I’m sure they’ll be happy to drastically raise it.
Why are you shocked? It’s a tale as old as pay TV. Popular sport increases viewers on FTA TV, pay TV company sees this as an opportunity to make money, pays large amount of money for exclusive rights, viewership goes down but governing body or rights holder doesn’t care as their income is boosted massively. Viewers suffer with content locked behind increasingly exorbitant pay wall.
But they’d need four or five times the number of subscribers to make up the difference to those who take the full Sports sub?
Why would they do that though? Their income would be reduced massively. And there'd be adverts. And the quality of programming would drop massively.
Be careful what you wish for. I can still remember ITV cutting to adverts as Schumacher and Alonso were fighting over the lead with a handful of laps remaining only to come back and one had passed the other and they had to show it in replay because they were contracted to a minimum number of ad breaks during the race.
Glad you're glad to be back. The Sky hate mob will be along shortly no doubt.I left Sky in February and had F1TV app and Now TV to watch F1.
I got tired of messing about with the poor consistency of the F1 app and the shocking picture quality of Now TV as well as the fact it can be days before quali and races appear to watch on demand if you don’t catch them live.
When the F1 App threw a wobbly and stopped working altogether I threw in the towel.
I called Sky and asked about Sky Q. It isn’t available on their website to take out a sub (or at least it wasn’t for me). Yep still available.
So I got a quote for ultimate TV + sports HD and a 2TB Q box for £29 a month for 18 months. That was actually cheaper than now TV sports + booster. I bolted on a few extra quid for UHD sports.
The deal was on the account that Sky were wanting me to return as a customer, no doubt because I properly left. The last Q box and router and everything were sent back. Happily they also allowed me to reinstate my time served status so I got immediate access to VIP etc and my account shows me as being a customer for ~16 years. I know a lot of people report headaches with Sky customer services, but I’ve never had an issue really.
Anyway, Sky Q is just so convenient and allows proper download and recording, which Sky Stream does not. I’m going to hold onto it as long as I can until it is inevitably phased out.
Can’t say I regret going Back to Sky - it’s been great to watch recordings in UHD at such a time that is convenient for me without the image quality dropping out or stopping altogether. It’s just a shame the 2023 season has been lacking any real competition!
Roll on 2024
Sky is pushing Stream and Glass in a big way and Stream will be the option they push on you by default. You can still get Q though but not sure if you can do it via the website.
An Adless service would be many times more expensive though? Like £60-£80 for sports along and no one would buy it.
To an extent, yes, but Sky clearly feels what they bid is worth it and the price they charge is also worth it.
The issue without a single supplier, or close to it as Sky will have next season means you don't need to jump around with different subs to different services to watch your team. Personally I'm still surprised the PL haven't gone for their own Streaming service, but I suspect the setup and running costs scare them, especially to begin with. Setup costs would be huge but it would work out better for the league eventually.
There are quite a few American sports, baseball is the one that immediately springs to mind, that have local blackouts on home games similar to 3pm games. Again this is to drive local attendance or when a local broadcaster has exclusive rights, both similar reasons to the limited number of games shown and the 3PM Saturday issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_League_Baseball_blackout_policy
There, fixed that for you.
Sure there's always a way but simple steps like this go some way to making it difficult.
So they just shouldn’t take any steps at all to protect their IP?
The distance is likely so they don't appear on the graphics. They do the same with the Football studios too, it's basically a table and 3 chairs with the studio projected as AR.
