Friday Knight Lights wrote:joe soap wrote:Friday Knight Lights wrote:Annoying Alba is being lost but the league needs more money.
I'll subscribe to watch Edinburgh and Glasgow games.
is the league getting more money? Not clear to me that it is. You'll be lucky to get 2 Scot team live matches a month.
If it was the best bid - as reported it was - then yes the league is getting more money. Can't imagine Alba were paying much if anything.
I reckon it'll be better than that. They'll change the schedule and have more games on Saturdays and Sundays to cover. 1930 Friday, 1230 1500 1700 1900 Saturday and 1400 1600 Sunday I reckon. All the games in there.
the starting point is Pro14 not being interested in SKY's wish to bid for a combined British & Irish rights. So Sky didn't bid and Irish rights went uncontested to EIR (who own the Irish part of Setanta, remember them?). Hard to see how making sure there is only 1 bid is ensuring the best bid!.
So to Scotland, NI and Wales. BBC bid, substantially increased their current offer, but Pro14 gave the bid to a presumably higher offer from Premier Sport. Now the highest monetary bid isn't necessarily the best bid, it depends on how much more money was offered. The lesson from other sports and from English Prem rugby is that pay to view gets lower viewing figures than free to view. Fewer viewers means less money from advertisers and sponsoring companies - less exposure. Some sponsors may feel it isn't worth it, or at least not at current value.
So the higher bid will need to be sufficiently higher to offset the losses from other income streams during the life of the deal (and remembering that it is much easier to lose a sponsor than to get one to sign up. And one lost is going to be very wary of coming back on board.
And the BBC may have moved on if we need to go back, remembering that Premier Sports was founded and run by the team who ran and folded Setanta UK.