Quote:
Originally Posted by OLD BOY
Interesting that you, the self acclaimed economist, still receives Sky Cinema and Sky Sports through Virgin when you can get it cheaper through Now TV.
There is nothing ideological about this. It's about what is best value to the consumer.
Incidentally, the 'depressing take' was my observation on your comment, not on consumer choice. Read it again.
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You possibly can, but as you cannot record from NowTV it would be useless for my needs (and a lot of others I am sure)
Streaming getting involved in Sports Rights is bound to increase the cost to the user, as sky/BT will try to retain their shares whilst streamers will have to bid big to capture anything apart from low-hanging fruit.
In the medium term (say 10-15 years) customers will need to pay more for what they currently get as linear tv/streaming battle it out
---------- Post added at 16:30 ---------- Previous post was at 16:23 ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by OLD BOY
Well, I have explained various ways of reducing cost to consumers, so this would be a second, not a first explanation. I am not trawling through a huge wad of posts to play this game - you can do that if you have enough hours in the day.
I have explained previously that Sky's approach is to charge the maximum possible price and keep all the rights to itself. The example I gave before set out how Amazon, with its retail arm, could sell other products on the back of sports rights. It would gain additional Prime customers, encouraging them to shop on Amazon's site, and it could market football paraphernalia on the actual football channel site. It could grant non-exclusive rights of some matches to the terrestrial channels to generate further income, as well as allowing highlights to be shown on other channels after the event.
Sky's approach is not the only one. Instead of charging sky high prices for these matches, they could reduce the price and make it accessible to more people. They could also offer a range of packages which might attract more uptake.
Amazon might even offer football as a loss leader to promote other parts of its business, as it did for the rights already acquired to screen the Premier league matches. Amazon gave us those matches at no extra charge, something that I dare say Sky would never have contemplated.
I think the mistake people are making is to imagine that Amazon would operate in the same way as Sky does, fleecing customers for all its worth. I don't think it needs to be like that and I believe that Amazon would have a different approach.
Of course, it would be different for other streamers such as DAZN, who do not have a retail arm, but for them it would be more of a straight forward question of whether it would be worth it for them, drawing on their experience of acquiring rights for sport elsewhere. There would still be the other areas of flexibility on price and awarding non-exclusive rights, etc, though. I'm not sure whether DAZN's pockets are deep enough to take on Sky and BT, but Amazon has no such problems.
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You really are talking through your ar*e - sky and BT both paused my sports subs for over 3 months as there were no EPL matches on.
Despite taking no money, the sports channels remained available so I was able to view past recordings and also watch live matches as they became available without any payment.
Additionally, when EPL restarted, I was treated to over 20 extra EPL matches on Sky and 15 or so extra on BT - at no extra cost.
Hardly fits with your assessment of Sky!