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Articles concerning television and broadcasting issues in football.
The Premiership business model and all the riches associated with it relies on the income from television rights. Two-thirds of this income is generated from the sale of UK rights, the rest elsewhere in the world, but more in Asia than in Europe.
Following the failure to secure the World Cup, England faces another potential blow from an international football body. Uefa is considering a Scottish-devised plan to redistribute television money from European Championship and World Cup qualifiers towards smaller countries and away from the ‘big five’ of England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. However, the proposal does have some positive aspects from an English perspective and the devil is really in the detail.
Sky Deutschland, in which Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp holds a 49.9 per cent stake, is finding Germany a difficult market. The country’s largest pay-TV operator is not going to reach its key target of raising its subscriber base from 2.5m to 2.8m – 3 m. by the end of the year. As a result, there will be a bigger than expected loss in 2010 and more red ink in 2011.
The modern Premiership financial model depends heavily on revenues from BSkyB. The broadcaster in turn only wants people to watch its programmes who have paid to do so. Premier League matches are being screened across the country in pubs at 3 p.m. on a Saturday streamed from overseas sites.
The sale of foreign television rights is increasingly become a key element of the Premiership business model. The sale of overseas television rights at £479m a year is almost four times as much as the foreign TV cash earned by its closest rival among Europe’s top leagues, La Liga. The Premier League earns more from foreign rights each year than La Liga earns from all its tv rights.
The Conference is close to a television deal for the Blue Square Bet Premier reveals the Non-League Paper. A contract is likely to be signed with satellite subscription channel Premier Sports within a week. The Conference has been without television coverage for a year since the collapse of Setanta.
It was a rather ugly and petulant World Cup final. Johan Cruyff has denounced the Dutch tactics as ‘anti-football’. But South African president Jacob Zuma has proclaimed his citizens as ‘the real stars’ of the tournament.
There have been complaints about the quality of its coverage and most viewers will probably prefer BBC to ITV for the World Cup final, if only because of the absence of adverts. However, the World Cup has given ITV’s advertising revenues a much bigger boost than it had hoped for.
BT Vision are going for broke in an effort to move up from their current third place in the UK televised sports market. They are discounting their offer to customers even though Sky have increased their charges for wholesaling their top sports channels.
Should goal line technology be used in football? Most England fans would have said ‘yes’ immediately after the decision which denied Lampard a clear goal against Germany. However, it could be argued that a world class referee should have recognised that the ball had crossed the line or that his assistant should have done even though he was not in line with the goal but had a clear enough vantage point.