2 Year TV Deal

[Tommygilf]

1 minute ago, cookey said:

That is what is being reported. Apparently good news for Matchroom and the boxers,not necessarilly good news for boxing. Apparently the Sky boxing contract with Matchroom ends in a few months. May be negotiations,who knows.

 

Yeah negotiations probably? Would be killing the golden goose unless DAZN could charge UK boxing fans £20 a pop and pubs a hell of a lot more.

[cookey]

Sorry,not really IT clued up but if you google    britishboxingmews and add in  DAZN,Matchroom and Sky Sports contract,you should get the story.

3 minutes ago, Tommygilf said:

Yeah negotiations probably? Would be killing the golden goose unless DAZN could charge UK boxing fans £20 a pop and pubs a hell of a lot more.

 

[whatmichaelsays]

DAZN loses money hand over fist - it really isn't that major a player in sports rights, despite constantly being mentioned. At some point the VC funding is going to dry up. 

[Dave T]

14 hours ago, gingerjon said:

That report doesn't even mention it.

So we have one report saying there's no news on it yet, another saying it'll be the BBC, and then some just reporting on the Sky/SL press release.

It's twice that Red Rooster claims this has been dismissed in an article that doesn't do that at all.

[Dave T]

2 hours ago, Damien said:

This is long overdue, its only took 25 years.

It seems really odd that this kind of detail (which is genuinely really positive news) has not been mentioned in any press releases. 

[Rugbyleaguesupporter]

ITV1 simplymake more money from repeating a film than showing RL. 

We might get a spot on ITV4 but rights fee minimal. 

On boxing,sky matchroom deal ends 1 July. Matchroom have massive partnership oversees with DAZN and appears 99% will move to them. 

Joshua and Whyte are not part of deal and may fight on Sky. Joshua independant from matchroom but uses them- he has two contracted sky PPV fights 

 

[gingerjon]

51 minutes ago, whatmichaelsays said:

DAZN loses money hand over fist - it really isn't that major a player in sports rights, despite constantly being mentioned. At some point the VC funding is going to dry up. 

According to a headline I've just seen, it's Amazon and Disney who are in the running for BT Sport.

[Saint Toppy]

2 hours ago, Spidey said:

ITV could promote it to their teeth, but still get less viewers as their reach is lower - is that what you want?

Yes - i'd much rather have our sport heavily promoted on a channel with a 24% audience share than naff all promotion on a channel with 31% audience share !

[Saint Toppy]

1 hour ago, gingerjon said:

How many times have rugby league rights - be that Super League, Championship, NRL, internationals, World Cup - become available in the past 20 years? And in that time how many times have the BBC bid and shown rugby league and how many times have ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, QVC or the Weather Channel?

Its up to our governing body to go out there and sell our sport, and generate the interest from other parties. Sadly thats something that they've been awful at doing.

Most of the main broadcasters have moved large chunks of their operations to the NW now in Salford Quays and with the RFL moving their headquarters there too you'd hope they would be able to generate that interest with the parties right on their doorstep. It appears they're still unable to do it, and to me that shows we have the wrong people in charge who don't have the right skill sets.

I'm sure the like of Rimmer, Wood etc. all dearly love the sport and want whats best for it, they just dont have the skills to do it.

[Futtocks]

42 minutes ago, gingerjon said:

According to a headline I've just seen, it's Amazon and Disney who are in the running for BT Sport.

Disney, via ESPN, already have some links with BT Sport.

[Spidey]

38 minutes ago, Saint Toppy said:

Yes - i'd much rather have our sport heavily promoted on a channel with a 24% audience share than naff all promotion on a channel with 31% audience share !

You want less people watching RL? - That's a bit weird from a RL Fan

[gavin7094]

On 28/04/2021 at 10:18, Eddie said:

It’s no different to most top flight football leagues, Bayern are about to win their ninth in a row, Juventus are about to lose their first in about 8 years, Spain is at best a three horse race, Portugal three also, and Ligue Un is usually a one horse race with this year being an exception. While I agree having more clubs capable of winning is far more interesting, having just two or three doesn’t prevent a thriving competition. 

That's not quite the point though. 

Last week I went through every fixture from the first 3 rounds and asked my other half to predict who won (she has an interest in RL but wouldn't have known the results). 

She got one wrong (can't remember which) and couldn't decide on one (Hull v Wire, which was a 14 all draw). 

THAT is how predictable SL has become.

To be interesting, a fan must be able to turn up to watch nearly every game with a reasonable expectation of their side winning.

At the moment SL doesn't provide this. 

[gingerjon]

6 minutes ago, Futtocks said:

Disney, via ESPN, already have some links with BT Sport.

Happy to be corrected - but didn't BT essentially buy/takeover the outstanding rights that ESPN owned when they vacated the UK market with one requirement being the ongoing use of the ESPN name for BT's third channel?

[Futtocks]

1 minute ago, gingerjon said:

Happy to be corrected - but didn't BT essentially buy/takeover the outstanding rights that ESPN owned when they vacated the UK market with one requirement being the ongoing use of the ESPN name for BT's third channel?

I thought Disney were majority owners of ESPN, but things may have changed.

[RP London]

8 minutes ago, Spidey said:

You want less people watching RL? - That's a bit weird from a RL Fan

surely you have been on this board long enough to realise its not actually that weird 

[Eddie]

25 minutes ago, gavin7094 said:

That's not quite the point though. 

Last week I went through every fixture from the first 3 rounds and asked my other half to predict who won (she has an interest in RL but wouldn't have known the results). 

She got one wrong (can't remember which) and couldn't decide on one (Hull v Wire, which was a 14 all draw). 

THAT is how predictable SL has become.

To be interesting, a fan must be able to turn up to watch nearly every game with a reasonable expectation of their side winning.

At the moment SL doesn't provide this. 

The NRL is the same though, as is international RL. In rugby (both codes) the best team usually wins and there are far fewer upsets than in football. Has there ever been a time where Wakey have turned up at Wigan with a reasonable expectation of winning? 

[sentoffagain2]

44 minutes ago, gavin7094 said:

That's not quite the point though. 

Last week I went through every fixture from the first 3 rounds and asked my other half to predict who won (she has an interest in RL but wouldn't have known the results). 

She got one wrong (can't remember which) and couldn't decide on one (Hull v Wire, which was a 14 all draw). 

THAT is how predictable SL has become.

To be interesting, a fan must be able to turn up to watch nearly every game with a reasonable expectation of their side winning.

At the moment SL doesn't provide this. 

In the N.F.L. success is getting to the play offs or winning more matches than you lose in a 16 game regular season.It helps that the good players are spread out more evenly.SL has a top 5 six if we are lucky,a middle just going through the motions and a bottom 3 fighting to stay above the drop.

[Saint Toppy]

57 minutes ago, Spidey said:

You want less people watching RL? - That's a bit weird from a RL Fan

That's not what I said at all - talk about completely missing the point !!!

It doesn't matter how big your potential audience is if the broadcaster doesn't promote the sport in order to attract larger numbers of their viewers to it. The Beeb could have a billion viewers but you wouldn't get any more people watching the game than they have now if they don't tell those billion viewers about us.

RL has always been the poor relation compared to other sports on the Beeb. For instance Yawnion receives a disproportionate amount of promotion compared to the actual viewing figures they receive.

Much better to have a smaller potential audience with someone like ITV but have our sport promoted fully to all of them to attract new viewers, than to have a bigger potential audience on the Beeb but hardly any of them know about our game. Just so you actually get it, lets put that into numbers. If there were say an overall viewing audience of 50M, and the Beeb gets 31% of that, so there's a potential audience of 15.5M. Their lack of promotion means they're only likely to reach a small percentage of those 15.5M. ITV gets 24% (approx 12M) but the extra promotion then reaches a significantly larger number of the 12M. Whichever way you look at it a high percentage of 12M is far better than a low percentage of 15.5M and it likely to bring in far more new fans.

[whatmichaelsays]

1 hour ago, Saint Toppy said:

Its up to our governing body to go out there and sell our sport, and generate the interest from other parties. Sadly thats something that they've been awful at doing.

Most of the main broadcasters have moved large chunks of their operations to the NW now in Salford Quays and with the RFL moving their headquarters there too you'd hope they would be able to generate that interest with the parties right on their doorstep. It appears they're still unable to do it, and to me that shows we have the wrong people in charge who don't have the right skill sets.

I'm sure the like of Rimmer, Wood etc. all dearly love the sport and want whats best for it, they just dont have the skills to do it.

Whilst there are some fair points here, to me they come at this from the wrong perspective. 

The problems facing RL aren't rooted poor salesmanship or advertising. They're rooted in a failure of product. Not in the sense that RL isn't a good sport, but because it's not necessarily a well-packaged product that people want to and find easy to buy. 

We have a great sport, but that sport is often packaged into a poor product - not often enough played at its best with the best possible talents, too often played in poor facilities or sparsely populated stadiums, too often sold to an audience that is reluctant to pay full price, too rarely sold with any sense of occasion or 'FOMO', too rarely appealing to audiences that broadcasters, advertisers and sponsors want to pay to reach, too rarely making it easy for people outside of the heartlands to buy into it. 

You could have the best salesperson in the world - they wouldn't be able to mask those problems and to blame Wood, Rimmer or Elstone is directing the blame in the wrong place. It is the clubs that are responsible for much of the product - they develop, recruit and retain the talent, they control the facilities, they sell the tickets - they need to shoulder their fair share of the blame.

[whatmichaelsays]

9 minutes ago, Saint Toppy said:

That's not what I said at all - talk about completely missing the point !!!

It doesn't matter how big your potential audience is if the broadcaster doesn't promote the sport in order to attract larger numbers of their viewers to it. The Beeb could have a billion viewers but you wouldn't get any more people watching the game than they have now if they don't tell those billion viewers about us.

RL has always been the poor relation compared to other sports on the Beeb. For instance Yawnion receives a disproportionate amount of promotion compared to the actual viewing figures they receive.

Much better to have a smaller potential audience with someone like ITV but have our sport promoted fully to all of them to attract new viewers, than to have a bigger potential audience on the Beeb but hardly any of them know about our game. Just so you actually get it, lets put that into numbers. If there were say an overall viewing audience of 50M, and the Beeb gets 31% of that, so there's a potential audience of 15.5M. Their lack of promotion means they're only likely to reach a small percentage of those 15.5M. ITV gets 24% (approx 12M) but the extra promotion then reaches a significantly larger number of the 12M. Whichever way you look at it a high percentage of 12M is far better than a low percentage of 15.5M and it likely to bring in far more new fans.

What does that ideal "promotion" look like in your eyes? I'm sure you could find Methodists who aren't happy that Songs of Praise doesn't have wall-to-wall promotions in between Eastenders and Line of Duty if you looked hard enough - is that the sort of "promotion" you're asking for? Because I can't think of any programming that gets that sort of treatment on the BBC aside from it's true 'flagship' stuff. 

[Man of Kent]

14 minutes ago, whatmichaelsays said:

I'm sure you could find Methodists who aren't happy that Songs of Praise doesn't have wall-to-wall promotions in between Eastenders and Line of Duty

Love the thought of someone on a Methodist internet forum demanding Songs of Praise should be on ITV 

[gavin7094]

1 hour ago, Eddie said:

Has there ever been a time where Wakey have turned up at Wigan with a reasonable expectation of winning? 

This says so much... 

[gingerjon]

25 minutes ago, Man of Kent said:

Love the thought of someone on a Methodist internet forum demanding Songs of Praise should be on ITV 

I have a friend who gives their considered opinion on every Sunday Worship on Radio 4 along with every Choral Evensong.

I can imagine them doing exactly this.

[Eddie]

1 minute ago, gingerjon said:

I have a friend who gives their considered opinion on every Sunday Worship on Radio 4 along with every Choral Evensong.

I can imagine them doing exactly this.

This forum is classic, from SL TV contract to Songs of Praise

[gingerjon]

4 minutes ago, Eddie said:

This forum is classic, from SL TV contract to Songs of Praise

Isn't Jason Robinson a born again Christian?

There's a crossover angle for us to try in this World Cup year.