BBC has agreed a new £211.5m deal to retain Premier League highlights rights for Match of the Day for three seasons 2019-2022. Interestingly, this is only a £7.5m increase on the £204m paid for the 2016-2019 deal. The previous deal saw the rights hiked from £180m to £204m. A sign that things are reaching their limit?
A sign that license fee payers are dying off and younger folk are getting their kicks from the many alternatives to terrestrial tv?
License fee revenue is certainly falling, but I think this is more about the costs having reached a ceiling, I expect the new live rights to also only have a small increase.
Why on earth would the BBC want to bother spending all that money? Do they actually gain anything from it?
I think it depends on two things. One is how the Premier League accommodate both Sky and BT’s needs (they usually invent new packages of games/kick off times like we’ve seen in the last two render windows. The other is how serious Netflix and Amazon are about entering the bidding. They’ve been rumoured to be for about a year now. With the highlights - BBC didn’t have to bid much more because C4 and C5 weren’t interested and there’s a real reluctance for the Premier League to give the deal to ITV (who have already scaled back on their live football anyway).
There can only be so much demand for live football before it reaches plateau Abroad you already get every single game It all depends on rival bids as cortez said Facebook/amazon If they do bid then it will be interesting how it affects sky and bts packages Regarding number of games
