Sky Sports halves offer for TV rights

[Sir Kevin Sinfield]

On 25/12/2020 at 19:34, thirteenthman said:

To be fair, the NRL have always accomodated TV. Every match in the NRL is in a seperate time slot so every game can be shown live on TV. Most weeks of the year there is only one game in the crowd popular Sunday afternoon slot. A Friday 6pm kick off was brought in at the insistance of Fox with little regard as to whether it's good for supporters. And then there's night time Grand Finals and 22 minute half time breaks during Origin games so more ads can be shown. And Channel 9 do show ads during normal matches. 

The NRL tv deal brings in so much money, wasn’t it something like $2 billion?
While Super League’s looking at £20 million.

The biggest question we need to be asking is how can we be more appealing to tv audiences and channels to up that figure. Mr Elstone obviously believes replacing Toronto Wolfpack and Sonny Bill Williams with Leigh and Andrew Thornley is the answer.

[Scotchy1]

8 hours ago, Big Picture said:

I'm sure they could embrace it, UK broadcasts of the NFL have commercials during the match don't they?  Fitting them in would almost certainly make a match telecast exceed 2 hours though.

Not all of them. Many breaks go instead to a UK studio or prepared highlight packages 

[GUBRATS]

26 minutes ago, Sir Kevin Sinfield said:

The NRL tv deal brings in so much money, wasn’t it something like $2 billion?
While Super League’s looking at £20 million.

The biggest question we need to be asking is how can we be more appealing to tv audiences and channels to up that figure. Mr Elstone obviously believes replacing Toronto Wolfpack and Sonny Bill Williams with Leigh and Andrew Thornley is the answer.

Dead right , because the TV deal was only put together in the last week ?

[Tommygilf]

7 hours ago, sweaty craiq said:

Sky ratings for the super bowl are far less than RL Championship play offs

Thats probably because its also on the BBC 

[Dave T]

9 hours ago, Big Picture said:

I'm sure they could embrace it, UK broadcasts of the NFL have commercials during the match don't they?  Fitting them in would almost certainly make a match telecast exceed 2 hours though.

 

45 minutes ago, Scotchy1 said:

Not all of them. Many breaks go instead to a UK studio or prepared highlight packages 

Yup, I don't know the detail for live sport nowadays, and cricket has plenty of breaks, but I believe the regulation in the UK is far more stringent than in the US and Australia. 

There is also the fact that to UK audiences it would be a huge turnoff, having watched US and Australian sport broadcasts I found it extremely jarring - but that would settle down over time as audience's got used to it. 

But we also shouldn't overestimate the demand here - sport in the UK has relatively low figures, even big events on Sky are low numbers. The biggest events with huge figures are generally on the BBC with no advertising. Watching BT Sport in the gym recently I was shocked by how few advertisers they had in their programmes, and I'm sure we all recall the ads on repeat on Premier for the last World Cup. 

The market is very very different in the UK to America and Australia, whilst we can clearly learn things from each other, people need to stop thinking everything can just be transferred over. 

If there was such demand for companies having presence during our games getting 150k, I think they'd be better spending a bit of money on pitch branding. Either the market isn't there or we are particularly poor at tapping into that one - probably a bit of both. 

[Dave T]

1 hour ago, Sir Kevin Sinfield said:

The NRL tv deal brings in so much money, wasn’t it something like $2 billion?
While Super League’s looking at £20 million.

The biggest question we need to be asking is how can we be more appealing to tv audiences and channels to up that figure. Mr Elstone obviously believes replacing Toronto Wolfpack and Sonny Bill Williams with Leigh and Andrew Thornley is the answer.

The Aussie deal is probably around £140m per annum with a new SL deal probably around £25m to £30m depending on where they end up, plus some more for the Cup from the BBC and anything else that can be scraped together for any other rights, although that is likely to be zero. 

[Dave T]

For the level of coverage it gets, Sky Sports NFL returns surprisingly low figures each week. 

[redjonn]

Just now, Dave T said:

For the level of coverage it gets, Sky Sports NFL returns surprisingly low figures each week. 

yep,  I suspect with Sky being owned by US company together with the deal with NFL in USA to help promote the game globally its more about strategic intent and hence investment in growing the audience. As discussed in previous threads.

Sky can find other broadcast fillers cheaper than RL as I don't see RL being as important to Sky as once was.

[gingerjon]

5 minutes ago, Dave T said:

For the level of coverage it gets, Sky Sports NFL returns surprisingly low figures each week. 

Last time I looked, Formula One was well done compared to the amount of noise generated.

My anecdotal view is that interest in the NFL is waning from a high of a few years ago.

[Dave T]

7 minutes ago, redjonn said:

yep,  I suspect with Sky being owned by US company together with the deal with NFL in USA to help promote the game globally its more about strategic intent and hence investment in growing the audience. As discussed in previous threads.

Sky can find other broadcast fillers cheaper than RL as I don't see RL being as important to Sky as once was.

Aye, it's no coincidence that the £'s value of NFL deals are never released. 

I expect it is next to nothing for a lot of content filler. Which is all we are, but more expensive. The value we deliver is the time of year we provide that content. 

[Dave T]

5 minutes ago, gingerjon said:

Last time I looked, Formula One was well done compared to the amount of noise generated.

My anecdotal view is that interest in the NFL is waning from a high of a few years ago.

The new channel structure Sky have used has always looked odd, but I still believe it is all about driving prices down. They still get the good figures for Main Event stuff, but can now point to lower figures for RL on SS8 or even Mix instead of good figures on SS2 historically and drive down the cost. 

We know that when Sky show RL in the same way they used to, our figures are as good as they used to be. 

They can now prove that they bring the viewers, not the sports. Even though that ain't fully true. 

[Sir Kevin Sinfield]

1 hour ago, Dave T said:

For the level of coverage it gets, Sky Sports NFL returns surprisingly low figures each week. 

Probably because they think NFL has the potential for growth in the UK, sky obviously don’t believe the same about rugby league with its current leadership.

[sweaty craiq]

2 hours ago, Tommygilf said:

Thats probably because its also on the BBC 

Don’t sky have a dedicated Channel for it though, what a huge loss leader that would be considering the 200k US born residents in UK

[Dave T]

24 minutes ago, Sir Kevin Sinfield said:

Probably because they think NFL has the potential for growth in the UK, sky obviously don’t believe the same about rugby league with its current leadership.

I wouldnt be surprised if Sky were paying many many millions more for RL than US Football. 

[Damien]

41 minutes ago, Sir Kevin Sinfield said:

Probably because they think NFL has the potential for growth in the UK, sky obviously don’t believe the same about rugby league with its current leadership.

Or they just get loads of cheap content all packaged up that requires minimal effort on their part to show it.

[Hull Kingston Bronco]

23 hours ago, Oxford said:

Of course you couls argue that the RFL/SL were only respoding to their core support which a bit like Labour they seemed intent and in danger of losing by their indifference.

I think Leigh were the candidates most likely to make a fist of being in SL and it has to be said the least likely to go under if relegated.

But if we're talking about saturation of the market, which city has two clubs and so falls into this category very neatly if not comfortably?

I’ve asked for no special favours for my club. In another thread I’ve made it clear P&R still works, but that we could have a strategic entry route for new markets with protections to provide time to embed (as we did with Catalans). We could also invest disproportionately in those markets to establish the club, as any other business or brand would do with a new market entry, instead of some daft concept of ‘fairness’ to the existing core (as the NRL did with Melbourne).
 

‘Fairness’ is better achieved by taking better decisions that ultimately grow the size of the whole cake, so that even the smaller slices are then bigger. Instead we’ve shrunk the cake, but think it’s OK as long as we cut it up reasonably amongst the existing members. 
 

In our final chance to show some strategic thought (where are not using P&R), we chose instead to ‘expand’ into a market we already dominate, and give the new club less money rather than more. That’s the opposite of an effective growth strategy, and illustrative of how and why we’ve destroyed our commercial value over 25 years. 

[gingerjon]

2 hours ago, Dave T said:

The new channel structure Sky have used has always looked odd, but I still believe it is all about driving prices down. They still get the good figures for Main Event stuff, but can now point to lower figures for RL on SS8 or even Mix instead of good figures on SS2 historically and drive down the cost. 

We know that when Sky show RL in the same way they used to, our figures are as good as they used to be. 

They can now prove that they bring the viewers, not the sports. Even though that ain't fully true. 

(A slight digression)

My personal view is that the channel renaming was all about a specific strategy that then - either because of not being able to get a big enough suite of rights and/or somebody coming on with a newer one - didn't really happen. Certainly, it's a complete dogs dinner and makes no real sense at all.

[Oxford]

56 minutes ago, Hull Kingston Bronco said:

I’ve asked for no special favours for my club. In another thread I’ve made it clear P&R still works, but that we could have a strategic entry route for new markets with protections to provide time to embed (as we did with Catalans). We could also invest disproportionately in those markets to establish the club, as any other business or brand would do with a new market entry, instead of some daft concept of ‘fairness’ to the existing core (as the NRL did with Melbourne).
 

‘Fairness’ is better achieved by taking better decisions that ultimately grow the size of the whole cake, so that even the smaller slices are then bigger. Instead we’ve shrunk the cake, but think it’s OK as long as we cut it up reasonably amongst the existing members. 
 

In our final chance to show some strategic thought (where are not using P&R), we chose instead to ‘expand’ into a market we already dominate, and give the new club less money rather than more. That’s the opposite of an effective growth strategy, and illustrative of how and why we’ve destroyed our commercial value over 25 years. 

You appear to be asking for SL/RFL to be acting contradictory to their nature.

I'm not sure why you think P&R is working apart from ensuring one club swaps with another?

It works in the psyche of a group of fans but beyond that I feel it's been a disaster for most going down. And that commercial value you put so much store in has never been enhanced by relegation and rarely by promotion.

So apart from not asking for anything special for your club, I'm not sure what you're saying.

 

[Tommygilf]

1 hour ago, sweaty craiq said:

Don’t sky have a dedicated Channel for it though, what a huge loss leader that would be considering the 200k US born residents in UK

Doesn't really matter as a comparison if the super bowl on FTA too. You can only compare like with like.

[Tommygilf]

1 hour ago, gingerjon said:

(A slight digression)

My personal view is that the channel renaming was all about a specific strategy that then - either because of not being able to get a big enough suite of rights and/or somebody coming on with a newer one - didn't really happen. Certainly, it's a complete dogs dinner and makes no real sense at all.

Aye they tried to do something with specific packages for specific sports but came up against the inevitable problem of off seasons and the problem of the general "sports fan".

Main Event is the most popular channel and in our new TV deal we must be insisting on a high number of Main Event games.

[Harry Stottle]

22 minutes ago, Oxford said:

You appear to be asking for SL/RFL to be acting contradictory to their nature.

I'm not sure why you think P&R is working apart from ensuring one club swaps with another?

It works in the psyche of a group of fans but beyond that I feel it's been a disaster for most going down. And that commercial value you put so much store in has never been enhanced by relegation and rarely by promotion.

So apart from not asking for anything special for your club, I'm not sure what you're saying.

 

So I take it you do not believe that the effort, time and money spent by some teams in the Championship should not be rewarded by being promoted to SL do you?

If your answer is no, then are you in fact not asking for something special being awarded to a number of SL clubs who without SL funding would not themselves compete or even survive in SL.

If your answer is yes, and considering that SL cannot afford to increase in the number of competeing clubs, how would promote a club by the wealth of the owner(s), the amount of support they have home and away.

You say P&R doesn't work, but that is just from a protectionist SL fans view, Look how the Championship has improved since P&R was reintroduced in '16, look at how some SL clubs have improved because of the threat of jeapordy - and no disrespect to Salford in fact congratulations - the biggest improvers of them all - ON THE FIELD OF PLAY, off the field how much can Salford offer that a number of other teams can't?

[Scotchy1]

4 hours ago, Dave T said:

 

Yup, I don't know the detail for live sport nowadays, and cricket has plenty of breaks, but I believe the regulation in the UK is far more stringent than in the US and Australia. 

There is also the fact that to UK audiences it would be a huge turnoff, having watched US and Australian sport broadcasts I found it extremely jarring - but that would settle down over time as audience's got used to it. 

But we also shouldn't overestimate the demand here - sport in the UK has relatively low figures, even big events on Sky are low numbers. The biggest events with huge figures are generally on the BBC with no advertising. Watching BT Sport in the gym recently I was shocked by how few advertisers they had in their programmes, and I'm sure we all recall the ads on repeat on Premier for the last World Cup. 

The market is very very different in the UK to America and Australia, whilst we can clearly learn things from each other, people need to stop thinking everything can just be transferred over. 

If there was such demand for companies having presence during our games getting 150k, I think they'd be better spending a bit of money on pitch branding. Either the market isn't there or we are particularly poor at tapping into that one - probably a bit of both. 

TV advertising on pay tv is not a massive money earner. About 20% or so of their revenue. You can get ads on sky sports on PL football half-time for a few hundred quid for a 30sec slot. Its not millions. 

Advertisers are far less important to the game than sponsors

[Scotchy1]

4 hours ago, Dave T said:

For the level of coverage it gets, Sky Sports NFL returns surprisingly low figures each week. 

NFL has a really dedicated fan base and a whole heap of associated content that they can bring in pretty much for free. 

 

[Scotchy1]

2 hours ago, gingerjon said:

(A slight digression)

My personal view is that the channel renaming was all about a specific strategy that then - either because of not being able to get a big enough suite of rights and/or somebody coming on with a newer one - didn't really happen. Certainly, it's a complete dogs dinner and makes no real sense at all.

There were three reasons behind it from memory the first was to do with how the sell the channels wholesale, where up to a year or so before the change Sky were forced to sell sky sports 1 and 2 at a commercial wholesale price. 

the second was it allowed them to claim they had slashed prices without really doing anything by breaking up the sports. 

The third was they were told constantly by customers that they were sick of paying for other sports they didnt watch and wanted a more a'la carte option. So sky offered one and pretty much everyone signed up for all the sports channels anyway

[Scotchy1]

Sky and BT make their money selling packages to people, they rarely sell one thing to one person. 

For the game to increase its value it needs to do one of two things. Either break out of its bubble and become a bigger part of the package for a bigger proportion of people, or find a way to monetise things that arent currently monetised. Preferably it would do both. 

The problem is that the game hasnt done that. For the last 5 or 6 years it has had the whiff of failure around it, its shrunk the size of its ambitions and its horizons and that has left it with an image in the wider public eye that is of a dying sport. Its thought of as old, small, irrelevant. That makes breaking out in to the 'bigger part of the package for a bigger proportion of people' virtually impossible. 

We havent done anything to monetise new things. So obviously that hasnt improved. 

The comparison I would make is with boxing. Eddie Hearn runs boxing on Sky Sports and largely in the UK. Boxing fans will moan and complain at some of the cards he puts on, some of the fighters he builds up, and complain about the 'casuals' etc tuning in to watch Joshua or White headlining, or some friday night cards with fighters like Dave Allen or Alen Babic. But those are the fights and cards to bring in the viewers, keeps the sport in the public eye and make the money. 

The small-hall shows might please the purists but they dont bring the money in. And if all there was was small hall shows, sky arent paying for them, Hearn isnt putting them on, and the sport drops from the public eye. 

Thats where we are. Regular small hall shows, but nights under the bright-lights and dropping from the public eye.