watford game (must stay in EPL then), bring it on, no more frozen streams, pop ups etc.
It sounds a good idea to just pay for Watford matches but how practical is it really? The PL relies greatly on the Sky / BT silly amounts of money, will they endanger these cash cows? If this money is lost then all PL teams will look very different, you can say goodbye to our talented friends from overseas. I'm sure much of the vast amounts generated by Sky etc come from people more interested in other offerings, films etc. If we lose that we could be back to watch Johnny Williams type players hoofing from the back. I quite prefer our nomad foreign millionaires gracing us with their presence for a few seasons.
Football was the thing that made Sky so successful. You can find out about the contracts and what they have paid here. https://www.theguardian.com/footbal...ier-league-tv-rights-deal-amazon-on-sidelines While the money from the UK is now falling, overseas rights income is not. Some comments that I have seen suggest that Sky are milking the UK market with combinations of packages that people don't want. It doesn't seem right to me that the players SH wants to watch rely on Murdoch paying enough money to win the contracts. With BT pulling back, and Amazon only showing at present a few games, you only need to look at the WFC accounts to see that Murdoch is in the position to drive prices down even more.
